Jani's at the mercy of her mind

[brainpanhandler]

Out of curiosity I googled calalini and did not find anything particularly noteworthy. When I googled ca la li ni though I discovered a Lalini Ramanathan that is a sleep researcher at Neurobiology Research (151A3), Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Health Care System, North Hills; and Department of Psychiatry and Brain Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California which I found to be an odd coincidence.

In the pdf at the link they of course use rats for their research.

http://www.semel.ucla.edu/sleepresearch ... 20john.pdf

Now it would be spookier than hell if they also used cats which were identified with numbers, like 400.

[MacCruiskeen]

Somebody has to help that child, really. I wish Wilhelm Reich was still alive. Or at least Laing.

I'm going to mail that article to Alice Miller (any port in a storm). It's just fucking outrageous. If that screed can appear in the LA Times without provoking a storm of protest, it's no wonder hardly anyone gives a shit about Guantanamo or Abu Graibh or even the normal US prison system.

[RomanyX]

What bothers me, I think, is what and how she's naming these things which are haunting her. For some reason that's where the 'creepy' comes in for me. Makes me wonder.

I was feeling that too, until I got to this part of the story:

Although she can't sit still long enough to read a book, she is a voracious learner. She's also bright -- her IQ is 146. Over the years, Michael and Susan have entertained her by feeding her information well beyond her years: specifics of evolution, the Roman Empire, the periodic table of elements.

"What is the atomic symbol for tungsten?" Susan asks.

"W."

FWIW, I side with Drew and LBO on this one. The medicos seem to have cause and effect reversed. Evidence indicates that the child has had a severe sleep disorder since birth. I find it far more likely that she started hallucinating because she was sleep-deprived, rather than the other way around. Though I'm sure it's become a vicious circle by now, I think an intensive holistic campaign to get her sleeping would be a healthier approach.

On another tangent, I feel she may well be seeing & hearing an aspect of objective reality that most do not. However, even if true, it's irrelevant--unless someone can recommend a bona fide exorcist (not some tent-show quack). If her condition interferes with her ability to function & engage in safe interaction within our shared reality, it's an illness and she needs treatment.

[MacCruiskeen]

Paging Laing and Gregory Bateson: here's a perfect example of a Double Bind:

"You want the rats and cats to go away, don't you?" Susan asks, trying to make eye contact with her daughter.

Jani stuffs a French fry into her mouth.

"No," she says. "They're cool. Rats are cool."

So is the kid. There's something positively heroic about her powers of resistance, even after a lifetime of browbeating and 133 days of Stalinist-Soviet psychiatric jail.

She says, 'If my parents don't love me, I'll go live with my rats.'

Wise child. At least those rodents won't emotionally manipulate her, nor will they incarcerate her and pump her full of drugs.

[JoseFreitas]

This story is quite weird. I do agree that there seems to be a sense in which the parents are not entirely normal, and may not have been capable at a certain moment, to handle a daughter who might have been too bright and active for them (they are by their own admission, depressed and have a family history of mentally ilness).

Yet, I also think that all is not normal with the daughter, and there seems to be a greater disturbance here than a sleep disorder (I did not write "just" a sleep disorder since they can be tremendously disruptive). The child seems a little out there and seems to meet many criteria for being metally ill. Note also that most of the doctors I've ever met (and I've met many, my sister is diagnosed as schizophrenic) are well aware that "schizophrenic" is a label for something that is not understood. We can attack the label, and it certainly is not a perfect, or even a good one, but the patient is still sick regardless of what label to apply.

The child may also have some contact with a different reality, but most children do and grow out of it. Not all children can become shaman! It is a phase, and although I admit that it's hard to tell (and I'm not trained to do it in any case), children who will become "shaman" seem to be somewhat more functional than this girl. Note also that it is possible to have contact with the "spirit world" and still be mentally ill, so....

Many little points call my attention in this story to the fact that the parents are probaly also not capable of seeing alternatives, many of which can be pursued at the same time as the conventional drug treatments. It is not normal (at least not in my book) for a six year child to eat at Burger King's every day. My sister had tremendous results with diet, herbs and vitamins. Certainly not enough to be taken off drugs, but still, great results. I am the first to dislike drugs, but I have to say that in the end, my sister is a lot better with them than without. But it took 10 years to find the good combo and dosage.

