Having spent my clinical and research career (prior to academia) working with adults with schizophrenia, I must concur that NO ONE should pray for schizophrenia. Yes, some people do respond to treatment, and some people do recover. But the ones that don’t undergo unpredictable cycles of dysfunction that are frightening to themselves and to others.
Yeticus, I’m glad your son is improving, but one reason why controlled studies with large populations are essential with situations like this is that it’s nearly impossible to know in an individual child what has caused a “small but perceptible” improvement.
From about 8 months - 8 years of age, my son demonstrated some strange behaviors that appeared to place him on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. With no interventions, these consistently diminished as he aged. Today, he’s “normal” (whatever that is!); slightly nerdy perhaps, but fully functioning in school with a network of friends, and he’s a happy, loving, considerate individual. His only residual problem is that his handwriting is horrifyingly bad, but that’s nothing compared to the deficits in social and motor skills that he had as a toddler.
If we’d gone to your doctor, or tried any of the other unverified treatments for autism, we might very well believe that whatever we tried was an astounding success. In fact, in retrospect it is clear that our child was simply on a rather unusual developmental trajectory.
So I wish you all the best, but I advise you to think long and hard about whether the improvements you see are due to the doctor, or due to the fact your child is getting older and therefore making progress. Perhaps you have a good instinctive sense of how to parent him, too - that could help account for his improvements.
Schizophrenics have a really high rate of suicide. I don’t know what’s worse. Being so forgone that you don’t know how forgone you are, or having some self-awareness of how hopeless things are.
Schizophrenia is quite traumatic for the individual who has it because you often lose your life to it. Your livelihood, your ability to go to school, your ability to connect to other people—you watch it all go down the drain. When you start off your life disadvantaged, it is horrible too. But you don’t have to watch what you used to have disappear before your eyes.
There is also an awful stigma attached to schizophrenics. I do not think I would ever tell anyone at work if I were ever diagnosed with it, not even my boss.
That said, I can see why someone would “wish” for someone to have schizophrenia over autism. Many people do actually recover from schizophrenic episodes, and drugs can make it more manageable–even if it does come with downsides. People who are severely autistic will probably stay that way, requiring services for the rest of their life. So I guess it’s a difference of hope. A person with schizophrenia may feel very hopeless, but in an objective sense they DO have a chance of getting better.
I do find the similarities between schizophrenia and autism to be interesting, though. I wonder what discovers will be uncovered in the future.
My youngest brother, adopted from Quatamala, had night terrors for a year. I swore at 16 to NEVER have kids. I spent every night, trying to fall asleep with the 1812 overture playing through my earphones. I remember the first time my mother said, ‘he’s just angry’ he’ll just cry it out. It turns out if you just ‘let him cry’ he’d have a seizure.
Thanks for the info.
Thanks CC…I will keep that in mind. I’m just glad that things are starting to improve after a 6-7 year downtrend. Allergies do run in our family, so that is an issue that needed to be addressed and the psychiatrist was little help (allergies to meds, he knew, but not allergies to food or environmental factors…very little). Our son was born with a very mottled red-rashed body, and there are times it crops up when certain foods are eaten over the years. Yeah, we went to an allergist to get him tested around 3 or 4 years of age and the only major red flag was OLIVES. (Pretty sure that included olive oil and other products derived from olives as well as olive trees). We keep that in mind when we cook over the last few years, but he still has allergies to other things as well…that we are still trying to weed out…almost a life-long process.
PM me if you’d like more details for our experience. It is a miracle drug for us. When I took my daughter into the sleep clinic for the first time at age 5 1/2, after just moving to the US from China, during the exam she threw my glasses on the floor and broke them, and scratched my face drawing blood.
The nurse practicioner asked if we had tried melatonin, and all the usual tricks of bedtime routine stuff or would we like to try something else? That night Serena fell asleep 45 minutes after her dose and slept for 10 hours. She still wakes up most nights and gets a second dose, but that is a small price to pay. BTW, Serena has made remarkable progress since then. I haven’t had my face scratched for over a year either (she mainly used to do it at night to get me to wake up)
Dangerosa, there is almost no research or literature on how adults on the Austism spectrum fare. How does your cousin do if you don’t mind sharing?
China Guy, I can also respond to this one. I have an older brother with autism who is doing quite well. He holds down a full time job at a nursing home (mostly doing laundry) and does reasonably well at it. He lives in his own apartment which is in a group home of a dozen or more apartments with some supervision to make sure that the apartments are kept clean, bills are paid, and meals are reasonably well balanced.
The key to all of this is an organization called South Brunswick Citizens for Independent Living. (It’s in New Jersey.) My brother was among the first group of students with special needs who were required by law to receive a “free and appropriate education”. They were the first with IEP’s, etc. Then, when they graduated, CIL was organized to provide jobs, transportation, and housing. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been successful, thanks to a lot of work by a lot of dedicated people.
Thanks Dendarii
Becuse autism affects young helpless (blonde! blue-eyed!) babies. Schizophrenia doesn’t manifest until later in life. And a lot of people with schizophrenia are homeless, so nobody cares about them. It’s easy to see why people freak out more over autism.
I see that I was ninjaed by even sven!