Jani's at the mercy of her mind

[OP ED]

unfortunately.

btw, there are also some glaring misstatements in the source article, but this may be mostly due to the fact that this girl's doctors are much too old to be as up to date as some of us who are students try to be.

wrt: PET

much cheaper for an insurance company than keeping someone at UCLA for months.
nowadays its cheaper than a week's worth of psychiatric drugs too. Of course, the problem might be that only certain types of doctors would even realize that "schizophrenia" doesn't really mean anything anymore and that behavioral diagnoses are so 19th century anyway and would therefore possess the audacity to suggest taking her condition seriously enough to try something other than the things which most clearly were already not working whatsoever. over specialization in this field is one of our chief problems by my reading.

sad.

....

on another note, after reading Bridge, Pengs, Romany etc's consideration of actual demonic activity, while i am generally inclined to shy away from this notion, i'd mention offhand that when i first read the article the phrase:

Magical 61-the-Cat

reminded me of something. which is to say it is clearly recognizable twilight language [my POV] which has a very personal meaning for me, and has been used in a sentence by my Ouija board before.

Given the girl's random number/name combinations there is an overwhelming chance this is mere coincidence.

but it paused me anyway.

[Searcher08]

This article was so sad.

I know a family who have a child with a rare chromosome disorder. MRI scans show no difference with a normal brain, yet the child exhibits autistic catatonia - she once lay down and didnt get up for three weeks and appeared to be in a trance. This was followed by periods of mania where she would go without sleep for many days or only be able to sleep briefly and while standing up.

Her presence during this time could be extraordinary - she would at times look upwards and her eyes and face would shine in joy and awe, as though looking at an angel.

Sometimes during the mania, she would be given really strong tranquilisers - they had almost no or a minimal effect. She would have long episodes of echolalia. Several kind, compassionate health service psychologists, eager to try the best and latest (non drug) approaches ended up in tears, saying they had never experienced such a failure around a patient. The limits of the model, eh?

The family are a very grounded, open minded and care for the child enormously, who is the centre for their lives. They have also used alternative approaches everything from a to z with virtually no effect. Acupuncture, Bach flower remedies, cranio sacral therapy, deep relaxation stories, energy healing,

It seems like the disorder is a rare, complex genetic condition, with little likelihood for funding, although it seems likely that many 'severely handicapped' children may actually have this condition, they just have not been tested for it.

[Penguin]

[
Thank you for having the ability to remind me that there is a true and monstrous problem in the real world that has nothing to do with the phantom projection of the board's collective narcissistic wounds about which most of the ranting and raving and cursing of the darkness on these subjects is generally directed. With a few assists from the PR specialists who ended up paying the most for the global rights to distribute the basic narrative parameters within which the ranting and raving ought to be channeled, as well as the guard-rails that keep it there.

Honey, the chances that her insurance was willing to pay for a PET scan, and that it was done competently, and that it was viewed insightfully by someone who knew what he or she was looking for and at are so remote as to be practically non-existent. And now that you mention it, I wonder how extensive even the really old-school pencil and paper (or crayon and computer, or stuffed animal, or house-person-tree or whatever) psychometric testing was. Because my guess would be: They barely did any. And that stuff's worthless unless you do so much of it that it turns the corner into: One of the most underutilized diagnostic instruments there is. Almost no insurance company's going to pay for as many labor hours as it would take to do a really thorough formal evaluation of even a mildly depressed child, let alone a frantically troubled and physically uncontrollable child. Plus, it kind of goes without saying, the value of every one of those tests, whether cutting edge or as-old-as-the-inkblot, that has any validity at all is very limited by itself. It really should be mandatory to do all of the ones that are non-invasive and have some chance of producing a meaningful result. At least then you'd have something more like a real starting place and less like the drugs-are-bad/good/the-best-or-only-option, children-are-wild-animals/need-structure, your-father-and-I-have-always-done-the-best-we-can free-for-all of passionately held theories, all of which have their pros and cons, but none of which are any more likely to be relevant to this child's well-being than any other.

Get Dr. House!

