My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
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Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#2"Every year, one in every five children and one in every four adults has a diagnosable mental illness. A quarter of all mental illnesses are considered serious."
1/16 adults having a serious mental illness seemed awfully high to me, but I went and looked it up and that may actually be low-balling it: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#3My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form.
Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish.
PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address:
• Print links generally do not include extras like comments. This particular story had a large number of comments at the original site.
• Although not applicable in this particular case, stories often include sidebar links to related stories, and these are often omitted from print links.
• The non-print link usually includes a very easy way to get to the print version. Typically, you just click a print icon and you are there. The print link, on the other hand, usually does not include any link or other mechanism to get to the non-print version (other than the "back" button if you happened to have come from the non-print version).
Taking this all into account, particularly the last part about it being very easy to get to the print link from the non-print link, and not easy to go the other way, in almost all cases the link submitted should be the non-print link.
PPS: there are some sites that offer an "all on one page" link, which is distinct from the print link. The former simply does away with splitting the article into pages, keeping the comments and sidebar links and human-friendly formatting. Submitting "all on one page" links is great.
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#4I grew up around a situation similar to this. Thankfully, it hasn't turned out that badly. People with that kind and depth of mental illness have to have someone watching out for them. One little slip, one missed pill has the potential to send them down a road that they will not be able to recover from on their own. It can get bad fast and take a long time to bring back under control.
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#5My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form. Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish. PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address: • Print links gen…
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#6My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form. Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish. PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address: • Print links gen…
Searching the title on Google gives this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/my-son...
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#7My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form. Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish. PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address: • Print links gen…
Press CTRL+PLUS a couple of times to increase the font size. CTRL-ZERO to go back to 1:1.
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#8My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form. Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish. PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address: • Print links gen…
Ctrl-+ (control-plus) on a PC or Cmd-+ on a Mac will increase the size of the type quite nicely. Ctrl-- (control-minus) will decrease the size, and Ctrl-0 (control-zero) will set it back to its original. This doesn't work well on every website, but works fairly well here.
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#9My old eyes cannot handle very very long lines of very small type, and after several tries I was not able to guess the URL for the story in human friendly form. Please submit links for humans, not machines. Add the machine link in a comment if you wish. PS: I'm aware of Readability and the ability to increase font sizes. There are other problems in general with print links that those do not address: • Print links gen…
Check out Readability.
Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
#10You can blame the schools for misdiagnosing ADHD, and you can blame them for a poor IEP, but you can't blame them for a child not having a normal life due to one of the most tragic diseases known to man.
Schizophrenia is not the kind of disease you can treat with an IEP, and it sounds like the author's son fell out of the system from a very young age. Trying to blame anything but genetics and development for his son's state is disingenuous - treating schizophrenia is a complicated, involved, and ultimately very stressful process for everyone involved, and in the end it can only bring someone on the brink of homelessness or self-harm into a situation where they can be stable most of the time, but never all of the time, or even almost always.
> The word “disability,” for instance, should have covered Tim and children like him.
ADHD or blindness are not even in the same room a schizophrenia. It's like comparing having six toes on your left foot to being comatose.
> If I were a legislator today, I’d mandate — and provide funding to ensure — that every teacher receive training in recognizing symptoms of mental illnesses.
Teachers have enough on their plate, and more importantly, that's not what teachers are for. It sounds like the author took his son to plenty of mental health professionals, and he still wasn't properly diagnosed until he was nearly an adult.
> I’d see that pediatricians are trained to make screening for mental health concerns a regular part of well-child exams.
Many mental health diseases don't manifest to the levels for proper diagnosis until adulthood, and even then the process of diagnosis is not scientific.
> I’d put much more money into community mental health services...
All of that sounds great, but mental health services are one of the first things cut into in a down economy.
> Tim is where he is today because of a host of public policy decisions we’ve made in this country.
No, he isn't. The author is wrong, and I'm sorry for that, but it's very unlikely that his son would have ever been a contributing member of society. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disease that cannot be treated like a 'special need.'