Jani's at the mercy of her mind

[lightningBugout]

Forgive me but I'm not clear on how flaming Mac is of any value whatsoever. A few pages back before that trend, this was one of the most interesting threads I've seen on RI. Or at least in a while that is.

[MacCruiskeen]

Thanks, LB.

To everyone else: My simple challenge on the last page still stands. I'll look forward to seeing whether anyone who does respond to it responds to it honestly and seriously, because it's at the core of the whole argument.

Anyway, I'm off out of here for tonight. It's very late, I'm not doing this for entertainment, and I'm sick of the incessant trolling and flaming.

Goodnight.

[Penguin]

But there are a lot of people who meet the profile criteria for being serial killers, who aren't. (Gosh, 25% of the men I know anyway)

Myself included.
And so far, I havent killed anything besides insects. Dont even much like the idea. But I can see how it could go down, neverthless.

Dont worry Mac, sleep well. I still like you.

[agitprop]

1.That January Schofield "has schizophrenia" (sic).

2. That January Schofield "had schizophrenia" (sic) even before being abused, neglected, and heavily dosed on psychoactive drugs.

These are the assertions of the quacks and the parents. These are the primary assertions, the truth of which is widely accepted (like the government's account of 9/11), and on these assertions they are now basing their "treatment" (sic) of a helpless child. They are also assertions which clearly require some serious verifiable evidence to support them -- if science and reason count for anything at all.

(Sidenote: Remember that the parents had to spend a lot of time and effort talking the reluctant quacks into that diagnosis, and not for no reason.)

So here's the challenge, yet again:

Where is the evidence to support those claims? Post it if you have any, any at all, even the slightest little bit.

Because very obviously, the burden of proof is on them, and now on you too.

Thank you.

As a person with grave reservations about the state of psychiatric treatment in the developed world, it pains me to be taken to task by someone who thinks vociferous ranting replaces calm logic.

I don't know about Nordic, but I certainly never indicated I thought Jani ever had schizophrenia. Read my first or second post. It appears she has a serious and extreme psychosis of some sort, but I question whether it's schizophrenia, as she seems to lack a lot of the negative symptoms, and ongoing extreme insomnia, as far as I can recall, certainly isn't a dominant symptom of schizophrenia. I would say, in Jani's case insomnia is THE dominant symptom and the area that deserves closest scrutiny.

If I was her shrink, I'd get her into a safe setting, away from her parents, get her off all meds, try alternative treatments for a time and see how she responded.

I think that human psychology has a spiritual component as well as a purely organic component. This should be taken into account as well.

[MacCruiskeen]

So no one has posted any verifiable evidence whatsoever that January Schofield either "has" or ever has "had" "schizophrenia" (sic), whatever that's supposed to be.

Conclusion: January Schofield does not "have" (sic) "schizophrenia" (sic).

Yet this belated and shamefaced quack diagnosis of a non-existent "disease" forms the entire basis for her current medical (mis-)treatment -- which even her father tells us may well kill her.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Moving on, then:

It appears she has a serious and extreme psychosis of some sort

Please post any evidence you have that this allegedly apparent "psychosis" (sic) preceded the heavily-documented chronic mistreatment by her parents, and the administration of massive doses of mind-altering drugs by the psychiatrists.

Thank you.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next point:

I would say, in Jani's case insomnia is THE dominant symptom and the area that deserves closest scrutiny.

I would say, in Jani's case the heavily-documented severe abuse & neglect by her desperate domineering father and her frightened mother is the area that deserves closest scrutiny. This might have had something to do with any unusual difficulties the child may perhaps have had in getting to sleep or staying asleep.

NB: All we have so far -- or at least, all I've seen so far -- is the father's assertion that January barely slept at all. (If I've missed something, please let me know.) But considering how sane and trustworthy his other assertions have been, I'd suggest we take that assertion of almost complete sleeplessness with an enormous pinch of salt, unless and until some reliable evidence of this extremely unusual condition is presented to us.

Because:

1. As every new parent knows, babies' sleep patterns are very different from adults'; which is why those new parents often look pale and drained from sleeplessness, especially in the early months. ("We were up half the night with the baby." - That's one of the most frequently-heard sentences in the English language.)

2. Michael Schofield -- who claims to be "the voice" of both his wife and his daughter -- does not strike me as a person capable of much empathy with children, or of much insight into his own words, deeds and motivations. (Does he strike anyone as such?)

3. Michael Schofield -- who claims to be "the voice" of both his wife and his daughter -- does not strike me as a sane or trustworthy witness. (Does he strike anyone as such?)

