Bizarre

January Schofield and Early Childhood Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a strange illness. While there are many commonalities among its "sufferers," it's quite the unique-to-the-individual type of condition. And while it seems to be devastating and dangerous for some, for others, it offers creative and artistic insights.

Take Mark Vonnegut, for example (yes, he's Kurt's son). His memoir, The Eden Express, chronicles his descent into madness, and also enlightenment, after taking LSD. When the acid-trip brought on his dormant schizophrenia, he had to be taken off the Canadian island where he and his hippie friends were living and farming, and handed over to a mental institution. After a plethora of medications, Vonnegut learned how to handle his disease organically, changing his diet to alleviate his personal symptoms. Others do not possess the same amount of control.

January Schofield is only eight years old, and far too young to properly devise her own coping mechanisms. But thanks to her parents bringing her on Oprah, Discovery Health, and other programs, she's become a well-known face of childhood mental illness. I'm not particularly interested in the controversy surrounding her father's admittance to hitting her (during one of her violent rages) on his blog, nor am I won over by his plea "to get the general public to reconsider that when they see a child acting up in public, it may be because of a mental illness and that they should not be so judgmental," since I think this is completely self-driven as well as overly idealistic, but I am interested in what goes on in young January's head.

Here is what I do know: Jani (as she's often called) apparently has a genius I.Q, and a generally soft spoken manner. Despite adult-dosages of the most potent anti-psychotic medications available, she continues to battle vivid hallucinations, delusions, and uncontrollable violent rages. She lives with one foot in the "real world" and one foot in her own personal world, called Calalini. As she said to Oprah herself, Calini is "on the border of my world, and your world." This imaginary place is home to mysterious animals and little girls that play with Jani and sometimes tell her to do bad things. Two recurrent creatures are "Four Hundred" the cat and "Wednesday" the rat; last year, Wednesday told Jani to find a place that was fifty feet high and then jump from it. Luckily, Jani didn't listen, but it's possible that one day she may involuntarily kill herself, or badly hurt someone else. At present, her parents maintain two apartments so that she does not injure her little brother. Jani also suffered some oxygen deprivation during or shortly after birth, which killed some brain cells. Doctors think that this exacerbates her psychotic states; however, they do not think this caused her mental illness.

Her father attempted to explain Jani's obsession with numbers and animals: "Every schizophrenic has certain hallucinations. My personal theory is that when Jani's illness was becoming acute, she was learning a lot at the time. She was learning about animals and numbers. At 13 months old, she knew her numbers to 20, and she always loved animals. And I think that is the form her hallucinations took."

My own childhood was colored by my vivid and overactive imagination. I'm sure this is the case with most children, and certainly I brought many other people (like my sister, cousins, and friends) into one of many worlds we could create together, but I do think that my ability to simultaneously exist in my head and reality lasted well beyond the age that most kids stop "pretending." I did not experience uncontrollable hallucinations (well, I did have an imaginary friend I don't remember, as do many kids) or violent episodes like Jani, but I did pace back and forth for hours on my lawn or in my basement, talking to myself. My sister makes fun of me to this day for the way I used to do this, oblivious to anyone else watching and wondering who I was talking to.

My inner world fostered a rich connection to myself, and I mourn the loss of the ability to create an all-encompassing inner-reality in which I could exist. At twenty-six, I am far too self-aware, and also too self-conscious, to fully "pretend." However, the ability to make things up, and keep myself entertained when nothing or no one else can/could, simply by way of my thoughts, has evolved into a love of and passion for writing. One day, I hope to make things up for a living.

Curiously enough, another thing that connects me to January is that my name was almost January too, since I was born on January 27th. Eventually, my mom decided that she didn't want anyone calling me "Jan" for short, so that idea was nixed, but I always thought it was a pretty cool name.

Well, we all know that Western medicine loves to put a label on a disease and then determine what the sufferer can or cannot do based on empirical evidence, but schizophrenia falls so outside any circumscribed course of action, rendering the predictable unpredictable and the sufferer largely misunderstood. Doctors also love to over-medicate anyone and everyone, even if that person is only a child.

Daniel Johnston lived in his own world too, and he wrote some gems of heart-wrenching songs, both before and after his own psychotic breakdowns. My hope is that January manages to function within the world that she subconsciously created, or perhaps within a world/realm that does exist somewhere but only she has access to, in addition to the one dictated by society. I guess we shall see.

-Amy Dupcak Read more!

Bizarre

Genie, the Wild Child

I have a personal fascination with feral children. The child I find the most remarkable, and the situation I find most bizarre, is "Genie," the subject of several books and films (such as a documentary by NOVA and a movie called Mockingbird Don't Sing).

While the concept of a feral child usually involves one who has been raised in the wilderness by animals after abandonment early in life, there are many others who become “feral children” after years of intense isolation indoors. Genie (which is a name given to protect her identity) is probably the most famous case. Discovered in California in 1970, she had the appearance of a seven-year-old, weighing just 59 pounds, even though she was thirteen.

During a routine medical exam as a baby, a doctor told the family that Genie seemed “slow” and could possibly have a form of mild retardation. Genie’s mentally unstable father, Clark, decided to “protect” her from the rest of the world by holding her hostage; Genie’s mother, Irene, was partially blind and dependent on her delusional husband. The parents and their older son slept in the living room while Genie was confined to a bare bedroom. She was tied to a potty-chair and made to sleep in a crib enclosed with metal screening, bound in a makeshift straitjacket. Year after year, Genie sat in the chair wearing diapers, with very little mobility. Clark beat her for making noise and would growl and bark like a dog to terrify her into silence.

