This blog was originally created as a place where I could post my thoughts, opinions, blatherings and pontifications about the varied movies, books, comics, and film music I enjoy (or have not enjoyed) passing the time with.
Last year, when I made the terrifying leap of faith to pursue a writing career, I also began using this blog to update my readers on my misadventures in writing.
I did not create this blog to share personal information, but there have been times when I have felt compelled to. This is one of those times.
My wife and I, like so many other parents in similar circumstances, were completely blindsided by our son's psychotic break in January of 2012. Because our son has been diagnosed with both autism and mental retardation (his IQ hovers just below 70, on a good day) we had been able to explain away the symptoms of the approaching break. Even as I write this review (on a bright and sunny Wednesday morning) it is still difficult for me to wrap my mind around what has happened.
The only way that I can best get across my reaction to a cinema buff is that it is exactly like how Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) obsessed, feared, and ultimately reacted to the realization that the planet Melancholia was not moving away from Earth, but actually moving toward it on a collision course. Yes, the emotions (the pain, the anger, the grief, etc.) are all that powerful.
Because of our son's autism and mental retardation, I was always quick to explain away his visual and auditory hallucinations with what I have come to call my Temple Grandin Defense. "Because he thinks in pictures," I would say to the psychologists and psychiatrists testing him, "if my son is having a visual based thought or memory, he claims to see it. If he has a verbal or language based thought, he claims to hear it." A nice theory, or excuse, for dismissing or downplaying hallucinations and/or delusions, but it does not explain the severity of the symptoms and, truth be told, they have been getting much, much worse in the last six to twelve months. Basically after he turned 17. Which is an almost textbook time period for the onset of schizophrenia.
At this moment in time it is uncertain as to whether or not our son is truly becoming symptomatic of schizophrenia. Not helping is that the comorbid symptoms of his diagnosed conditions (i.e. his autism and his low IQ) already mirror, echo, or are almost identical with that of schizophrenia. And, as my wife as pointed out, the treatments are pretty much the same.
Now matter what our son's chronic mental disability or illness is being called today, we are already doing all that we can for him, at the moment.
Because the life long symptoms of his autism and mental retardation also fall into an almost frightening alignment with the symptoms of disorganized schizophrenia, I purchased and read Raquel Gur's and Ann Braden Johnson's If Your Adolescent Has Schizophrenia: An Essential Resource for Parents
Aimed at the newcomer to the battlefield (and it is a battlefield, believe me) of mental disability/illness, the book offers valuable information about the wide ranging symptoms of the disease (and yes, it is a disease, don't let anyone tell you, or try to convince you, that it isn't). It also paints a rather grim picture of the lack of long term resources for treatment. I had already become aware of this, thanks to my wife and I's constant battle (and it was a battle, believe me) for a diagnosis of autism to replace the misdiagnosed "learning disability" that he had been given in the second grade.
There is also a good deal of contact information for resources, which is very helpful.
What was not helpful, for me at least, was that the book is exclusively focused on intellectually standard adolescents. If you are like me and have a child with a below average IQ, this book can really make you feel left out of the cold and helpless. Even more depressing is learning about just how little help there is out there.
Despite that, though, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to any parent that has questions or concerns about the mental well being of their child or children.
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