Dr. Henry Paul, MD

Psychiatrist, Author and Educator

CHILDREN WITH MENTAL ILLNESS AND THE PARENTS WHO LOVE THEM

October 7th, 2014

Every Mom’s Worst Nightmare; Coping with a Child’s Mental Illness was a great segment recently on CBS News. I highly recommend you take a few minutes and watch it.

Do children really suffer from mental disorders? Isn’t that only the domain of adults? Unfortunately, no. It might be helpful to consider the numbers. There are approximately 75 million children and teenagers in the country. About one-in-five young people less than eighteen-years-old are thought to suffer from a bona-fide mental disorder. That is at least 15 million of our youth. In that number, approximately half suffer from a serious mental disturbance, and about half of those suffer from what is called an extreme disturbance.

In the CBS segment, Mom Liza Long tells how she felt on the day of the Sandy Hook shooting.

“I just put my head down on my desk and started to cry,” Long, 42, told CBS News. But it wasn’t that Long knew any of the families that had lost a child. “I had children about that age too. It’s every mom’s worst nightmare. But I realized right away it’s every mom’s worst nightmare on two fronts, not just one.”

Her first thought, she later wrote, was “What if my son does that someday?”

Only a day before Sandy Hook, Long had to forcibly restrain her second oldest son, Michael — then 13 — to prevent him from running out into oncoming traffic, and then had him transported to an acute care psychiatric hospital.

Realizing that your child has a problem is scary. It can be devastating to learn that your child is physically sick, but discovering that your child suffers from a mental disorder adds another layer of confusion and anxiety. Mental disorders are not as well understood as physical disorders, and it is only recently that they have begun to be talked about openly. The school shootings have really focused the microscope on mental health as the root of the problem, not just the accessibility of guns.

Long’s story opens a new dialogue for parents of children with severe mental disorders. Raising a child with these issues is complicated, scary and often-time daunting for parents, caregivers and the medical professionals who are trying to help.

In the CBS interview, Long tells about the night of the Sandy Hook shooting when she returned home and wrote her blog entry, “Thinking the Unthinkable” on her blog, “The Anarchist Soccer Mom.”  It was her call to action.

(From the CBS interview):

“I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys–and their mothers–need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness,” said Long.

Long had been telling her story anonymously for years, but this time she made the decision to put her name to the story. “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me,” she wrote. The blog post went viral, generating more than a million ‘likes’ on Facebook and 30,000 email replies.

I applaud Long for speaking out about her child and her struggles to parent a child with such a mental disorder. We need to be having more dialogues about how to address these mental disorders so we can come up with a better support system for the families and better treatment for the children. We need to be able to diagnose better, offer more support, and make it less bureaucratic for the system to work for those families in need.

You can follow Long on her blog the Anarchist Soccer Mom.

DISCLAIMER
Information contained in this blog is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical or psychiatric advice for individual conditions or treatment and does not substitute for a medical or psychiatric examination. A psychiatrist must make a determination about any treatment or prescription. Dr. Paul does not assume any responsibility or risk for the use of any information contained within this blog.