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

by Andrew Solomon

Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz’s Count Us In

I wouldn’t exchange these experiences for anything. They’ve made us who we are, and who we are is so much better than who we would have been otherwise.”

the documentary Autism Every Day,

mindblindness, an inability to recognize how another person’s thoughts differ from one’s own.

But medicine is often unprepared for parental perspectives that do not align with an illness model.

“I think of diagnoses as an aid to pattern recognition in our lives,” she said. “We could make sense out of things that had previously been inexplicable to us; we felt validated.

“Society has developed a tendency to examine things from the point of view of a bell curve. How far away am I from normal? What can I do to fit in better? But what is on top of the bell curve? Mediocrity. That is the fate of American society if we insist upon pathologizing difference.”

A certain amount is your life goals and whether you can achieve them, and whether you’re experiencing distress and disability as a result of how you think and feel or whether you are happy with the way you are.”

This concept is popular for its suggestion that healthy people have earned their health through personal courage. For those who are unwell, however, the suggestion that flawed discipline and weak character are the source of their psychosis is torture.

“The thing that made him himself was always there. It just wasn’t where you could find it all the time.”

“The human spirit is eccentric and unique and unconquerable and bizarre and unstoppable and wonderful. So this is really about reclaiming what it is to be human in the face of so-called normality.”

Joy is one of the few gifts we can give to our fellow human beings, especially our children,

At least three times as many mentally ill people are in jail as are in hospitals. Nearly 300,000 people with mental illnesses are in jail in the United States, most convicted of crimes they would not have committed if they had been treated; another 550,000 are on probation. Few are in for violent crimes; most are there for the myriad small transgressions that are inevitable for people impervious to social reality. They are dealt with not by doctors, but by police officers—and then prison guards and other criminals.

classification builds identity.

Their progress has been to stop anticipating progress; that is its own kind of peace.

Families rise to the occasion of various difficulties, struggle to love across those divides, and find in almost any challenge a message of hope and an occasion for growth or wisdom.

An extreme but stable stress is easier to handle than a less extreme but erratic one.

Of all the words the doctor uses, the name he gives the illness has the greatest weight. The name of the illness becomes part of the identity of the sufferer.” The sadness of a poor prognosis is vastly easier than the chaos of no prognosis. Once the course is clear, most people can accept it.

Identity is a function of certitude.

For people who must accept a fixed external reality, the only way forward is to adjust internal reality.

Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos.

internal locus of control, wherein one determines one’s own trajectory, rather than external locus of control, wherein one feels entirely subject to outside circumstances and events.

often achieve a feeling of control by making a firm and positive affirmation of their lack of control. The most important thing, often, is a belief in something bigger than one’s own experience. The most common source of coherence is religion, but it has many other mechanisms. You can believe in God, in the human capacity for good, in justice, or simply in love.

Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perpetual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime. We commit to love our children without knowing them, and knowing them changes how we love them, if not that we love them.

we all perpetrate and are subject to loving yet damaging acts within our families. That damage is likely to be greater and more frequent with horizontal identities because the good intentions are less informed.

You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent. All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Pity impedes the dignity of disabled people; resentment is a parallel obstacle for people with enormous talent. The pity and the resentment alike are manifestations of our fear of people who are radically different.

80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. More than half of rape victims in the United States are under eighteen, and nearly a quarter of them—an eighth of the total—are under twelve.

“My personal pain is just a ripple in this huge ocean of pain that women feel every day,”

“Trauma not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind, but also remains in the body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic event.”

In 2001, before the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence someone to death for a crime committed before the age of eighteen, some 12 percent of the population on death row were nineteen or younger.

Biological evidence now demonstrates that the adolescent brain is structurally different from the adult one, which supports making a distinction between adult and juvenile crime. In the prefrontal cortex of a fifteen-year-old, the areas responsible for self-control are undeveloped; many parts of the brain do not mature until about twenty-four. While the full implications of this variant physiognomy cannot yet be mapped, holding children to adult standards is biologically naïve. On the one hand, kids who commit crimes are likely to become adults who commit crimes; but on the other hand, kids who commit crimes act on impulses in part because they are kids.