(besides, ranting and raving? huh...Who...Who!)

[Bridge It]

OP ED wrote:

January wrote:
Magical 61-the-Cat


reminded me of something. which is to say it is clearly recognizable twilight language [my POV] which has a very personal meaning for me, and has been used in a sentence by my Ouija board before.

Can you elaborate on that?

[MacCruiskeen]

i am curious about the "schizophrenia" diagnosis.

here in the united states this phrase can mean at least three distinct states. of these three states, only one of them, the organic, hole-in-the-brain sort of scizophrenia is only currently treatable [success ratio] with hardcore chemistry. the other two are, well, not really schizophrenia and can be treated in a number of ways, most of which i'd suggest are things the Psychiatrists i know would treat somewhat less aggressively, especially in a six yr old.

anyone know where we can look at the kid's PET scans?

[which should be a mandatory requisite for this sort of harsh treatment]

Thank you for having the ability to remind me that there is a true and monstrous problem in the real world that has nothing to do with the phantom projection of the board's collective narcissistic wounds about which most of the ranting and raving and cursing of the darkness on these subjects is generally directed. With a few assists from the PR specialists who ended up paying the most for the global rights to distribute the basic narrative parameters within which the ranting and raving ought to be channeled, as well as the guard-rails that keep it there.

Thank you for reminding me that I fully anticipated a cheap-shot response of precisely this kind (and from precisely that address, sadly), but that I thought better of replying to it before it had actually arrived. So I am simultaneously disappointed and not-disappointed, if you get my drift.

Having noted a certain amount of what you choose to call "ranting and raving and cursing" in response to this sorry tale of institutionalised Ritual Abuse, you then move straight on to a strikingly untentative diagnosis of what's behind such clearly pathological anger: "phantom projection of ... narcissistic wounds". So thank you, once again, for reminding me that words are weapons, and that classical (or is it Kleinian here) psychoanalysis also has some impressively Big Words in its vocabulary, aka its armoury.

The question is whether we have to take those words at face value or admit that they have any particular explanatory or diagnostic power. And we don't. We can in fact choose to say that what you're describing is a near-universal human capacity to empathise. And that has the advantage (for those at the receiving end) of not sounding nearly as dauntingly pathological as your tendentious polysyllabic diagnosis.

FWIW, and I can only speak for myself, I was never beaten by my parents, nor was I ever incarcerated or fed mind-altering substances against my will. So if I can empathise with that child, and I can, then it's not because I've been through any remotely comparable ordeal. It's because I'm a mammal of the human species. And empathising is a task literally anyone can master, a task very few people can avoid mastering. It's child's play, in fact, unless the children have that inborn capacity beaten or drugged or pathologically diagnosed out of them, perhaps with the assistance of Big Words.

Actually, the thing that struck me as the only really strong indicator of some kind of parental culpability was the part about how they would run around with her thirteen or fourteen hours a day when she was an infant. I've never known any new parents who were so stupid or so freaked out or so clueless or so self-centered, or so some-combination-of-the-forgoing that their inability to distinguish the boundaries between themselves and their newborns led them to spend several years torturing a colicky baby without even knowing it. But I've known a whole grip of them who came close enough that it's a whole lot easier to imagine than I wish it were. Or than should ever even be possible. But you know. It's not like you have to get a license to have a baby.

Hmm, yes, that might be worth looking into (after we've done the serious scientific research)... Torturing a baby, whether deliberately or inadvertently, might just possibly have the tendency to produce some decidedly unpleasant symptoms in the torturee, which we might (or might not) then choose to call evidence of "early-onset schizophrenia".

Placing the child in emotional Double Binds (you don't find this pathological behaviour, or likely to induce pathology) while being frightened of that child's imagination (ditto) might well also -- in my opinion, and not only in mine -- tend to exacerbate the child's suffering and cause her to make others suffer in their turn, including those who made her suffer in the first place.

