My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life. • Hacker News Board

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#41

Post by pnathan » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:16 PM UTC

lusr wrote: post #20

aes256 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like the term 'mental illness', not so much because of the stigma attached to it, but because the term implies there is some 'normal' from which only a small subsection of the population deviates. In reality, there is no 'normal'. There is no one person with perfect mental health; perfect clarity of thought, perception, of feeling and action. Everyone, to put things bluntly, is a little fucked up. Thus…

There's a ridiculously vast difference between "a little fucked up" and serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, rapid cycling bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. If you think serious mental illness isn't a real, debilitating reality, I encourage you to spend some time with somebody in a truly psychotic state and see how you feel afterwards. Then imagine living as that person. There may be no…

> There may be no absolute "normal", but there are most certainly people who live in a sad, terrible, frightening state of mental disturbance with no simple treatment.

Agreed. There's a vast gulf between someone who is quirky on Tumblr and someone with a mental illness. It's simply not the same, not even close.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#42

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #30

btilly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His son might not have been contributing, but having him homeless and bouncing in and out of jails is more expensive to society than appropriate institutional support. Furthermore one of the stated issues is his unwillingness to take antipsychotic medication, and one of the characteristic traits is that in a structured jail environment, where he's presumably receiving those medications, he is able to function well. T…

Anti-psychotic medication isn't like taking Tylenol. It can completely change a person's personality, and people have likened it to living in a fog.

[deleted]

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#43

Post by wonderzombie » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #36

fusiongyro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fatalistic attitude isn't wrong, but it is manifestly unhelpful and surprisingly expensive. Being homeless is not a zero-cost alternative to real treatment; in many cases, the cost of lavish treatment is far lower than the cost of ER visits and criminal proceedings that would otherwise be incurred. I believe Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about chronic homelessness a few years ago, about Denver rolling out a…

> when it makes both ethical and financial sense. It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.

On the other hand, you have to ask whether the cost of trying to make sure not a single dollar is given to the undeserving outweighs both the monetary savings and benefits to society overall. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I envision this to be a lot like crime. You'll never get rid of it completely, so you put into place some (ostensibly) cost-effective measures to mitigate the worst of it.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#44

Post by erichocean » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #23

This is a tough story of a state legislator who became an adoptive father finding out that policies that he thought were humane reforms didn't end up helping people in this generation like his adoptive son. Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author of the book A…

We do know that young people whose family history suggests genetic risk for major mental illness (which might not be known for a particular adopted child) are playing with fire if they take schedule I drugs without medical supervision.

That marijuana is classified as a "schedule I drug" is, itself, obscene and a result of politics, not science.

Therefore, the rest of your suggestion regarding them "playing with fire" does not apply in this instance.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#45

Post by jlgreco » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #23

This is a tough story of a state legislator who became an adoptive father finding out that policies that he thought were humane reforms didn't end up helping people in this generation like his adoptive son. Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author of the book A…

"We do know that young people whose family history suggests genetic risk for major mental illness (which might not be known for a particular adopted child) are playing with fire if they take schedule I drugs without medical supervision."

Considering that "Schedule I" is nothing more than a legal classification, I would like to see how that works. Does it just so happen that drugs in that legal classification coincide with drugs that people at risk of mental illness should not take? That seems like quite a coincidence, if true. If he were self-medicating with tobacco or caffeine, would you express similar concern?

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#46

Post by xk_id » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

aes256 wrote: post #14

showerst wrote: post #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...

I don't really like the term 'mental illness', not so much because of the stigma attached to it, but because the term implies there is some 'normal' from which only a small subsection of the population deviates. In reality, there is no 'normal'. There is no one person with perfect mental health; perfect clarity of thought, perception, of feeling and action. Everyone, to put things bluntly, is a little fucked up. Thus…

Then you don't like the world "illness" in general. The same holds for physiological health: none is completly bacteria-free, has perfect levels of vitamins, etc. However, we need to operate in our judgements with ideals (healthy; sane; circle and all other mathematical entities, etc.): reaching for them, although never succeeding; that's perfectly okay.

