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After “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” Post, A Dramatic Turnaround

After the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, when 20 children and several educators were murdered by 20-year-old shooter Adam Lanza, a distressed mom wrote a blog post called “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” The mental distress Lanza reportedly lived with was something Liza Long saw in her own son, Eric Walton.

Sunday morning I heard a report on NPR in which Long and Walton opened up about the turn their lives took after that blog post went viral. And it’s damn inspiring.

Mood music:

Walton, now 16, used to experience rages and suicidal thoughts, including a particularly brutal episode a couple days before the Sandy Hook massacre that left him hospitalized.

He says the start of his rages were like a blackout where he lost all control of his faculties. He had been given a series of misdiagnoses, but after his mom’s post went viral, mental health professionals and others came forward offering help. Eventually, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“I got the correct diagnosis. I got put on the right medication. And I haven’t had a rage, I think, since that day,” Walton told NPR. “It’s funny, I don’t even keep track anymore.”

Asked how he views his disorder now, Walton told NPR, “I choose to think of it as my superpower. I’m really, really creative. I’m very empathetic. I have a lot of skills that teenagers don’t normally have: conflict resolution, mindfulness — just things I’ve had to pick up over the years because it kind of helped control myself before the right diagnosis.”

That tickled me, because I’ve been describing my own condition as a superpower when all the pieces are managed properly.

The full interview is available on the NPR website.

In the years since I learned how to control my OCD, depression, fear and anxiety, I’ve had my backslides, especially in the past year. I experienced a particularly pervasive bout of the depression in the fall of 2014. But I’ve always been able to find my way back into balance, so I know what Walton speaks of.

Getting sorted out is hard. But with the right support and motivation, it WILL be sorted out.

If you suffer from bipolar disorder or any torment of the mind, I hope stories like these will help you push forward.

Liza Long
Liza Long

 

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When Your Kid Asks About Anti-Depressants

My 12-year-old has a few things in common with his dad. Both of us have mental disorders (his is ADHD, mine is OCD with wintertime undercurrents of ADHD). Both of us take medication to help manage our ills. But until last weekend, he had never asked the big question:

“What do these pills do, anyway?”

Mood music:

To answer the question, I dusted off an analogy I had used some years ago to explain it to others. Essentially, I told him, the brain is an engine. When one part gets worn out, the whole the engine can fail. An engine needs the right amount of oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, and so forth to function properly.

If the oil runs out, for example, the engine seizes up. If the brake fluid runs dry, the breaks fail. Too much of these fluids can harm the engine, as well.

Car owners and auto mechanics use many different techniques to keep engines healthy or fix them when they break. It could be something simple, like topping off the oil, to something more complex, like realigning or replacing faulty parts.

The brain works much the same way.

Heat map of brain activity, normal state versus depressed state

Think of a psychotherapist as the auto mechanic who is well versed in how to regulate the different engine fluids and pinpoint specific fixes for specific problems.

The different drugs are tools the mechanic uses to deal with specific problems in the engine. In the brain, when certain fluids are running low, the result is depression and a host of other mental disorders.

Antidepressants

In my case, Prozac addresses the very specific fluid deficiencies that spark OCD behavior. Since OCD is essentially the brain pumping and spinning out of control, I like to think of my specific problem as a lack of brake fluid.

When I explained it this way, I think he got it.

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Duncan at 12: Like Me, Only Better

Yesterday my younger son, Duncan, turned 12. He’s been through a lot, and he makes me proud every day.

Mood music:

I often tell people Duncan is the spitting image of me at that age. He certainly looks like I did at 12. And as I did, he has developmental challenges. As a kid I was never diagnosed with something like ADHD or placed on the autism spectrum. But that was the early 1980s, when kids weren’t regularly tested for such things.

I was sick and hospitalized a lot, and I think people chalked my immaturity and slowness to learn as byproducts of a lot of missed school. As I got older, some teachers labeled me as less than average. In middle school they placed me in the C group for 7th and 8th grade. I don’t think we remember childhood events exactly as they were, but it seems there were more than a few teachers who didn’t think I’d amount to much.