More than half of juveniles who are arrested test positive for drugs, and more than three-quarters are under the influence of drugs or alcohol when committing their crimes. Arrested juveniles are twice as likely as age peers to have used alcohol, more than three times as likely to have used marijuana, more than seven times as likely to have used ecstasy, more than nine times as likely to have used cocaine, and twenty times as likely to have used heroin. These statistics do not elucidate whether substances actually influence juveniles to commit crime, whether substance abuse and criminality are symptoms of a single underlying personality disorder, or whether laws restricting access to substances compel abusers into criminal activities. They do suggest, however, that drug treatment for juveniles is important to fighting crime. Sadly, only slightly over 1 percent of those arrested receive substance abuse treatment. • • •

As many as three out of four incarcerated juveniles have a mental health diagnosis, as opposed to one of five in the general nine- to seventeen-year-old population.

Some 50 to 80 percent of incarcerated juveniles have learning disabilities.

To wish for and resent parental love is a familiar adolescent paradox,

“We have fifty-one different systems of juvenile injustice with no national standards of practice or accountability.” The abuse in the juvenile justice system is commensurate with the corrupting nature of its absolute power.

One study found that children in its sample who suffered physical maltreatment, witnessed interparental violence, and encountered violence within their community were more than twice as likely to become violent delinquents as those from peaceable homes; of course, abused children also may carry their parents’ genetic predisposition

I deplore violence, but I recognize the military intimacy it allows men who have no other occasion to bond.

Indeed, I recognize that the conquests by which the map of the world is drawn derive from the loyalty and aggression of young men. My

Finding a horizontal identity can be life’s greatest liberation, but it can also be crushing,

Jail concentrates human emotions because it confiscates so many normal human actions and robs the inmate of so many ordinary decisions: what to eat, when to eat it, when to shower, and on and on. When you are not on the street, fending for yourself, running from crime to crime, taking drugs that banish the world, you are compelled into reflection. In this pensive state, prisoners dwell on love and hate, on reunion and vengeance. They contemplate how to get back at whoever put them in the box; virtually all the prisoners I met blamed someone else for their incarceration if not for their crime. They also long for the people who offer them succor: a husband or wife, a boyfriend or girlfriend, the prisoner’s children, parents whose relatively untempered love becomes a cherished souvenir of innocence.

While nearly three-quarters of people working with juvenile delinquents believe effective ways exist to treat the problem, only 3 to 6 percent believe that the juvenile courts are helping. Our lack of sympathy for these pariah children keeps successful treatment out of their reach. Aside from the common prejudice that therapeutic interventions are excessively soft on the criminal, the justification for withholding such treatments is often that they are ineffective and exorbitantly expensive. Neither justification has merit. The cost of jailing a minor ranges from about $20,000 to $65,000 per year. Prisons with more programs experience less violence, which reduces some expenses, but the major financial benefit lies in curtailed recidivism. A crime gives rise to enormous knock-on costs, including loss of property, trial expenses, health-care costs from injury, and psychological liabilities sustained by frightened victims.

We rail against the atrocities perpetrated by kids, but we consistently choose the satisfaction of retribution over the efficacy of prevention.

malevolence does not always grow in a predictable or accountable manner.

“When people devalue you, it far outweighs all the love.”

But I accept my own pain; life is full of suffering, and this is mine.

It is a poverty of our language that we use the word sex to refer both to gender and to carnal acts, and from that unfortunate conflation springs much of the disgust around the notion of transgender children. Being trans is taken to be a depravity, and depravities in children are anomalous and disturbing. But trans children are not manifesting sexuality; they are manifesting gender. The issue is not whom they wish to be with, but whom they wish to be.

How we name something determines how we perceive it.