Live Blogging Oprah On 7-Year-Old With Schizophrenia
Thanks to all of you who made me aware that the Oprah Winfrey Show was doing a program today on Jani Schofield, a 7-year-old girl in South California who’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is extremely rare in children so young. Globally, the program wasn’t bad, but it sure was tough watching a cute kid wrestle with all that she’s got to address. You see clips and whatnot from the show here.
I know it caused a lot of controversy on this site back in July when I noted that Jani’s father had written on his blog that he and his wife had both hit and, at times, starved their child in an attempt to control her behavior. The father has since excised that admission from his site and, curiously, Oprah doesn’t ask him or Jani’s mother about it. I know Oprah’s staff was scouring the Net for information on Jani a couple of months ago, so it strikes me as odd that they didn’t confront the parents at all. Just saying.
The show opens with Oprah saying the parents are “going to ends of earth to keep both of their children safe and alive.”
Lots of talk about Jani’s drawings of rats and cats, the evil ones who tell her to hurt people.
Says Dad, “All the hallucinations come back….She had to be stimulated constantly.”
Jani says, “I take Clozi cuz of the rats.” That’s a reference to Clozaril, which she takes at 200 mgs. a day plus 600 mgs. of Lithiium.
Jani’s raised separately from her baby brother and they live in two different apartments. “She would attack him….” No cleaning supplies, knives, etc. in Jani’s apartment.
The goal, says Dad, is to “give her as many happy moments as we can.”
“Jani can’t entertain herself.”
Says Dad, “We have to make her hallucinations happy.”
Ask Oprah, “How do you discipline her?” “Are you afraid of her?”
Mom says she was “getting hit constantly with shoes.”
We see Jani in a park. She hits another kid and Mom has to take her home.
Parents say there are “basically no services at all.” And that the State of California wanted to send her out of state to a specialized psychiatric facility.
Says Dad, “We want her in our lives. We love her.”
We then meet another young girl, Becca, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It’s a play date for her and Jani.
LA Times reporter Shari Roan appears on the show. “She’s better on the Clozaril.”
Dad admits he became so desperate at one point that he swallowed half his anti-depressants and then backed out of his suicide attempt.
At the end, the parents deliver a plea for some kind of specialized day school for children like Jani.
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