4. It seems to me, prima facie, deeply implausible that the Schofields regularly spent literally 14 hours a day in toyshops, malls and other "stimulating" (sic) environments with baby January. (Was she in a pram or a sling or a buggy or what? And was neither of the parents working, even back then?)

Yet this is what they claim. Has anyone else -- a doctor, a neighbour, a shop assistant, a mall security guard, anyone -- ever confirmed that claim?

---------

IF Michael Schofield is actually telling the truth, then:

a) Precisely what was baby January doing during these almost-daily 14-hour walkabouts? Sleeping, maybe? - at least some of the time?

b) Weren't they themselves completely exhausted by the time they arrived back from these almost-daily odysseys? And if the baby woke up just as they got home -- presumably they were dying for some peace and quiet by that time, if not for some actual sleep -- how would they have been likely to react? How did they react?

c) As compared2what pointed out, about ten pages back: If the Schofields really spent such extreme amounts of time in such "stimulating environments" with a tiny baby, then it demonstrates a truly extreme cluelessness about a baby's needs. (I'm paraphrasing from memory; I believe c2w used the word "torture".)

d) Prolonged abuse or neglect by parents who can't cope with a baby is very likely to disturb that baby's sleep patterns.

e) If January Schofield really hardly slept at all, then how on earth did she manage to score 146 on an IQ test? Why is she so evidently lively, robust, strong, energetic, hungry for knowledge and deeply interested in the world?

We're left with a choice:

EITHER

1. Physically and mentally, January Schofield is an extraordinarily anomalous human being, an almost unique freak of nature -- and born that way.

OR

2. Michael Schofield is exaggerating, misinterpreting, misremembering, deceiving himself, repressing and rationalising his own inability to engage with a child's mind, and/or just plain lying.

If anyone has any serious verifiable evidence for Option 1, please post it.

[MacCruiskeen]

He has just issued yet another absolutely insane blogpost.

Please read the whole thing, if you can bear to. If I were to comment on everything that's grotesquely wrong in it, the following text would be twice as long as it is, and almost entirely in red:

[..] Is Jani’s diet poor? Yes. Is she deficient in niacin and vitamin B and all the other supposed cures for psychosis? Absolutely. Is there anything I can do about it? No. Psychosis extends to all aspects of Jani’s life, including food. You want her to take niacin or vitamin B? Good luck. One of the things that I don’t think everybody realizes except for those who have lived through it is that although Jani is only six, Susan and I have very little control over her. We have only as much control as the psychosis will let us have. Jani’s diet is limited to the number of foods you can count on one hand: mac n’cheese, cheese pizza (but only if she can’t see the sauce-yet if you order it without sauce she won’t eat it either), rice, and grilled cheese. That’s it. She will not eat meat (never has-Susan and I are not vegetarians). She will not eat meat because she loves animals, yet she will also sometimes kick a dog if she thinks it has wronged her in some fashion (Jani attributes human motives to animals). She will not eat salad or veggies. Fruit, sometimes.

When I was a kid, my dad would say “You’ll eat what’s in front of you” when I said I wanted something else. Sometimes I called his bluff and ended up going to bed without dinner. And so eventually, no matter how much I hated the food, I eventually ate. Jani doesn’t do this. If you don’t give Jani the food she wants, she will starve herself, which only makes her behavior worse. We’ve tried. Jani went two whole days without eating before Susan forced me to give in and give Jani what she wanted. She does not eat in the hospital. So if we don’t bring her the food that she likes, she just won’t eat.

You have to remember that many of your suggestions involve logic and rationality, because you are rational. But schizophrenics are irrational. And for them the mind is more powerful than hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep. There is no way to break Jani. We tried for six years. It can’t be done. Even if you break one thing, another will rise to take its place. We bribe Jani with points she can trade in for toys, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I have watched her desire for a toy fight against the psychosis. I saw this once when I offered her double daily points to show a toy to a boy. She did it, but you would have thought I was killing her. She gave him the toy, but then broke down and raged and hit because her hallucinations were punishing her. [No, YOU are punishing her, she knows that and she's too scared to say it.] She kept screaming she was a “bad girl,” because that is what she was hearing in her head. [Because that is what you are incessantly teaching her, you poor blind clueless self-obsessed manipulative fucking bastard.] She never heard, could not hear, our praise [This is unbearable.] for having shared the toy and beaten her illness [SIC] , even if only for a moment. It didn’t matter. She hit me GOOD FOR HER.], she hit herself [/b][the poor child], she ripped rose blooms off a plant and ate them. “They” really made her pay for that one. It wasn’t until she announced that she could share the toy but she could not allow this boy to be first in line that she calmed down. Because she had given the hallucinations what they wanted. She had been forced through one of her delusions [She is NOT delusive. YOU are.] but erected another seconds later.