This article simply does not say enough about the case for us to make informed guesses, so we should just "talk for talk's sake" rather than discuss it directly. I still feel there's something wrong with the parents, though. But this doesn't say much. I think there's something wrong with most parents I meet, anyway, so....

[Penguin]

Born Aug. 8, 2002, Jani was different from the start, sleeping fitfully for only about four hours a day. Most infants sleep 14 to 16 hours a day. Only constant, high-energy stimulation kept Jani from screaming.

"For the first 18 months, we would take her to malls, play areas, IKEA, anywhere we could find crowds," says Michael, 33. "It was impossible to overstimulate her. We would leave at 8 in the morning and be gone for 14 hours. We could not come home until Jani had been worn out enough so that she would sleep a couple of hours."

When Jani turned 3, her tantrums escalated. She lasted three weeks in one preschool and one week in another. She demanded to be called by different names; Rainbow one day, Blue-eyed Tree Frog the next. Make-believe friends filled her days -- mostly rats and cats and, sometimes, little girls.

Hmmm..
One family I know had a kid few years back. Lets call it G.
G had trouble sleeping from early on, and as soon as G learned to talk, described seeing all kinds of things, monsters, animals, dream stuff while awake, and being afraid to sleep, and horrified of some of the stuff G saw.
This was less than 3 years old. At the time they were seeking medical help for G, but doctors were baffled by what was wrong..

Too bad I dont know what happened afterwards, and whether G is now ok. This story reminded me of that in some ways..

[Penguin]

The usual disciplinary strategies parents use to teach their young children proper behavior -- time-outs, rules, positive rewards -- failed time and again for the Schofields.

Well, how could they possibly "succeed", those "usual disciplinary strategies"? Jesus christ almighty, she is six years old. ("Teach"! "Proper behavior"!)

There are so many blandly unexamined assumptions (and truly thunderous silences) in this gruesome article that it's hard to know where to start. Exactly how long has she been going through this purgatory of imprisonment, forced medication, emotional blackmail, and "the usual disciplinary strategies"??

"Diagnosed schizophrenic"! The only thing that's absolutely clear from this appalling screed is that the child is unusually intelligent and imaginative and lively and brave. For how much longer, though?

You dont say.. And the drugs given are pretty heavy stuff, and in huge doses..If that alone wont do her in..

[MacCruiskeen]

The very first lie is the headline:

Jani's at the mercy of her mind

In fact, no. As the article itself makes perfectly clear, all her seizures, all her actual suffering (and all her so-called "tantrums") are provoked either by people trying to compel her to act against her will and deny her own experience, or else by massive overdoses of psychoactive drugs. She's not "at the mercy of her mind" (which genius of a sub-ed came up with that title?), with which she seems perfectly and sometimes ecstatically happy -- and why wouldn't she be? It's a good mind, and an unusual one . She is in fact at the tender mercy of her poor clueless abandoned parents and the smugly brutal human-resources managers who call themselves physicians and demonstrably heal nothing. They should go and heal themselves, if they can. Maybe with some E, if they can develop the elementary social skills required to find a trustworthy dealer.

What does the article tell us, unambiguously? The parents are deeply depressed and isolated; they have no family and no friends to help them, and they're clearly not getting on very well with each other either. The mother is also frightened of her older child's perfectly normal imagination, and struggling to cope with an even younger infant. She is also unemployed since last Fall, and not of her own free will. All four of them eat junk food daily.

January is forced to go to school when she's clearly both too young for it and too clever for it. No one takes her seriously. No one wants her around. Her mother is scared of her, and favours her baby brother. (Where are her grandparents?) Everyone insists she's a fucking nutcase. Is it any wonder her imaginary friends are multiplying? (Wouldn't yours?) She has an amazing vocabulary, despite (allegedly) not reading. She is six years old and she's familiar with the periodic table. To have learned it, she must have loved it. Maybe that's why she gives her imaginary animal-friends those quirky number-names. Helium 2, Zirconium 40, Rat 99, Cat 100. (Just a thought. But at least it's a fucking thought. There's nothing evenly remotely resembling one in the whole bloody article or in any of those smugly cruel and stupid diagnoses.)