We could respond to all this by incarcerating the child and drugging her, while pursuing our researches in neurology or microbiology or pharmacology or alchemy. Or theology. Or we might, conceivably at least, choose to respond otherwise, i.e. at least as intelligently as the lower primates, who manage to empathise with their offspring despite having no science at all, nor even any vocabulary.

Just a thought.

But you know, such thoughts are merely evidence of my pathological narcissism. Instead of taking such thoughts seriously as statements of the bleeding obvious (that torturing children fucks them up), we should ignore those naive narcissistic projections and take the path of non-pathological scientific reason. Let's be judicious: We need more research. By the time young January's in an adult jail or dead (whichever comes first), we might actually have come up with some nifty new polysyllabic vocabulary to go with our machines that say "bleep". So she won't have suffered in vain. Mature people realise that you can't stop progress; and besides, there are so many jobs at stake.

[barracuda]

That's a pretty intense tirade, Mac, against a post by c2w which in essense concurs with most of what you've said about your feelings on this article, that is,

- These non-parent parents have behaved with criminal irresponsibility (torturing a sleepless infant), and

- The psychiatric profession has lept to the use of drugs and incarceration rather than explore non-invasive diagnostic tools or therapies for the child.

[lightningBugout]

Calling people wounded narcissists is basically throwing steaks to angry lions. If they are narcissists you should be able to anticipate their anger and attempt at a spirited defense.

Doing so, if one assumes you can anticipate the response, suggests you are fueling the very fire you claim a distaste for.

[MacCruiskeen]

Barracuda, I quoted precisely the the bits I disagreed with, and I certainly didn't disagree with them for no reason. I also explained my reasons. See above.

Have to dash now. More later, maybe, about false dichotomies between the brain and the mind, and about reversed chains of cause and effect. (If something's demonstrably wrong with a child's brain and the child also behaves weirdly, then we still haven't necessarily established what's causing what.)

[lightningBugout]

Mac, despite the value you have added to this thread, I hope you will re-consider the attempt to frame questionable invasive psychiatry as an analogue of Ritual Abuse.

RA is not a hypothetical construct but a historic, cross-cultural and documented phenomena. Its explicit purpose is to traumatize a child in an organized and alienating fashion.

For all intents and purposes these parents, despite any shortcomings apparent in the narrative, mean well and love their child.

A child living through RA never gets a heartbreaking human interest story written about his experience (my psychic wounds are wailing, eh?).

Using RA as a rhetorical device (I do recognize you mean well here) threatens to re-ify the same old RA as nothing more than concept problem.

wrt: PET

I appreciate OE's point(s) but would point out that essentializing the authority of medical imaging further confounds the basic problem of prematurely assuming uni-directional cause and effect. PET scans are not at all definitive wrt bipolar/schizo disorders. I've read numerous positions in which imaging is argued to represent effect rather than cause. I know next to nothing about the specifics of this problem wrt serious mental illness but know that with ADD, PTSD and depression this has sometimes been convincingly proved to be the case.

[barracuda]

I read your response, Mac. Three times, actually; for the most part because I enjoyed your writing of it. But when I encounter a caustically effronted nine-paragraph satirical tirade personally decrying the generalized comment that the board's members display a collective narcissism, I can't help but read it as... somewhat narcissistic. But then again, I may just be projecting. It wouldn't be the first time.

[compared2what?]

i am curious about the "schizophrenia" diagnosis.

here in the united states this phrase can mean at least three distinct states. of these three states, only one of them, the organic, hole-in-the-brain sort of scizophrenia is only currently treatable [success ratio] with hardcore chemistry. the other two are, well, not really schizophrenia and can be treated in a number of ways, most of which i'd suggest are things the Psychiatrists i know would treat somewhat less aggressively, especially in a six yr old.

anyone know where we can look at the kid's PET scans?

[which should be a mandatory requisite for this sort of harsh treatment]

Thank you for having the ability to remind me that there is a true and monstrous problem in the real world that has nothing to do with the phantom projection of the board's collective narcissistic wounds about which most of the ranting and raving and cursing of the darkness on these subjects is generally directed. With a few assists from the PR specialists who ended up paying the most for the global rights to distribute the basic narrative parameters within which the ranting and raving ought to be channeled, as well as the guard-rails that keep it there.