I hope I defied those expectations, but it took a lot of work that didn’t start until adulthood and a proper diagnosis.

Duncan has been through the wringer in his young life, going through neurological testing; switching schools, doctors and medications; and spending many hard hours getting through homework. But in the last two years, he has made enormous progress.

With the assistance of some excellent teachers and administrators — and some great work on the part of the Triumph Center — he has made huge strides. His focus is better, and his social skills have made a quantum leap in the last couple years. I also give Erin a ton of credit for the time and effort she puts in for Duncan every day. Some days can be difficult and he doesn’t always appreciate how relentless his mom can be. But some day he will.

Some things haven’t changed, thankfully. He’s always had a heart as big as the sky, eager to help those in need, including a new student in his class in need of friends. He still has a big range of interests that he works at, most notably cooking and music. And he has a command of vocabulary that’s hard to come by in kids his age. He writes not because he has to — some school assignments notwithstanding — but because he enjoys it.

He cares about all life and has chastised me more than once for killing a fly. The neighbors’ pets love him, coming right up to him when he’s outside. They know his is a gentle, sweet soul. And he’s a dedicated Boy Scout.

At that age, I was usually lucky to get the occasional B or A, often getting Cs and Ds. About all I cared about was going to movies and playing with my Star Wars toys.

Parents dream that their kids will climb to greater heights they they did. Duncan, like his brother, is well on his way to fulfilling that dream for me.

Happy birthday, Duncan. Keep soaring!

Bill and Duncan Brenner
Left: Duncan, 2015. Right: me, 1983
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A Generation of Do-Nothing Kids

An article in The Huffington Post asks an important question: Are we raising a generation of helpless kids? It would be wrong to paint every parent with one broad brushstroke, but we can’t deny there’s a problem.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/VrZ4sMRYimw

The HuffPo article begins with the story of a college freshman who dissolves into a puddle of mush after getting a C- on her first exam:

Sobbing, she texted her mother who called back, demanding to talk to the professor immediately (he, of course, declined). Another mother accompanied her child on a job interview, then wondered why he didn’t get the job.

Tim Elmore, founder and president of the nonprofit Growing Leaders and author of the Habitudes series of books, explained the roots of the problem to the writer:

Gen Y (and iY) kids born between 1984 and 2002 have grown up in an age of instant gratification. iPhones, iPads, instant messaging and immediate access to data is at their fingertips. … Their grades in school are often negotiated by parents rather than earned and they are praised for accomplishing little. They have hundreds of Facebook and Twitter “friends,” but often few real connections.

Parents of my generation and older will tell you how we grew up playing in the street unsupervised and learned self-reliance. That’s certainly true for me. I spent my teen years hanging out with friends under a neighborhood bridge and on Revere Beach. My father worked all the time, and I spent many days at home on my own.

Yet it’s our generation that’s hovering over our kids, trying desperately to never let anything bad happen to them. We fill their days with scheduled activities, and yes, some of us fight with teachers over grades.

Elmore suggests this kind of parenting is rooted in the fall of 1982, when seven people died after taking extra-strength Tylenol laced with poison after it left the factory. Halloween was just around the corner, and parents began checking every item in the trick-or-treat bags. From there, an obsession with child security grew.

Fast-forward to Easter 2012, when organizers of an annual Easter egg hunt attended by hundreds of children canceled that year’s event because aggressive parents swarmed into the tiny park the year before, determined that their kids get an egg.

It’s an example of how the concept of keeping kids safe expanded to include shielding them from hurt feelings.

I’m not immune to this stuff. As a parent, I feel horrific when Erin and I have to punish the kids. I hate seeing them cry. I’d be lying if I denied being overprotective at times.

But we’re also determined not to raise helpless kids.

