Sitting in church today, I saw a young woman who has had some definite challenges in the mental health area lately. She has, in the past, regularly asked the church for prayers to help her hold it together long enough to graduate and head off to college, where she is supposed to be right now. Last week, her sister asked for a prayer of thankfulness that Big Sis was off at college and the stress level around the home had dropped. So now she’s home already, whether for a visit or for good I don’t know. But this child seems too fragile to be off on her own at this point. And I began to wonder what were the early signs that her mental health was not, shall we say, robust? Because Little Sister seems a tad off to me too.
And I thought back to a guy I once went steady with, who seemed just a tad manic at the time…nothing you could really put your finger on, but there was the incident a few years before we became friends where he stayed home from school, supposedly sick. Every time a car came down the street he ran out of the house, buck naked except for a pair of turquoise socks. He was 11 at the time, and it made the police beats column of the local paper, which is why my mother did not want me around him. So flash ahead 25 years, and I see his sister at a funeral and ask how he’s doing…and he’s a full-blown manic-depressive, surviving on doing odd jobs. It seemed obvious that his problems started back before age 11.
So as parents, have you ever noticed behavior in your children at a young age that led you to believe they might fall prey to mental illness later on, and did that come to pass? Is there anything that can be done for these kids at a younger age that could forestall the collapse of their mental health? Should I have paid more attention to the sermon than I obviously did?
There are too many variables to say what course of action one set of parent/doctor/patients would take compared to the next but in general “forestall” I think is the wrong question.
It’s more of a question of management of the situation from my perspective.
Some people don’t seem to be bolted together really well, and heading away from family to try college for the first time (with all its concurrent challenges, alongside of those that would attend to the agegroup in or outside of school) can jolt them pretty bad.
I would have been so described, and accurately.
I would have to say that I owe my current circumstance of independent and fully employed living, and relaxed & relatively serene mental and emotional composition, entirely to factors other than any professional help of the sort that is usually associated with the term “mental health”.
Inversely, I’d have to say that I’ve seen a great deal of life destruction wrought in the name of psychiatric services for adolescents and young adults.
My oldest daughter, who is 18, has been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It would seem (from what the professionals have told us) that one of the most telling signs of BPD is an almost complete lack of conscience. She wasn’t diagnosed until she was 16 (although she was diagnosed bipolar a year earlier); but looking back, it goes as far back as I can remember. When she was in second grade, she would come home, tell me with a perfectly straight face that she had no homework. This went on for several weeks until her teacher contacted me to ask why she wasn’t turning in her homework. When I confronted her, she seemed upset that she had been discovered in her deception, but showed no remorse for lying. For a few days, she brought her homework home and did it, and then started telling me she had done it during lunch or recess, or on the bus. It didn’t take long to catch her in the lie, and again, while there was regret at having been busted, there didn’t seem to be any regret about lying.
This episode, of course, is only illustrative of life in general with her. From a very early age, she would buck our rules, get away with it by lying, and never seemed bothered by the fact that she had done wrong. She never showed true remorse for a single thing she did.
The scariest thing is that she is very, very bright, outgoing and capable of being very charming. She sucks people in with her charade of being a “troubled teen”, which people react to by trying to help her, and then she takes advantage of them in any way she can, with no regrets.
I don’t know how young mental illnesses can be diagnosed, but in retrospect, my daughter was showing symptoms for ten years before she was diagnosed.
(I’m not a psychiatrist…) For my son, preschool. But some conditions start to present symptoms at a much later age, such as about age 20 (I think?) for schizophrenia. Other conditions (such as depression) get worse for each episode, so they’d be worse later in life (if untreated). And head injuries can cause problems at any age. So it all depends.
An older brother of mine had anger issues and other things that as I kid ( he was 10 years older than me.) I thought, " That is not right to behave that way."
He could crap all over our mom and she would always defend him. :rolleyes: x infinity. because he was bucktoothed, very nearsighted and had red hair as a kid. uhhhhh…yeah…
About a week or so before my wedding, unbeknownst to me, he had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized. ( to the utter mortification of our mother. Mental Illness is worse than jail and jail is worth than death. and death is the worst. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY for being farked up !)
I had a lovely wedding and and at the reception all I could think of is, " Gee everything is going swimmingly…Mark hasn’t farked it up yet by falling asleep in a chair in the most public place and starting to snore." ( Besides working odd shifts - this was his one party trick besides extremly offensive racist jokes. Good times.)
I was never given details of what transpired, but he was put on meds and his entire personality was quite lovely after that.
And the greatest ironic golf clap of his life after that was in his final days he was cared wonderfully for by African American nurses. (He didn’t hate blacks as individuals, he had issues with them as a whole. )
Everyone is a victim and a martyr in their own mind. (Except me. I’m a super hero with delusions of grandeur.)