Thank you for reminding me that I fully anticipated a cheap-shot response of precisely this kind (and from precisely that address, sadly), but that I thought better of replying to it before it had actually arrived. So I am simultaneously disappointed and not-disappointed, if you get my drift.

Having noted a certain amount of what you choose to call "ranting and raving and cursing" in response to this sorry tale of institutionalised Ritual Abuse, you then move straight on to a strikingly untentative diagnosis of what's behind such clearly pathological anger: "phantom projection of ... narcissistic wounds". So thank you, once again, for reminding me that words are weapons, and that classical (or is it Kleinian here) psychoanalysis also has some impressively Big Words in its vocabulary, aka its armoury.

The question is whether we have to take those words at face value or admit that they have any particular explanatory or diagnostic power. And we don't. We can in fact choose to say that what you're describing is a near-universal human capacity to empathise. And that has the advantage (for those at the receiving end) of not sounding nearly as dauntingly pathological as your tendentious polysyllabic diagnosis.

FWIW, and I can only speak for myself, I was never beaten by my parents, nor was I ever incarcerated or fed mind-altering substances against my will. So if I can empathise with that child, and I can, then it's not because I've been through any remotely comparable ordeal. It's because I'm a mammal of the human species. And empathising is a task literally anyone can master, a task very few people can avoid mastering. It's child's play, in fact, unless the children have that inborn capacity beaten or drugged or pathologically diagnosed out of them, perhaps with the assistance of Big Words.

Actually, the thing that struck me as the only really strong indicator of some kind of parental culpability was the part about how they would run around with her thirteen or fourteen hours a day when she was an infant. I've never known any new parents who were so stupid or so freaked out or so clueless or so self-centered, or so some-combination-of-the-forgoing that their inability to distinguish the boundaries between themselves and their newborns led them to spend several years torturing a colicky baby without even knowing it. But I've known a whole grip of them who came close enough that it's a whole lot easier to imagine than I wish it were. Or than should ever even be possible. But you know. It's not like you have to get a license to have a baby.

Hmm, yes, that might be worth looking into (after we've done the serious scientific research)... Torturing a baby, whether deliberately or inadvertently, might just possibly have the tendency to produce some decidedly unpleasant symptoms in the torturee, which we might (or might not) then choose to call evidence of "early-onset schizophrenia".

Placing the child in emotional Double Binds (you don't find this pathological behaviour, or likely to induce pathology) while being frightened of that child's imagination (ditto) might well also -- in my opinion, and not only in mine -- tend to exacerbate the child's suffering and cause her to make others suffer in their turn, including those who made her suffer in the first place.

We could respond to all this by incarcerating the child and drugging her, while pursuing our researches in neurology or microbiology or pharmacology or alchemy. Or theology. Or we might, conceivably at least, choose to respond otherwise, i.e. at least as intelligently as the lower primates, who manage to empathise with their offspring despite having no science at all, nor even any vocabulary.

Just a thought.

But you know, such thoughts are merely evidence of my pathological narcissism. Instead of taking such thoughts seriously as statements of the bleeding obvious (that torturing children fucks them up), we should ignore those naive narcissistic projections and take the path of non-pathological scientific reason. Let's be judicious: We need more research. By the time young January's in an adult jail or dead (whichever comes first), we might actually have come up with some nifty new polysyllabic vocabulary to go with our machines that say "bleep". So she won't have suffered in vain. Mature people realise that you can't stop progress; and besides, there are so many jobs at stake.

Mac, I wasn't thinking or writing about anything you said, nor was what I wrote directed at you. It's clear that your feelings are very strongly engaged by the story. And if someone held a gun to my head and told me that I had either select a single word to characterize the state of mind from which you were writing or die, I'd select "empathy," although I'd privately make a perfectionist little note indicating my obligation to make an effort to understand you and your posts with a little more multi-dimensionality than that. For one thing, your intellect as well as your emotions are also clearly strongly engaged.