Our kids have responsibilities. They earn allowance for chores, just as we did as kids. If they mouth off, they lose privileges, such as screen time. They fold laundry and scrub the bathrooms. Being in Boy Scouts has helped them. Boy Scouts is all about learning self-reliance.

Does that mean as parents we’ve bucked the modern trend? I don’t know. I only know that we’re trying to.

Crying Toddler

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For Parents With Kids Freaked About Winter Storms

With a blizzard in the New England forecast this week and next month’s 37th anniversary of the Blizzard of 1978, I thought this might be of use:

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/6-WMbP1RcC4

I got a message awhile back from a mom who reads this blog regularly. I’ll keep her anonymous but share some details of the note:

“My son, only 7, has suffered from pretty severe anxieties about weather over the past 3 or so years. It took me forever to figure out what was going on (the doctors couldn’t) and finally found an amazing counselor for him that has given him the tools to deal. But still it is a lot for a little kid.”

Since this one really hits me where I live, I’m going to take a stab at offering something useful. But be warned first that I AM NOT a doctor. It’s also important to note that one person’s perfect solution might make things worse for another individual. What I offer is simply based on my own personal experience and some of what I’ve read from smart people in the medical community.

Tricky stuff, mental illness is.

I do think there’s good news for children who suffer:

1.) Getting the right help early will spare him/her from a lot of pain later on.

2.) Children seem to learn things like coping mechanisms more readily than adults.

3.) If a kid has to deal with any form of mental anguish, anxiety is probably one of the more natural, normal reactions to life. Even the healthiest of children live with a certain level of fear. My kids are healthy boys, mentally and physically, but they still crawl into bed with Mom and Dad in the middle of the night because their minds are spinning with worry over a ghost story they heard in school.

What really resonated with me is that this child gets anxiety over the weather. It’s been nearly 35 years since I watched in fear as the ocean rose up and ripped apart my neighborhood along the northern edge of Revere Beach in Massachusetts during the Blizzard of 1078..

Houses were torn from their foundations. Schoolmates had to stay in hotels for a year or more while their homes were rebuilt. The wind tore the roofing off some of the pavilions lining the beach.

Every winter since then, every nor’easter riding up the coast filled me with anxiety. The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.

From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of 1978 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep. That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.

My step-sister still likes to bring up how, on the morning Hurricane Bob was coming, I came into her room and yelled at her to wake up, telling her, “This aint no (expletive) Gloria.” That was me in OCD mode.

That rough weather scared the heck out of me as a kid, I think, was perfectly normal. Carrying that same fear and anxiety well into adulthood? Probably not so normal.

In more recent years, I’ve overcome that fear, and I actually like a good storm now and again. I love to drive through the snow. And when Washington D.C. got smacked with 30-plus inches of heavy snow in a blizzard in 2010, I gleefully walked the streets as the storm continued to rage.

That’s my long-winded way of saying this 7-year-old probably — hopefully — will grow out of his weather-based anxiety, and hopefully sooner than I did.

I think the best thing his mom can do is talk him through it, explaining that weather changes all the time and we usually get through the rough stuff just fine, even if a tree is blown over.

I’d tell him it’s ok to be concerned about a coming storm, but that the storm always passes and is followed by the sun.

When the TV news starts to hype up a storm, make fun of them for making mountains out of molehills. Sometimes, the hype is warranted, like when Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew came along. The Blizzard of 1978 certainly lived up to the hype.  But most of the time, the media exaggerates the importance of a storm, and they deserve to be picked on for it, especially if it makes a little kid feel better.

Now, for those seeking a more scientific, medically-grounded piece of advice on treating childhood anxiety, I once again direct you toward the excellent WebMD site. I did some digging and found some helpful tips, which include the following:

Professional counseling is an important part of the treatment for depression. Types of counseling most often used to treat depression in children and teens are:

  • Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps reduce negative patterns of thinking and encourages positive behaviors.
  • Interpersonal therapy, which focuses on the child’s relationships with others.
  • Problem-solving therapy, which helps the child deal with current problems.
  • Family therapy, which provides a place for the whole family to express fears and concerns and learn new ways of getting along.
  • Play therapy, which is used with young children or children with developmental delays to help them cope with fears and anxieties. But there is no proof that this type of treatment reduces symptoms of depression.

