Reddit reviews January First: A Child's Descent into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her

Books About Mental Illness:

• January First, nonfiction about childhood schizophrenia from the father's perspective
  
• Speak, about a high school freshman who develops selective mutism in order to deal with trauma
  
• Wintergirls, about eating disorders and a girl who keeps seeing her dead best friend
  
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, about a freshman with older party animal friends and PTSD
  
• Slaughterhouse Five, where the main character develops PTSD after being involved in the bombing of Dresden, but thinks he's become unstuck in time, abducted by aliens, etc.
  
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about an autistic teenager who tries to solve a mystery with his own brand of logic

Like you'd hear your mother calling you for dinner "external." It's that real to them.

Read this book

Not fiction, but January First is a memoir about dealing with a child's schizophrenia diagnosis.

I'm seeing Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, January First: A Child's Descent into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her, Descent into Madness: A Personal Look into Schizophrenia, and The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. All of those are about schizophrenia, none of them are textbooks or as old as you describe.

Not every older book is possible to find with google. It's possible that she has the title exactly right, and it's just so obscure that nobody is talking about it online.

Inter-Library Loan is a great way to get ahold of rare books. If you have enough information, you can give that information to the library, and they'll check with other libraries until they find one that has the book. Then that library mails the book to your library. It can cost some money, but sometimes it's the only way to find some rare books.

This might help you?

This is not a normal answer to this question, but I think this book is extremely revealing about the pain, confusion, and uncertainty of being a loved-one to a person with Schizophrenia. It's called January First and it's written by the parent of a girl who was born with psychotic symptoms consistent with schizophrenia. It's a rare situation and certainly extreme, but the experiences the family goes through are simultaneously very personal and applicable to others.

There's also a documentary for those who are curious.

I like your post, so Imma DA (devil's advocate) right here: so, like, how do we blame Hitler's parents, then? Or, you know, pick your favorite despot: Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, Alexander the Great, Cortez, whoever.

And be careful now, because otherwise we have to blame Hitler himself, which is Pinker's bag.

Thing is, you start blaming parents, you have to blame their parents, then their parents, etc., etc., etc., until, simply by the effects of time on the aggregate, we're back to blaming genetics again, a la Pinker.

And, like, shit, ya'll. Wasn't this the entire point of Frankenstein? The Nature vs. Nuture thing is great and all that, but you can only ever nurture the nature. Eugenics is frowned upon. Would we have gotten another Bill Cosby if Charles Manson were raised under similar conditions? No, of course not. That's the rub here. By your first example, you rebelled against your parent's eating habits. So were Hitler's parents too nice to Jews? Or was he "highly influenced" in his Aryan supremacy like you were in your spirituality? I mean, a complex relationship to be sure... but was it really? Brainwashing is a real thing, the average mind is quite fragile. Like in the news now, rich white kids getting converted to being jihadists. Really, we're gonna go all "parents failed them"? No, the way they were built, their genes allow them to be succeptible to brainwashing. It's a real thing.

Parents have a kid with schizophrenia, kid with Down's, kid with homicidal tendencies: their fault, or genetics? Why do you lot always stop with mental illness? The slippery slope of the mind never ends! The mind runs a spectrum. A bloody long spectrum! There is no possible way having your son grow up to be a rapist is any different than your son having schizophrenia. Unless, back to before, he was brainwashed, i.e. specifically raised to be a rapist. We, as a society, blame cult leaders for that shit. Seems fine to blame any brainwasher, parent or no. You know, all the recent shotings in the US, folk want to blame mental illness, and the parents. Can't have it both ways, guys. Unless those parents specifically, explicitly, brainwashed their kids to be mass killers, sorry y'all, born that way.

There have been stories here, in r/Parenting, about just such let downs, parents with "inexplicably" "evil" kids. I don't remember a single comment about how the parents "did done wrong". It was all sympathy, because genes. Because it all is genes.

On a side note, really great book tangentially related to all this: January First. If it;s not your fault if your kid has a mental illness (schitzophrenia), why would it be your fault if your kid has a mental illness (rapey)? And since you cannot affect that...

Just like with any shitty disease, autism, MS, Leukemia, the spectrum is wide. And it is, it only and really is, the genes that make it so. You can be the best parent in the world, kid gets some rare disease at 10 and dies. WTF did you do wrong? Nothing, man. Nothing. Kid grows up to be the next Stalin, where did you fail? Nowhere, man. Nowhere.

So how can it matter for whatever falls between?

Sad thing is, once we know what every gene does, the only way, only way, to "breed out" the genetic disorders we don't like is Eugenics. Which still give folk the creepy-feels because, and here we go full circle, of Hitler. Well, and the US, but that was mostly reactionary to Hitler's "Super Soldier" BS. Point is, we really are just a bag of chemicals, and while a lot of you think how we feel about that bag is what makes us human, those fairy tales don't help me sleep at night. My kids will run the world or end up dead in a gutter with a needle in their arm, or anywhere in between, by their own abilities, their own make-up. My job is to make sure they don't get dead. I'll do more, of course, but it's a fine line between parental altruism and ego. But whether they turn into a rapist or a priest, er, somebody non-rapey and really good, I, or anyone, are only capable of so much that is allowed outside of the tolerances of their make-up. The parental burden is very small. What's the cliche: communities raise children? Hell, if parents were competent we wouldn't need a federally mandated school system!

Some say kids are fucked up becasue thier parents suck. Some say kids are fucked up because their parents were the best, but they just have to rebel. Some say kids are fucked up because they are made that way. Problem is, all those kids are "made that way". Some don't fuck up, even exposed to the shittiest situations. Some have "affluenza". But since the entire gamut of outcomes is evidenced across all socio-economic backgrounds (the kid that makes it out of the 'hood, the suburbanite that shoots up a theatre...), the only common factor is how they were made, and the way they happened to be made allowed them to triumph or fail in that particular situation of their life, again, as related to their genetic make-up. This is why parenting techniques are so varied. If parenting were a factor at all, however Hitler was raised, all we'd have to do is the opposite.

Except for one big problem: it don't work that way. Because, genes.