So to whatever extent you were anticipating and felt you had received an unmerited indictment, please stop feeling it. I salute you. Okay?

Objectively speaking, insofar as it's possible, I make no judgment of your position at all beyond that it has its pros and cons. In fact, I read the whole thread and almost all of the contributors to it mostly as expressing (though in a few cases just as provoking**) valuable and (to me) informative insights about matters of interest to me that I couldn't come up with on my own.

In retrospect, I perceive that the beginning of my post reads much more severely than I intended it to, and much more harshly than anything I think or feel. I might equally have said: Thank you, OP ED, for dispelling the fog that lingers around my reading of these subjects owing to my own strong feelings and opinions, which ultimately say more about me than they do about anyone else. Although I'd maintain that they do also have some validity as a contribution to the body of opinion on the subjects to which they pertain. But that's a separate matter and not a very relevant one for present purposes, since nothing I said in the excessively harsh part of what I wrote shows any sign of it.

You're also reading the rest of what I wrote as if it were more authoritative, conclusive, high-handed and, in general, stuck on itself and itself alone than I intended. And I think, although I may be wrong, than the writing itself suggests I intended. Some of those tests have real, though limited validity. It can't hurt to do them or to include some consideration of the limited valid results in your contemplation of what obstacles the child may confront and what tools she may have for overcoming them, wrt straight-up everybody-has-them cognitive assets and deficits, and other stuff along those lines. You might not learn anything you couldn't already see, and you certainly wouldn't learn anything decisive about a six-year-old whose troubles are roughly as described in the article. But at a minimum you'd get some confirmation of what part of what you'd already seen was consistently reflected from a number of different angles. And you might (or might not) learn something that you hadn't seen or -- in some cases -- can't see simply from observation. So in addition to not hurting, it might help to do them. I don't worship them as oracular, or anything like that.

The thing about the parents was a subjective observation, and plainly presented as one. It's not regarded by me as being of any more or any less value than any other subjective observation on the thread, and I don't think I suggested otherwise. But just for the record: I intended it to be understood as a contribution to the larger pool of subjective observations and not as an entry into some kind of gladatorial competition among subjective observations. For one thing, because as far as I can subjectively see, the latter doesn't exist.

Okay? The first paragraph of what I wrote is, I now perceive and fully acknowledge, capable of being read as a lot more fucking insulting than anything I meant to convey, and probably incapable of being read as not in part a fucking insulting dismissal of everybody and everything that went before it other than OP ED's post and, by implication, the Splendor That Is Me.

I regret that. I agree with you that medicine is social. I couldn't agree with you more, in fact. Long ago, I wrote a great big essay one part of which was dedicated to savaging those who say otherwise. I used to be a lot more dedicated to savagery as a matter of conviction back in my youth than I am in the present. Neither part of which I regret. Such things are constantly evolving. Or so one hopes.

I won't pretend that I don't think this board is inclined to give too little thought to the issue of "mental health" (a phrase I despise, incidentally) outside of the more popular conventionally alternative extant frameworks that are readily available and close-to-hand. I do think that. On the other hand, I don't just think it about this board. I think it about practically the entire world. It's one of my hobby-horses, and I'm perfectly willing to cop to it as that.

However, I'm sincerely sorry to have caused you any personal distress by riding it. It's not in any way something I'd want to do, nor anything I'd in any way wittingly seek to do, to you or to anyone.

[lightningBugout]

if someone held a gun to my head and told me that I had either select a single word to characterize the state of mind from which you were writing or die, I'd select "empathy,"

This voice is what I truly admire about you c2w, something I first noticed when you chose to give Cowbell open, human counsel as the rest of us couldn't help but swarm together with real indignancy against his ignorance. Or, as you demonstrated, we actually could've helped it.

Thank you for it.

ps. I wholly agree with you that this board does not theorize or interrogate (to sound like a silly first-year grad student) mental illness with all the rigor that is elsewhere demonstrated on this board.

[Maddy]

There is so much about this issue that I can't even begin to pick apart one thing at a time, I want to rant about the entire thing. So, I'll pick on the parts that aren't as blatant as the medication-guinna-pig issue, or the issue of the diagnosis itself.