Hope that helps!

“Blizzard of ’78,” by Norman Gautreau, depicting the devastation of Revere Beach following The Blizzard of 1978:

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The Lost Generation of Revere, Mass.

An old friend from the Point of Pines, Revere, sent me a note some time ago. He came across my post on Zane Mead and another on the Bridge Rats gang. For him, they brought up more memories of kids from the neighborhood who died young.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/jX-yuZFVm34

I’ll keep his name and certain details out to protect his privacy, but here’s some of what he wrote to me:

I came across your piece in your OCD Diaries about Zane Mead. It stirred up some old memories of growing up. I was actually friends with Zane until I left for the military in 1985. He was a sweet kid with a good heart most of the time. Occasionally he would be angry and self destructive. This was usually followed by an attempted suicide.

I had many talks with him about it. he never would say what was eating at him. Not sure why but I don’t think it was an issue at home. I feel like it was a personal daemon. As you stated, our life’s experiences at the time didn’t give us the ability to see the problem no less the wisdom to offer any real help. I often wonder if there was something more I could have done.

It seemed that I lost a lot of friends over the five years I was gone.

We lost your brother, Scott James, Mike McDonald. Kenny Page. It’s like we lost a generation. For years I thought I was a under achiever in my life. The more time moves on I think we may be lucky for just getting out of the city. Revere was just eating people up back then. Probably still is.

I also read you piece on bullies where you mention the Bridge Rats. I’m sincerely sorry for any part I may have caused in your distress.

Thanks for the memories. Good, Bad and Ugly. I guess they make us who we are.

Indeed they do, my friend.

I had forgotten about Mike McDonald and Kenny Page. As a teen I was so self-absorbed over my brother’s death that I didn’t realize how much loss our generation was suffering. After reading my friend’s note, I thought hard about his points about Revere eating people up. Was there some kind of curse hanging over the city in the 1980s? Were all my adolescent traumas part of that curse? Was my brother’s death and Sean Marley’s death part of it?

If you asked me that about six years ago, I’d have bought the theory straight away. Today I tend to doubt it.

It was a sad and unfortunate period, but it wasn’t a curse. We all had our share of childhood happiness in Revere in between the bad stuff. And I know now what I didn’t get back then: That we weren’t meant to live soft lives devoid of pain and struggle. These things are tossed in our path to mold us into what we can only hope to be: good people. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But let’s face it: Has life ever been fair?

As for the Bridge Rats, my memories are fond ones.

The last post I wrote about this gang suggested they were a band of bullies. But if you read all the way through the post, you’ll see some nostalgic warmth in my memories. As I’ve said many times, I was a punk like everyone else. I got picked on, but I did my share of picking on other people. For the most part, the Bridge Rats were a collection of pretty good kids. Some grew into happy, productive lives. Some didn’t.

That’s life.

I recently wrote about the time the Brenners nearly left Revere. There’s no question that for a time, I hated that city and would have done anything to get out.

But I stayed, and good things happened in the years that followed. A lot of good things. Precious, joyful things. I look at my kid sister Shira and the amazing, beautiful woman she is today. Would she have been that way if not for the Revere in her? Perhaps. But living there certainly didn’t damage her.

I’ve said before that Revere is where I survived and my current city of Haverhill is where I healed. That was and still is the truth.

But make no mistake about it: Revere helped make me who I am today.

And I’ll admit it: I like who I am today.

7,Revere Point of Pines

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A Terrible Chapter Closes in Blackstone

A few weeks ago I posted about the terrible story in Blackstone, Mass., where children where found to be living in a house of absolute squalor.

