Monday, April 29, 2013

Far From the Tree: continued

This post is dedicated to but one chapter. One heavy, heavy, chapter.

"More than any other parents coping with exceptional children, women with rape-conceived children are trying to quell the darkness within themselves in order to give their progeny light." These stories offer a perspective on humanity few other tales of life can in exhibiting both the light and the dark in equal intensity.

"The children described in the rest of this book sustain injuries; these children, through no fault of their own, are injuries."

As most of you know, I am a scholar of psychology. Particularly, I am interested in rape and other forms of sexual assault. My research is aimed at preventing these acts, my clinical work towards treating women (and sometimes men) who have suffered, and my teaching is about a mix of the above with a few other things thrown in. So, I talk about rape a lot. Sometimes the tone I use offends people because, let's face it, I get habituated. It's not that I don't care it's that it doesn't hold the taboo for me anymore and I perhaps speak with less hesitation than the normal person and this comes off as callous. But I do care, most deeply. For me this is the perfect little intersection of issues I care about: clinical psychology and women's rights.

Given this background I was very intellectually excited to read the chapter on Rape in Far From the Tree. Rarely do popular non-fiction books cover this topic in a depth that appeals to me. And I don't know as much about women who have had children because of rape, this is a topic on which there is very little information. Little did I know how difficult it would be to read this chapter!

In many ways, I had to force myself to read this chapter. It stabbed little holes in my skin emotionally while I read it. This surprised me a bit, I thought since I am so familiar with this topic it wouldn't get to me much. I was wrong I think, for two main reasons. One reason is I underestimated how much I do care about psychotherapy treatment ( I do more research than treatment generally) from a justice perspective. One thing that really tore me up reading this was reading about all the crappy therapists these poor women had been too. OH MY LORD. I cannot fully describe my anger while reading these passages. Because I DO know how to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. Most people with posttraumatic stress disorder deal with it untreated for an average of TWELVE YEARS before seeking help. And then, these poor women fell onto these bozo therapists? Perhaps they were somewhat helpful but it statistically very unlikely they "cured" them or alleviated their symptoms as significantly as they could have if they followed empirically supported treatment protocols. LIKE I WOULD. So this really got to me, knowing how many women (people) are out there who are not getting the treatment they deserve.

It was also just overwhelmingly sad to read these stories of many of these women, for whom having a child because of rape was just another injustice. We tend to think of having a child because of rape as "an exception" and something so horrible as to cause us to grant exceptions to our norms (e.g., abortion laws). Yet, for many of the women described in this chapter it was just another awful thing. For some though, it was the final injustice that propelled them towards a different way of living, living with love for their child. It's truly amazing the way different mothers dealt with this circumstance, though it seems a little silly to call a child a circumstance. I found the mothers in the US just as moving as the mothers in Rwanda, though their horrors seemed slightly different, when things are that horrible is there a point to making gradations in the horror? Seems unnecessary to me.

Still a great book. A great chapter too, though I don't think I will assign it in my Abnormal Psychology class like I planned, too much. As much as reading about trauma may make one wonder about the status of the world it actually usually makes me a bit hopeful. If we can live through all that we can do about anything. But we need to work out the details.


Sunday, April 28, 2013

FAMILY: A Monster Calls

At seven past midnight, a monster calls. But this isn't the monster that Conor has been expecting, this monster isn't the one from his nightmares, so what does it want?
A Monster Calls is the heart-wrenching story of a boy who is trying to deal with the reality of his mother's sickness. Every night he wakes up from a nightmare to a monster knocking on his window. The reader follows Conor as he navigates school, where he has become an outcast due to his "special circumstance;" his family, a sick mother and an insufferable grandmother; and his nightmares, which force Conor to confront his deepest fears--the truth.
Told alongside stunning illustrations, the story unfolds before the reader page by page, where the monster outside Conor's window shows him not everything is black and white, and where finally the reader confronts Conor's nightmare alongside him. 
Family: With his mother dying, Conor is (rightfully) resistant to anyone--even family--coming into his life as his new caretaker. It's heartbreaking to see his grandmother and absent father try to explain to him what's happening with his mother and see him shut down. The reader understands, as well as he does, he knows exactly what's going on--he just doesn't want to admit it. Family is at the core of this story, even though truth, love, and grief all play an important part.

Goodreads rating: 4 Stars
Recommendation: Read it! The only reason why I didnt give it 5 Stars because it didn't make me cry nearly as much as other books by Patrick Ness..

Friday, April 26, 2013

"Family": Far From the Tree continued

Autism, Schizophrenia, Disability, Prodigies

I continue to be pretty obsessed with this very long book. I have already brainstormed how to assign chapters from this book in future Psychology classes I might teach. Note: I don't teach them yet, that's just how badly I would like to teach anything where I can assign chapters from this book. It's that good guys.

