Great Works About Raising Kids with Mental Illness

Ginsberg raised her son, Blaze, largely before autism had a name—at the time, the doctor’s best guess for her son’s puzzling behavior was that it was related to some “birth trauma.” The first years of Blaze’s life are strange but also wondrous for Ginsberg. Blaze won’t crawl but then he suddenly stands up, loves jazz, creates intricate systems of organization, and most of all is a loving, open delight to his mother and grandfather. But when Blaze leaves home to start school he falls apart. All his quirks and idiosyncrasies become “red flags” in a school setting. Ginsberg has a strong and compelling voice and she sets up a great conflict between the reality of the world she has created for Blaze inside the safety of her apartment, versus life in the outside world—which serves as a great metaphor for us all.

This memoir, a wonderful companion book to Raising Blaze, was published when Blaze was twenty-one years old. He organizes his memories in a TV show format: through reruns, reoccurring characters, syndication, and cancelations. The result is a fascinating peak into Blaze’s interior life.

Genie is one of my top-ten favorite books of all time. Genie’s parents strapped her to a potty chair and locked her in a bedroom from the time she was a toddler to when she turned 13 in 1970. Genie never saw her parents (they slid her meals under the door); she did not know how to talk or walk or clean herself. Genie is, to this day, the closest case of a feral child since the Wild Boy of Aveyron in the late eighteenth century. For ten years, Genie bounced between researchers, doctors, institutions, and then went back to the mother who had allowed her to be locked her in the bedroom in the first place. Everyone is eager to help Genie learn language and take care of herself, but they continually fail to meet Genie’s most basic need: the love of a single caregiver.

January Schofield is one of the few kids under the age of fifteen to be diagnosed with schizophrenia—a diagnosis most clinicians never thought possible until just a few years ago. Like Ginsberg in Raising Blaze, January’s parents are convinced that their child is a genius. January is verbal at a very young age and creates an elaborate fantasy world filled with benevolent creatures whose adventures she shares with her parents. The slow, agonizing realization that their daughter is actually experiencing psychosis nearly shreds the Schofield family apart. Particularly when January starts attacking her baby brother. Some people who have read this book, written by January’s father, have found his voice too aggressive, angry, and unapologetic. But Schofield’s rage—given the huge amount of dead ends, compromises, and brushes with death he has to undergo to save his daughter’s life—seem unavoidable.

Sebold suffered a brutal rape during her freshman year of college. The police officers who took down the details of the crime said she was “lucky” to be alive. Sebold’s trauma takes a decade to resolve and there is alcohol and heroin addiction along the way. There are several chunks in this magnificent memoir devoted to Sebold’s home life, focusing on how her own parents try to offer support, and on the way her family breaks down and slowly reform following her trauma.

This is a slim manifesto from the director of Yemin Orde, a village-style boarding school for foster youth in Israel. It’s hard to heal a whole family when the parents are absent; the best an institution can do in this situation is focus entirely on the child and prove to them that adults will not abandon them again. That means no foster parents (they can be too unreliable). Peri does not propose that his educators and counselors can serve as surrogate parents to abandoned teens. But they can build the kind of durable, steadfast relationship that their parents could not. I reported on a school in San Diego called San Pasqual Academy that is affiliated with Yemin Orde and uses Peri’s book as a founding ideology. I was deeply moved by the way the students at the live-in school thrived among their peers and a supportive community of educators.

This short story explores the self-destructive impulses a parent feels because his severely autistic daughter cannot speak or express love. It is dark, transgressive, and beautiful.

Complicated and devastating, Porter’s short story outlines a mother’s decision to institutionalize her son. It’s unclear what the son actually suffers from; it is also unclear if the family “did all they could” for him.

Olsen’s classic short story—narrated by a mother reflecting on how she might have raised her first daughter differently—is likely the reason I harbor such fear about my child’s existence being in some way beyond me, and unknowable. This paragraph still haunts me: “And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.”