Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

Stephanie Moulton, a petite young woman, was left on her own to care for seven people with schizophrenia because the budget didn’t allow for additional support.

Deshawn Chappell beat Stephanie Moulton, stabbed her to death, and left her seminude body in the parking lot of a church.

unnecessary for her to get murdered on the job when all she was trying t...

She explained that she had tried to get treatment for ...

Jared Loughner had never been insti...

Tucson supermarket where Representative Giffords was holding a meet and greet, dozens of peop...

In an e-mail months before the shoot-out, a fellow student said, “We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon.”

“He was speaking language X and everyone else was speaking language Y.” Two months after his suspension, Jared bought a gun.

“We don’t understand why this happened.”

The psychiatrist appointed by the court found that Jared “experienced delusions, bizarre thoughts, and hallucinations.”

“Is it ethical and proper to help someone regain competence just to go after them for a death penalty offense or a murder offense?”

“When other little girls were trying on their mothers’ high heels, I was wrapping myself with Ace bandages, ’cause I thought it looked cool,”

Susan had a compulsion to bite her lips, and they were usually scabbed or openly bleeding.

“You’ll grow out of it.” But schizophrenia did not manifest fully until Susan entered the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1973.

“but it wasn’t until my freshman year that it became obvious to other

people.” During Susan’s freshman year, her father left her mother. “That jostled everything enough so that symptoms s...

seeing a Freudian psychoanalyst, whose treatment involved regression...

“I basically stayed in during the day and came out only at night, when I walked the streets and studied the moon. I saw deformed bodies; bloody faces; devils; bodies hanging from trees.

The real people I saw all appeared distorted. They were missing arms, legs. I remember being very threatened by stains in the asphalt, and plastic bags caught in the bushes in January.”

need to be around fire,” she said.

the school asked that she withdraw. “I just was imploding, burning myself with cigarettes and putting my fists through windows. In my better moments, I would go to the Brown medical library, looking, looking, looking for what was wrong with me.”

The doctors would explain that she needed to be on medication for the rest of her life, but wouldn’t tell her what was wrong with her; she, in turn, refused to give the ho...

very strong, strong desire to prote...

I believed that I had baby breasts and adult breasts, and that the baby breasts were going to drop off, and the adul...

these ...

men and women were going to come out ...

The men were carrying scythes, and the women were carrying burlap bags. They would hurt her. I was afraid my mother would see them, which meant she would know abou...

the animal hid under an old, green vinyl reclining chair.

“I thought the chair was infested with fleas, and then the fleas became sperm. I took out a bucket of paint and painted the whole chair white and took out a kitchen knife and started stabbing it.”

“I was like an animal, my hair knotted and greasy. I would cut myself and paint on ...

When Susan graduated from her most intensive treatment phase, she accepted a job at the hospital, which came with benefits, and her insurance paid for electrolysis to remove her facial hair.

Of all the things that required catching up, perhaps the most challenging was romance. At the time I met Susan, she was nearly fifty and had not yet had a full sexual experience. “I’d like to experience love. But do I know what love is? So far, my mother’s it.” Susan laughed. “My poor mother. She signed me up for three different dating services, simultaneously. It was grueling. But I looked at it as a way to grow developmentally. The schizophrenia has given me the ability to find something inside of me, parts of myself that I might not have been able to reach otherwise.” Susan has also attempted to reconnect with her long-absent father. One day she told me she had just spoken to him on the phone, for the first time in decades. “I told him that I loved him,” she said. “It felt right to say that, despite his abandonment of me. I had written him a letter because he was turning eighty, and I thought I would free him from some guilt. I wanted him to know that he gave me the one tool I needed to climb out, which is my art, because he nurtured my creativity.

“My son was doing the crossword,” one mother told me, “and he was really mad because the voices kept giving him the answers.” A

“I would hear the leaves whispering love poems to me.”

“I wish I could find a medication that would make the horrible voices go away and...

A San Francisco mother said, “Even though they’re not nice, they are his friends. It’s privat...

His psychiatrist told him to be friendly to the voices and talk to them as tho...

“When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it. It’s hard to know which is worse.”

The schizophrenic often cannot retrieve the language he knows, but even if he could, there is no appropriate language for him to use.

Reductive thinking about the nature of mental illness—the suggestion that it can be fully described by chemistry—satisfies those who fund research, and that research may help sufferers. It is also dishonest. Schizophrenia has no margins; it becomes what it invades.

There is a community of people who have or treat the illness.

No one has ever been able to say quite what is wrong with Sam Fischer.

Sam clearly has a mood disorder, with periods of intense depression and occasional bouts of hypomania, a nonpsychotic but excessive feeling of worth and power.

His manipulative social interactions suggest borderline personality disorder. He has anxiety and phobias, signs of obsessive-compulsive and narcissistic personality disorders, and a long-running post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sam was born jaundiced at less than five pounds, even though he was at term.

Sam also had scoliosis and an undescended testicle that would have to be surgically removed.

On early standardized tests, he was, his mother recalled, “a linguistic genius, and practically retarded when it came to doing puzzles.”

do math, and he couldn’t write or draw because coordination eluded him.

‘There are calculators now. What does it matter that he can’t do sports or drawing?’

To us, that was wonderful; it should have been a sign that something was not wonderful.