Autism:
Of the identities covered thus far in this book autism presented some of the most complex conundrums. Many with severe autism are totally without language - at least language that we can understand. There is some evidence that many with autism do have the capacity for language but is is near impossible to express. This leads me to a meta-science question, how would we know if someone with severe autism has the capacity for language? How would we know? Previous chapters in this book have stressed how much social and verbal communication is vital to humans as a species, as established with deaf children, if not allowed to develop communication skills their intellectual development is delayed. Certainly a similar process likely occurs for those with severe autism but, then again, maybe their abilities are SO different that we would be unable to ascertain this. It's almost like if we tried to communicate with an alien species, how would we know what their capacity for language is? How would we know how to communicate? It is a bit of a stretch to compare kids with autism to aliens but the depth of the social disconnect for some individuals is very intense.

This chapter also illustrated I think how vastly difficult it is to parent children with autism. That's pretty obvious yes, but autistic children often do not express affection while simultaneously demanding huge amounts of resources. I cannot imagine the pain of these parents who quit jobs, spend their life savings, to see improvements to facilitate basic skills for their children like feeding themselves and then their kids can't show their love or appreciation. May not even treat their parent much differently from a stranger or a foreign object in extreme cases. Wow.

Schizophrenia.
Another "meta" question ran throughout this chapter for me regarding forcing psychiatric patients to take their medication. Clearly, many of these individuals suffer psychotic symptoms at a level that incapacitates them. But how do we know? How do we know when someone's mind is so plagued that they cannot make an informed decision about their treatment? We uphold individual rights (or say we do) at a high level in our culture, yet is it an unfair burden for those with schizophrenia? One parent quoted in this book, whose son was severely affected and homeless, describing allowing his son to go off and stay off his medication as slow suicide. And the connection between the closing of psychiatric institutions and rise in homeless populations is pretty well documented. So functionally, is being homeless better than being forced to take medication? Is the ideal principal one we can really uphold? I don't know.

Disability
This chapter was very similar in some ways to the autism chapter in that often the goal of these parents is not to obtain "normal" functioning - they don't ever expect their kids to be average - but basic self care and comfort. One of the controversies in this chapter was about whether to artificially stop puberty for severely disabled children (especially girls). I think this is a very intriguing and intense debate and one that I really can't take a side on. I find the idea repulsive at the idea level; however, I when I think practically about these families and how providing basic physical comfort can be such a challenge then I think that I can't have much of an opinion. The challenges these families based are so idiosyncratic, unique to the family, good lord there is no way I could say what they should do. I thought of a family I know who did take this option, because knowing that their daughter had the intellectual abilities of a much younger girl and had no verbal abilities, how would she feel when she began to bleed and have cramps? They presumed, I think correctly, she would be freaked out, uncomfortable, and unable to understand the experience. But at the same time, considering she could be a 20 year old with the body of a 12 year old seems repugnant, yet, the lifespan of these children is so short, is that really an important issue? I don't know.

Prodigies
A prodigy, for this book, was any child who could perform an ability at the level of an adult. This chapter focused on musical prodigies particularly. What was particularly interesting to me about prodigies is how much being a 'prodigy' requires facilitation from their adults in their lives. You can't be a piano prodigy if your parents never had one in the house and weren't ok with you practicing (at a minimum) five hours a day. And oftentimes, the children were acting out the fantasies of their parents, "living vicariously" seemed a common occurrence. I think that is likely because in very few cases were the parents themselves prodigies so they would have no understanding of the experience. Secondly, children reflect the wants and expectations of their parents. And there is really no way to separate that out once the kid has picked up on it - so again, how could we know what those kids really want? And just because they want it doesn't mean it is good for them. Kids want to eat candy all the time but we sure don't let them. It is a little facetious to compare to the two but there is lots of evidence that prodigies are often lacking in lots of skills, especially skills, because of the service to their talent. The complete focus or obsession on their talent is inevitably to the detriment of something else. So what things are worth sacrificing? I'm not sure the talents are inevitably worth it as parents often assume.

I have some personal perspective on this. I read at the college level when I was in the fifth grade and was in gifted education throughout most of grade school and on. Yet my education was still quite lacking, I can count on one hand the number of times I had homework in high school. And certainly in some ways I have regretted not having more educational experiences pre-college, mostly because I think I could have gotten a lot more of college paid for. However, I have still been very successful academically and often find I am more well rounded in my interests, in my social and personal life generally, than many of my PhD program peers. And for that I am very grateful as I do regularly though not often feel socially isolated because of my talents, I can't imagine how much more that would be had I been able to "exploit" them earlier and with abandon.