Jani’s world is a world of rules that make sense to nobody but herself. [This is completely ass-backwards and utterly beyond satire. It is a world of arbitrary, stupid and sadistic rules that make no sense to anybody but YOU.]

A diseased limb can be cut off. Cancer can be cut out. The only way to free Jani is to cut off her head. The center of everything is diseased. [...]

http://www.januaryfirst.org/www.january ... n_You.html

Sic.

January Schofield is a perfectly normal child in a state of torment and desperation, and Michael Schofield is one of the worst, most incompetent, and most abusive parents I have ever heard of.

But that's an understatement. He's murdering his child slowly, he's live-blogging it, he's praising himself incessantly for it, and worst of all, he's becoming a national hero because of it -- on the TV, in the papers and now on the radio. No one is stopping him. The quacks are assisting him. And his comments box is filling up with tearful expressions of solidarity, as well as breathless praise from several healthcare professionals.

This is the kind of parent America wants.

He's killing her. - I don't know what to say any more.

[chiggerbit]

I'm not going to go back through the thread to check, but I don't think anybody has said, "Oh, sure, see, she's schizophrenic", or "Oh, it just HAS to be schizophrenia, because the doctor said so". As a matter of fact, what I've seen is mostly doubt as to the accuracy of the diagnosis. So why the fuck do you expect that now that you demand that they do so, anyone is going to come in and heed your demands to argue for something they don't believe? As for myself, I was kind of thinking out loud, following a train of thought with my posts, had a couple of other things I was going to add, but your hysterics put me totally off. Go for it dude, it's your thread now.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'm not going to go back through the thread to check, but...

Which is why what you say is a) plain wrong and b) completely misses the point. Because you won't even make that minimal effort, but you still feel compelled to stick your oar in.

Chiggerbit: With all due respect, and considering the actual context (i.e., live-blogged child-murder):

Get out of my face, stop wasting my time with your increasingly stupid and lazy non-contributions, and climb right back onto that comfy fence of yours. Millions of proud Americans are already sitting there, to keep you company.

Back on-topic.

[lupercal]

January Schofield is a perfectly normal child in a state of torment and desperation, and Michael Schofield is one of the worst, most incompetent, and most abusive parents I have ever heard of.

For what it's worth, having skimmed just a little of this, I'm with you. It sounds like manque-CC instructor Schofield has found the perfect theme for the endless English B essay that is his life.

[MacCruiskeen]

For what it's worth, having skimmed just a little of this, I'm with you. It sounds like manque-CC instructor Schofield has found the perfect theme for the endless English B essay that is his life.

True. But it lurches from English essay to screenplay. The guy inhabits his own bad movie, entitled I Am Her Voice (or My Beautiful Mind). Can you hear the lush strings soundtrack? He can, all the time, and he claims he's not deluded.

And thanks, lupercal. I am becoming increasingly grateful for any sane responses to this insanity.

- Again: Does anyone know anyone who can stop this?

[Penguin]

Im inclined to agree as well, given the information available.
Having worked in child care, and some relatives who have worked with severely debilitated children, I know there are people who do not have a clue to what children are, nor a clue of what they themselves are.

Sometimes the parents can be sick, or sometimes they can epitomize the normal to such lengths that it really makes you beg the normalness of anything in our society, as here.

I once overheard a conversation in the metro...
Grandmom and grandmoms friend were taking care of a boy maybe 3 or 4. They talked among themselves about how wondrous it is that God has created kids so they know very young the difference between boys and girls, and boys know to play with cars, and cops and robbers, and girls play home etc.

I just had to butt in and say that it really isnt so, but that children are in an all out learning the game of society from the other people around him/her - mode from the moment theyre born, and its not really a matter of creation at that level.

[agitprop]

Im inclined to agree as well, given the information available.
Having worked in child care, and some relatives who have worked with severely debilitated children, I know there are people who do not have a clue to what children are, nor a clue of what they themselves are.

Sometimes the parents can be sick, or sometimes they can epitomize the normal to such lengths that it really makes you beg the normalness of anything in our society, as here.

I once overheard a conversation in the metro...
Grandmom and grandmoms friend were taking care of a boy maybe 3 or 4. They talked among themselves about how wondrous it is that God has created kids so they know very young the difference between boys and girls, and boys know to play with cars, and cops and robbers, and girls play home etc.

I just had to butt in and say that it really isnt so, but that children are in an all out learning the game of society from the other people around him/her - mode from the moment theyre born, and its not really a matter of creation at that level.

Interesting. I worked with kids in the 80's and saw kids actively being discouraged from pursuing games and activities that interested them, all to support the weak hypothesis that there were no basic differences between the sexes, that it's all nurture, not nature. Completely outlandish.