These are the quotes (in the story and video) that really bother me. I'm not sure exactly how they bother me. Perhaps in a metaphysical way, or perhaps they set something off that might remind me of a potential ritual abuse (not including the abuse that her psychiatrists are putting her through). This child might also be DID, though I'm certainly not a doctor to diagnose anyone. Just noting some similarities.

"Jani knows she is different from other children," she says. "She has a degree of insight..."

Jani knows she is sick and that people want to help her.

She's also bright -- her IQ is 146. *(And educated.)

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.

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.

"She would go into these rages where she would scream, hit, kick, scratch and bite. She could say, 'Mommy, I love you,' and seconds later switch into being really violent," Michael says.

she flaps her hands and rarely stops moving *(Possible side-effect of the Thorazine!)

She locks her fingers in front of her chest and flexes her wrists furiously, a tic that surfaces when she's anxious *(Dyskinesia from medications?)

"One day we figured out if we stepped outside she stopped screaming. We stepped back in, she'd start screaming. Went back in, she'd start screaming again." *(This is most certainly not schizophrenic behaviour. This rings to me a child who is afraid of something, or something in the environment disturbing her.)

"Her mind was a sponge."

"The first one to appear was 400 the cat"

"For every delusion the Thorazine killed, another would come to take it's place." *(Its very common in DID for medications to not work, or only to work some of the time.)

"Around her third birthday she became anti-social. She'd scream at people if they called her January."

"At five the violence began. ... The impact of her blows was like she was fighting for her life." *(This makes me think of PTSD abreactions.)

"It slowly became obvious that she was disassociating from those violent moments, and really didn't remember them. She knew that she'd done something wrong but she didn't know what."

"She was five years old, and he [her son] was born, and she was running around the hospital going nuts, before any medication. I grabbed her, I just grabbed her and put her on my lap, and she turned to somebody who was not there and said, 'Woo! She's not pregnant any more!' in that kind of voice, and it kind of freaked me out. I had never heard her talk like that. I'd never heard her talk specifically to someone else." *(This creeped me out, the way she described it. In a "Jody the Pig" kind of way.)

Then of course the names she's using. I can't put a finger on that, exactly, either. It just hits me in a cross between an occult way, and/or an actual medical/scientific way. I can't really describe it.

Googled various forms of the names. Oddly came across this poem by Emily Dickinson several times, Googling "Emily 54":

IF I SHOULD DIE

by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

If I should die,
And you should live,
And time should gurgle on,
And morn should beam,
And noon should burn,
As it has usual done;
If birds should build as early,
And bees as bustling go,--
One might depart at option
From enterprise below!
'Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand
When we with daisies lie,
That commerce will continue,
And trades as briskly fly.
It make the parting tranquil
And keeps the soul serene,
That gentlemen so sprightly
Conduct the pleasing scene!

/mental regurgitation

[lightningBugout]

Most offensive comment on this story found via Google @ Hipinion (Urban Dictionary says "music forum with eclectic crowd of pasty losers and alcholics.")

"This is a reality show I would watch."

Most defensibly offensive one:

"did they try unnaming her january?"

ps Why has noone pointed out that the title of this thread sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song title circa The River? Or maybe just a line in one.

[Perelandra]

I didn't watch the video until now and found it terribly sad. I don't find anything unusual in her past behaviors except the intensity of them. FWIW, I have a niece who resembles this case, only less intense. As an infant, she basically screamed until she started walking around 6-7 months (yes, we figure she just wanted mobility). She's always been challenging, very intelligent, needs lots of physical activity, goes on little sleep. Now she's nearing puberty and is having problems with anxiety and other issues. Luckily, my family doesn't consider her mentally ill.

The fact that this girl has had the millstone of being "different", "sick" (in the head), and "schizophrenic" drilled into her by everyone is appalling to me.

While it's true that her development hasn't been normal, I don't agree with her present diagnosis. That's not very rigorous, but it's my intuition.