Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children
Paul Raeburn
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0767914384
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, Acquainted with the Night is a powerful memoir of one man’s struggle to deal with the adolescent depression and bipolar disorder of his son and his daughter.
Seven years ago Paul Raeburn’s son, Alex, eleven, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after leaving his fifth-grade classroom in an inexplicable rage. He was hospitalized three times over the next three years until he was finally diagnosed by a psychiatrist as someone exhibiting a clear-cut case of bipolar disorder. This ended a painful period of misdiagnosis and inappropriate drug therapy. Then Raeburn’s younger daughter, Alicia, twelve, was diagnosed as suffering from depression after episodes of self-mutilation and suicidal thoughts. She too was repeatedly admitted to psychiatric hospitals. All during this terrible, painful time, Raeburn’s marriage was disintegrating, and he had to ask what he and his wife might have done, unwittingly, to contribute to their children’s mental illness. And so, literally to save his children’s lives, he used all the resources available to him as a science reporter and writer to educate himself on their diseases and the various drugs and therapies available to help them return from a land of inner torment.
In Paul Raeburn’s skilled hands, this memoir of a family stricken with the pain of depression and mania becomes a cathartic story that any reader can share, even as parents unlucky enough to be in a similar position will find it of immeasurable practical value in their own struggles with the child psychiatry establishment.
snacks in the afternoon, so we could eat dinner together when I got home. She couldn’t, she said; the kids were too hungry, and they couldn’t wait. On weekends, if I didn’t get to the kitchen first, she would make dinner for the kids, feed them, and then start dinner for the two of us. Some of my fondest memories of childhood are of sitting around the dinner table with my family every night. My parents worked office jobs doing things they didn’t have a passion for. It was a way to support the
bucks, and if you turned down overtime when the boss offered it, he might not offer it again. It helped to cover tuition at the Catholic schools to which many of these mostly Polish-American families sent their children. My mother was one of the few mothers who worked, and she did it for the same reason that everyone else did, to try to get ahead, to save some money for the kids’ college tuition. If car sales were up and the plants were at peak production, the overtime could continue for weeks.
evaluating Alex at the principal’s suggestion completed their report. By now, I understood the importance of the evaluation by the child-study team. The idea was to determine whether Alex should be classified as a special education student under state law. Such a classification would do two things. It would make him eligible for extra help and special classes, something he clearly would need, at least for a while. And it would, in some sense, separate him from the other kids. For children
no intelligence at all? On impulse, I called him at home. “You should get down here to the hospital and see the consequence of what you’ve done,” I told him. “You’re responsible for this. Alicia’s so out of control she’s tied down. I want you to get over here now.” He gave the phone to his mother. Fifteen minutes later, the two of them showed up at the emergency room. I didn’t know what to do next, but I couldn’t sit down. I paced the hallway outside Alicia’s room, trying to figure out how to
judgments and resisting impulses, do not reach their adult form until about age twenty. The cerebellum, which is involved in social interactions, does not mature until late adolescence. Various other connections are made during adolescence, and levels of the brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, which are involved in signaling between brain cells, also change. Is it possible that some of the troubles Alicia and Alex experienced were related to these changes in the adolescent brain? And does