Little girls like playing with dolls and playing house, generally speaking. There are exceptions. (I preferred gender neutral activity when I was a kid, but I was a bit different.) Boys like trucks, cars, more action. They also hit each other over the head more often. Girls prefer to form "secret clubs" where they bar access to the uninvited. Both are forms of aggressive play, and repeated so often, in my experience of observation, it seems to be a basic sex difference.

[Penguin]

agitprop:

The differences start to show up at age 3-4, or 5 latest, before that all kids play pretty much with all kids, irregardless of sex, and have many shared games.

When kids go to school, 6-7, the gender roles are pretty much solidified into the basic forms, and we see a separation to girls and boys stuff.

Im not saying there are no basic differences (because there certainly are! Otherwise we would not have females and males), but the roles and the differences are not the same.

Also, physical violence is socially more acceptable for boys, hence they go for that, whereas physical violence for women is pretty much not allowed in the same way. "Boys are boys". Thats also social.

http://jezebel.com/5303008/in-chinese-m ... l-the-work

Many have described the Mosuo of southern China as one of the world's only matriarchal societies. But from what Ricardo Coler says in an interview with Der Spiegel, being a Mosuo woman isn't all that fun.

Sorry for slight OT maybe.

[nathan28]

For what it's worth, having skimmed just a little of this, I'm with you. It sounds like manque-CC instructor Schofield has found the perfect theme for the endless English B essay that is his life.

True. But it lurches from English essay to screenplay. The guy inhabits his own bad movie, entitled I Am Her Voice (or My Beautiful Mind). Can you hear the lush strings soundtrack? He can, all the time, and he claims he's not deluded.

And thanks, lupercal. I am becoming increasingly grateful for any sane responses to this insanity.

- Again: Does anyone know anyone who can stop this?

I have such a hard time believing that the information in that weblog is accurate. It seems like too much. I'm half-expecting it to be part of the they-who-shall-not-be-named saga.

I'm also willing to admit that it sounds like too much because the author sees his life as a narrative, as that endless English 301 theme. But the position I am in is one so quite literally mediated, and by someone who seems as schizophrenic as he claims his child is, that I simply have difficulty believing it's real.

I'm also willing to acknowledge that my disbelief is a socially-developed defense mechanism that would lead me to ignore any psychic vampire of the sort that character seems to be. Unfortunately, his primary victim is his daughter.

[agitprop]

agitprop:

The differences start to show up at age 3-4, or 5 latest, before that all kids play pretty much with all kids, irregardless of sex, and have many shared games.

When kids go to school, 6-7, the gender roles are pretty much solidified into the basic forms, and we see a separation to girls and boys stuff.

Im not saying there are no basic differences (because there certainly are! Otherwise we would not have females and males), but the roles and the differences are not the same.

Also, physical violence is socially more acceptable for boys, hence they go for that, whereas physical violence for women is pretty much not allowed in the same way. "Boys are boys". Thats also social.

http://jezebel.com/5303008/in-chinese-m ... l-the-work

Many have described the Mosuo of southern China as one of the world's only matriarchal societies. But from what Ricardo Coler says in an interview with Der Spiegel, being a Mosuo woman isn't all that fun.

Sorry for slight OT maybe.

From what I've seen, take it fwiw, female toddlers are verbally fluent sooner than toddler boys. By the time they are 3, they are showing a clear affinity for more verbal back and forth and play involving communication, more than most little boys. I think part of the reason that they are encouraged not to be physical, is simply, because they are more amenable to that message. The boys will be boys idea, where violence of all sorts is condoned, is in my view, a Neanderthal idea. I've had to take several parents aside and insist they intervene in their own children's interaction. It's simply bizarre the notion that you let an older boy bully smaller boys, with the idea that "they just have to learn to work this out themselves!" You wouldn't believe some of the bizarre rationalizations for violence, I've heard in my lifetime.

As far as the matriarchy and the patriarchy goes, same thing. Tradionally, the fist was the bottom line. As liberated as we think we are, and whether it's women or men behind the fist, threats of violence are a familial control and an international controlling mechanism. Middle class individuals, in the developed world, with stable family backgrounds, have been a bit distanced from this reality, though many can appreciate it on an intellectual level. They are about to find out, in the next few years, how little things have actually changed since medieval times.

This is one of the reasons I'm triggered by threads where people get their sentiments confused with actual proof. We are entering into an era where our govt. through all manner of psy-ops, could encourage all sorts of knee jerk reactions, to deflect attention away from the real locus of control. A person's intuition can and will be used against him/her. Rigorous intuition is a bottom line requirement when absolute proof evades us. I try to remain calm and consider all points of view, because I know if I don't, I can be played.