Father Of Girl With Schizophrenia Admits Hitting, Starving Girl
I’m sure many of you read a Los Angeles Times article last week on a 6-year-old girl who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and her parents’ struggles to cope with her. The girl’s name is January and she’s called Jani. Schizophrenia is extremely rare in young children and while I know many readers are dubious of the diagnosis, it’s difficult to tease out of the story itself what’s going on. Whatever she may or may not have, it’s clear that Jani’s case is very complicated and extreme in just about every way possible. It’s also clear that her parents have been pushed to their own personal edges.
Now adding to this complexity is that Jani’s father is writing a blog about his daughter and admits on it that both he and his wife have at times hit Jani and starved her. Here’s what he writes:
“Jani would fly into rages that would last 5-15 minutes. During this time, when we tried to discipline her, she would hit us, scratch us, bite us, and kick us. People thought we were raising a brat. Even our own families thought this. We were so worried about trying to explain ourselves that we didn’t notice at first that Jani’s eyes changed when she went into this rages. We didn’t put it together that a five year does not swing from ‘I love you, Daddy’ to ‘I want you to die!’ in seconds. Teenagers do that, not five year olds. Five year olds are still desperate for parental approval.
“Yes, kids have temper tantrums. But Jani would dig her nails into my skin and pull…leaving a bloody track down my arm or face. She would grin while she did this, a demonic grin that would have scared me had I had time to really think about it. But I didn’t.
“We tried everything. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Hitting her back (I won’t tell you how many people told us that all she needed was a good beating). We took all her toys away. We gave her toys away. We tried starving her. We did EVERYTHING we could to try and break her. Nothing worked.
“Even then, it did not occur to us that our daughter was mentally ill. Now I wonder who was really delusional. Susan and I held fast to our belief that Jani was just a misunderstood genius.
“Then Bodhi was born.
“The violence became so bad that at times Susan and I both lost it and hit Jani as hard as we could. We hit in impotent rage.”
That admission is striking for several reasons, aside from its brutal honesty: I don’t think I’ve read anything like it on a blog before; it makes me wonder if some of the parents’ behavior might not be contributing to Jani’s problems; and, there’s utterly no mention of it in the LAT story.
While I don’t know when the father wrote the above lines, the blog goes back to early February 2009 and I assume the reporter–who globally wrote a good piece about something few reporters would touch, likely doing the reporting in May and June–had been through the blog and had run across the admissions of hitting and starving. I’m at a complete loss to explain why that information wouldn’t make its way into the story. Perhaps there is a good reason for the omission, but since the father had admitted it publicly I cannot think of what it might be.
While I don’t read the hitting/starvation admissions as implying routine beatings or regular starvation, there is no question that schizophrenia and psychosis can certainly be spurred on and deepened as a result of physical abuse and that often people with schizophrenia are the victims of abuse. I know there were a lot of passionate comments on the LAT article when I posted on it last week and that a lot of people blamed the parents for Jani’s condition, but in truth I still don’t know what to make of it all. My antennae are certainly up, however, as I’d like to see this child do well and escape a lifetime of antipsychotics and the like. I’d like to see the parents do well too.
Is Something Not Quite Right With Stan found the admission first and has plenty to say. Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher picked up on the admission ahead of me and offers her thoughts here. The Different Thoughts blog sees in the initial story the usual line of NAMI parent pathos. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I thought I’d pass it along.
So what do you all think?
Related posts:
Posted in Furious Seasons