Finally, Irene left the house with Genie and entered a welfare clinic, where a social worker alerted the police to the child’s condition. Shortly after, Clark killed himself, rather than face prison.

Genie soon became a prized patient for many doctors, psychologists, and linguists, as she bounced from home to home and endured an endless variety of tests, treatments, therapies, and examinations. She had be taught to chew, as well as to divert her anger and emotions outward, instead of violently scratching herself. During frequent temper tantrums, she would bite and kick, and would often urinate or masturbate without discretion. She also had a strange walk, which therapists called the "bunny walk;" she functioned as if blind due to her lengthy sensory deprivation and thus walked with her elbows bent and hands pointed down.

Eventually Genie, who gravitated toward shiny, plastic objects, warmed up to acts of affection, made eye contact, smiled, and formed personal bonds. But the biggest challenge was language acquisition, since she was practically nonverbal.

Language is the most important method of human communication and interaction, and it is integral to society and the functionality of its participants. Noam Chomsky wrote of the human brain’s innate language ability and believed that if you placed infants on an island together, they would eventually form their own language despite having never been exposed to one. Another theory suggests that puberty acts as an age limit for acquiring the ability to speak a language, as well as the proper use of grammar. When she was discovered, Genie was dangerously close to that barrier, having surpassed the “critical period” of early childhood when language is typically learned. Though she did begin to speak, as well as to sign, Genie was never able to create syntactically correct sentences and could not hold a conversation or communicate abstract thought.

Genie's fate and situation may be sad, but her case serves to show just how bright the human spirit can shine, against all odds.

--amy.
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Bizarre

The "Gloomy Sunday" Suicides

David Foster Wallace might have gotten an idea for Infinite Jest (I won't say what it is, in case you haven't read this monster, although to be honest I've only made it through about 300 pages) from the legends surrounding "Gloomy Sunday."

The song was written and recorded by a Hungarian pianist and composer named Rezső Seress in 1933, using a poem by László Jávor. In 1936, the song became connected to a number of suicides in Hungary; those who committed suicide apparently did so after hearing it, or while it was still playing on their gramophones, or they included the lyrics in their note. The song was then allegedly banned in Hungary, a country that already had a high suicide rate.

In 1941, Billie Holiday recorded an English version of what became known in the US as the "Hungarian suicide song." Legend has it that radio stations banned the song for fear that it would cause people to off themselves, but it seems that only the BBC did so, citing the tragedies of WWII. While some sources claim up to 200 American suicides could be linked, others report no such connection.

However, Rezső Seress did commit suicide when he jumped to his death from his apartment in 1968. Also, Billy Mackenzie, a vocalist for the Scottish band The Associates, committed suicide in 1997; the band had recorded a cover of Billie Holiday's version fifteen years prior. And of course, David Foster Wallace killed himself as well (rip).

Mere coincidence? Collective unconscious? Read the original lyrics and listen to Holiday's version, if you dare....


The literal English translation of the original Hungarian lyrics are as follows:

Gloomy Sunday with a hundred white flowers
I was waiting for you my dearest with a prayer
A Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams
The carriage of my sorrow returned to me without you
It is since then that my Sundays have been forever sad
Tears my only drink, the sorrow my bread...

Gloomy Sunday

This last Sunday, my darling please come to me
There'll be a priest, a coffin, a catafalque and a winding-sheet
There'll be flowers for you, flowers and a coffin
Under the blossoming trees it will be my last journey
My eyes will be open, so that I could see you for a last time
Don't be afraid of my eyes, I'm blessing you even in my death...

The last Sunday



I happen to think Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely" also makes for a good suicide song. And let's not forget Nirvana's "Something In The Way" and NIN's "Hurt." Have a great Sunday!

--amy.
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Bizarre

Brooke Greenberg: The Girl Who Doesn't Age

So I've always been fascinated by people with abnormal medical conditions and mysterious disorders, partially due to my own sick curiosity and partially because they challenge the conventions of what it means to be "human" by representing a very wide range of possibilities of the human form...even though some of these conditions usually make the person's life much more difficult. One of the most intriguing cases I have heard about lately is a girl with a condition known only as "Syndrome X," since she is the only known person in the world with her specific abnormality. Although Brooke Greenberg looks and acts like a one-year-old child, this girl is actually a teenager, seventeen to be exact. Some believe she is "frozen in time."

Brooke has a mutation in Chromosome 1, but specialists and geneticists cannot explain how this affects her growth and development. She is unresponsive to growth hormones and any other type of treatment. Her sixteen-pound body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts, out of sync. Her bones are like those of a ten-year-old, but she still has baby teeth.

Children's brains obviously grow and change as they age, yet Brooke's is not much more mature than that of a newborn, even though she was a newborn seventeen years ago; doctors estimate her mental age to be around nine months to a year old. What that says about her memories of the last sixteen years nobody can know for sure because while she can make gestures and recognize sounds, Brooke cannot speak. The medical field believes that she presents "a unique opportunity to understand the process of aging," even though her telomeres, which limit the number of cell divisions and indicate the body's true age (much like tree rings), seem to be shortening at a normal rate.

Another bizarre aspect of her condition occurred when she was five, after she'd already undergone other severe medical issues. Doctors found a mass in her brain and diagnosed it as a tumor; this caused her to sleep for fourteen days straight. When she woke up, the tumor had mysteriously vanished.

Brooke has three perfectly normal sisters, two very loving parents, and one full-time nurse in her hometown of Baltimore. It is unknown whether or not she will ever age in the future, or how doctors might make use of her very special case. She certainly represents the idealized "fountain of youth," which seems to be all the rage in the world of vampires. But while it might seem great to never age beyond eighteen, few would prefer to live their entire lives as an infant.

--amy.
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