(May 29, 2013) Naomi Haskell begins to cry as she watches her son lift weights and run on the treadmill. He was in a psychiatric hospital only several hours earlier. Now she wonders if his behavior is the beginning of another manic episode.
Every parent of an adult child with a serious mental illness will see themselves in Haskell’s story, described in the Washington Post (“A mother helps son in his struggle with schizophrenia,” May 28).
For this mother, it is “an hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute vigil.” Even her son’s body movements can alert her to a looming psychiatric crisis. She notices changes in behavior like “how he walks, whether he is quick or slow or heavy or aimless” and “[h]ow he talks — crisp or sluggish, or perhaps angrily to no one.”
Haskell’s son says he understands why, after his first psychotic episode, his mother “went to a court and convinced a judge that her son was a danger to himself or others, then tricked him into getting on a bus back to Houston, where he was handcuffed and taken to the psychiatric hospital, where he began to accept that he would have to manage delusions and paranoia and mania and depression for the rest of his life.”
Other parents are not so lucky. Unlike Haskell’s son, many people with severe mental illness suffer from anosognosia, a lack of awareness about their illness.
If you love someone with severe mental illness, don’t miss this compassionate story, eloquently told.
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