Nothing I've read recently has angered me more than that article and what it tells us about the state of the US today and how it treats its children (and its parents). I can hardly even bear to look at it for more than five minutes at a time. There's barely a line in it that isn't simply grotesque.

Medicine is social or it is nothing. Reich knew that and that's why he died in jail. Laing knew it too and that's why he drank himself to death. Meanwhile, January's know-nothing psychiatrists are alive and well and at the top of their fucking game. They can be sure they won't run out of lucrative work any time soon. On the contrary: the "financial crisis" will keep them busier, and wealthier, than they've ever been before. Every cloud...

[MacCruiskeen]

In December 2007, they were referred to Dr. Linda Woodall, a psychiatrist in Glendale. Jani's medical records for the following year depict a doctor searching for effective medications while her patient slid (sic) further into a world (sic) stalked (sic!!!) by rats and cats.

July 8, 2008: Claps hands, hops (tic-like) (i.e., is a child); food can't touch (What?); strips clothes off if she thinks they have a spot. (Like many kids, especially if they're unhappy.) Wants order and perfection in play, toys, stories. (Doesn't everyone?)

Nov. 11, 2008: Talking to a "bird named 34" on her hand. (i.e., is a child) Drawing on her clothes and body with permanent marker. (i.e., is a child) Screaming at school and in the waiting room. (i.e., objects to being manipulated, pushed around and generally disrespected) )

Jan. 7, 2009: Patient is psychotic; talking to rats naming them the days of the week . . . I believe it would be in the best interests of January and her family to have her placed in residential treatment.

If naming rats after the days of the week counts as evidence of psychosis in a child called January, what do we call adults who name their daughter 'January'? (And their son 'Bodhi'?) - On Edit: And how will we describe a physician who calls a six-year-old child psychotic?

Her parents named her January because they loved the sound of it.

Maybe their next kid will be called Epiglottis, or HappyMeal, or Brumaire. Or Ritalin, why not. It's a free world.

[justdrew]

MacCruiskeen
well said

[happenstance]

In 1963, Dr. Gary Fisher wrote a paper titled:

Interim report on Research project:
An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of
LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized
Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children


I wish her parents would read that report and listen to this recorded interview [link below] with Fisher. They were yielding some startling, amazing results with kids who were considered "gone."

http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=697

[Penguin]

Medicine is social or it is nothing. Reich knew that and that's why he died in jail. Laing knew it too and that's why he drank himself to death. Meanwhile, January's know-nothing psychiatrists are alive and well and at the top of their fucking game. They can be sure they won't run out of lucrative work any time soon. On the contrary: the "financial crisis" will keep them busier, and wealthier, than they've ever been before. Every cloud...

Yes...

happenstance:
That whole area of research, with a few hundred entheogens have been mostly taboo-ed, along with the accompanying mystical / altered state experiences - after all, hallucinations must be bad for you. Even thou we dont understand them, or the substances, or the brain, same of course being the case with the mental (societal?) illnesses, or the drugs used to treat those.

Vines of the soul.

[MacCruiskeen]

Applause back, drew. You and several others make some very good points throughout the thread. And it's all stuff that should be obvious to anyone with two eyes, two ears, and any memory at all of their own childhood.

A healthy child is a wild animal. (Not "like a wild animal".) Coop it up in a flat with people who don't much like it, stuff it with junk, employ "the usual disciplinary measures", and that child is bound to become "dysfunctional", probably "hyperactive" and maybe even "schizophrenic".

The big words, the big words... That's what we have to offer children these days, rather than some elementary care and attention, and some respect for their actual needs, wishes and lives. The big words are what demonstrate our maturity, along with the ability to sit still forever.

[Penguin]

along with the ability to sit still forever.

Uhh.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'd also be curious to know how much TV that child watches. Both at home and in the jail.