Police found four children, two of which were covered in feces and hidden from the world. A police search turned up the remains of three dead infants and dead animals. Those who went in the house said they will never forget the smell.

Tuesday, the town demolished the house.

May the children get the love and attention they need and deserve.

And may the mother, Erika Murray, get whatever help she needs for her sick mind.

Demolishment of Blackstone, Mass., house

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A Birthday Message to Colin

A mom from Kalamazoo, Mich., created a Facebook page for her son called “Happy Birthday Colin.” She did so after he told her he had no friends to invite to his upcoming birthday celebration. Colin has issues that are similar to autism, though his specific diagnoses are not yet public. Given my youngest son’s challenges on that front — not to mention my own — this squeezed my heart. What follows is an open letter to Colin.

Mood music:

Dear Colin:

Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some people have trouble figuring you out. Some classmates and their parents may not be comfortable around you. They mean no harm. It’s just that, unfortunately, human beings often react foolishly to things they don’t understand.

I experienced that as a kid, though probably not to the degree you are experiencing now. Some of the kids who made fun of me back then are good friends today. Because we eventually grow up and learn to understand and even appreciate our differences.

If I’ve learned anything in my own journey, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.

It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.

Item: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose worldview changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.

When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a couple of years older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.

Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).

You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want. And you shouldn’t resign yourself to the idea that you can’t have good friends.

Item: Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.

There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective. Be patient with those around you and they will come around someday.

Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.

Just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.

One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.

It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and neurological disorders to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

That’s OK.

I believe in you. Your mom certainly believes in you.

The rest is up to you.

Your friend,

Bill

Colin

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Taking Lunch from Children Is Never OK

The headline was so outrageous I didn’t believe it at first. I see a lot of crazy stuff on the Internet that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Unfortunately, this one is true: Administrators  at Uintah Elementary School in Salt Lake City confiscated and trashed the lunches of up to 40 students because their parents were apparently behind in payments.

Mood music:

From The Salt Lake City Tribune:

Jason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches. As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said. But cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which children owed money until they had already received lunches, Olsen explained. The workers then took those lunches from the students and threw them away, he said, because once food is served to one student it can’t be served to another. Children whose lunches were taken were given milk and fruit instead.

Parents were understandably outraged. Erica Lukes, whose 11-year-old daughter had her cafeteria lunch taken from her as she stood in line Tuesday, told the newspaper that as far as she knew, she was all paid up. “I think it’s despicable,” she said. “These are young children that shouldn’t be punished or humiliated for something the parents obviously need to clear up.”

The school district issued this lame apology:

When lunch time came, students who still had negative balances were told they could not have a full meal but were given a piece of fruit and a milk for lunch. The district does this so children who don’t have money for lunch can at least have some food and not go without.

Anyone with half a brain knows a piece of fruit and milk is hardly enough lunch for a child. It’s also a known fact that for a lot of poorer kids, school lunch is often the only decent meal they get all day.

Any decent soul knows that when parents fall behind on payments, it should never, ever be taken out on the kids. What’s worse is that in this case, it doesn’t appear parents knew they owed money.

I want to forgive the administrators who did this. I doubt they are heartless. I doubt they set out to do wrong. But their actions certainly demonstrate that they are unqualified to be doing the jobs they have. They should be fired or retrained.
Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City

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When Teachers Get It

Last night I attended a parent information night at Sean and Duncan’s new school. It’s a great school, but the kids have been struggling to adjust, especially Duncan. That’s to be expected. But there is always that worry in the back of my brain that teachers will never truly understand Duncan, who has ADHD.

We moved them to this new school because we felt Duncan in particular needed a more organized, regimented environment to thrive. His academics are going well, but he is clearly not at ease in his new surroundings. Not yet, anyway.

But by the time last night’s event was over, I knew everything would be fine. The fourth-grade teachers showed us this video, which tells me they get it. The video is from a website called Raising Small Souls and is worth a few minutes of your time.

Thanks to Duncan’s teachers for showing they get it.

Animal School