Oh, and we do have some quite good (attempts at) theories of what "sanity" is all about.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#47

Post by kyro » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

I just finished my Psychiatry rotation as part of my training and there are three things, of many, that I learned: First, America has a long way to go in developing the best screening and management tools for people with mental disabilities. Second, schizophrenia is an incredibly complicated illness that can take manifest in a whole host of unsuspecting symptoms, and is not easily treatable. And third, diagnosing and treating a mental disorder in children is really hard.

The last two points, I think, are very relevant to this article. While I sympathize with you, understand that child development is a very, very complicated thing. You have naturally hyper children, naturally withdrawn children, etc, and physicians are very wary to label any child with an illness, especially schizophrenia. When we're adults and have leveled out, it's easier to discern what is "normal" from "abnormal." But children are constantly changing, being molded by their environment, and so it's much harder to outline a symptomatic threshold of what's considered normal. Additionally, children exhibit mental disorders in very different ways than adult do; there are different sets of symptoms to look out for. And these symptoms can be anything from "pressured speech" (talking too fast. some kids are just naturally fast talkers, right?) to auditory hallucinations (but the child could have a vivid imagination, right?).

The treatment for schizophrenia is an entirely different beast. The goal is usually to just suppress the symptoms and to restore the patient to a functional baseline. In many cases, the disease progresses and the prognosis worsens. In your case, your child had early-onset schizophrenia, which is associated with a worse prognosis than late-onset cases.

Although there are studies that show that early detection and treatment of schizophrenia can improve the course of the disease, chances are your kid would have still developed much of the same symptoms and issues that he has now. It really sucks, and I sympathize with you, but that's the nature of the disorder. It's terrible, difficult to manage effectively, and can ruin lives. I've seen it.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#48

Post by jlgreco » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:22 PM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #44

tokenadult wrote: post #23

This is a tough story of a state legislator who became an adoptive father finding out that policies that he thought were humane reforms didn't end up helping people in this generation like his adoptive son. Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author of the book A…

We do know that young people whose family history suggests genetic risk for major mental illness (which might not be known for a particular adopted child) are playing with fire if they take schedule I drugs without medical supervision. That marijuana is classified as a "schedule I drug" is, itself, obscene and a result of politics, not science. Therefore, the rest of your suggestion regarding them "playing with fire"…

Yeah, the only way "playing with [legal classification of drugs] is playing with fire" makes any sense is if the fire in question is set by the legal system.

Now, if you want to say "playing with stimulants" or "playing with depressants" or some other scientific classification, then that makes sense (though I would still like to see a citation..).

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#49

Post by wonderzombie » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:23 PM UTC

tjic wrote: post #25

Some problems just don't have good solutions. We're so used to political debates where the Republicans say "less regulation will solve X", the Democrats say "more spending will solve X", the libertarians say "X is none of the government's business", and each suggests that things will go swimmingly under their preferred way of attacking the problem. Some things, though, just suck. Schizophrenia is one of those things.…

I think this is too fatalistic. This sets the bar far too low -- you could substitute poverty or crime in here without substantially altering the meaning. No, you cannot "cure" it or "fix" it, but the alternative isn't "do nothing." That's a false dichotomy.

At a minimum you can look for ways mitigate the impact it has on our society. See the pieces elsewhere in this thread which discuss the cost to our society incurred by ER visits from the mentally ill and/or homeless. That's a trivial example.

It might be worth discussing how other western industrialized nations approach this; I suspect that those countries which have some kind of socialized health infrastructure do more than the US than shrug their shoulders and avert their eyes.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#50

Post by emeraldd » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 9:23 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #23

This is a tough story of a state legislator who became an adoptive father finding out that policies that he thought were humane reforms didn't end up helping people in this generation like his adoptive son. Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author of the book A…

The whole "Schedule I" thing is probably a bad choice of words on the authors part. Perhaps something along the lines of "mind altering substances"? Anything with the potential to significantly impact a persons impressions of the world around them is a bad idea in this situation.