[Hardcover]" />Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children [Hardcover]
Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children [Hardcover] is a new product in Computer Store. You can get special discount for Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children [Hardcover] only in this month. But, you can get special discount up to 30% only in this weeksProduct Details
- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (May 11, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0767914376
- ISBN-13: 978-0767914376
Product Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
- Average Customer Review:3.8 out of 5 stars style="margin-left:-3px">See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the space of a few months, 11-year-old Alex Raeburn is bounced among seven psychiatrists and prescribed even more drugs, among them Lithium and Depakote, after lashing out at his 5th-grade teacher. The doctors are swift to prescribe pills but slow to provide therapy, despite varying opinions on what the diagnosis may be--maybe depression, ADHD, or an anxiety disorder. While the family finds little relief from the medical establishment, author Paul Raeburn, Alex's dad, slowly admits that his lack of parenting and anger-management skills may have exacerbated his son's condition. Some of his temper tantrums, one of which involves flooding their kitchen, are as frightening as his son's manic episodes.
Ironically, as the science and medicine reporter for BusinessWeek, Raeburn had access to the most prestigious names in psychiatry, but his denial of Alex's emotional problems was so strong that he didn't even bother to look up the (significant) side effects of his son's prescriptions in the Physician's Desk Reference: "I was not going to read about psychiatric drugs and mental illness because I was not going to be the parent of a mentally ill kid." He and Alex are given hope from bipolar expert Kay Redfield Jamison, who, during a book signing, writes, "Things will get better." They do, but not before the Raeburns' marriage disintegrates and Alex's younger sister Alicia is also repeatedly hospitalized for depression and attempted suicide. Raeburn's bravery in telling his childrens' story is to be commended, but the reader is left wondering just how much of Alex and Alicia's misery can be blamed on his own moodiness, prejudices, and procrastination. --Erica Jorgensen
Customer Reviews
3.8 out of 5 stars
(30)
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“I felt the anger and bitterness of the author towards his ex-wife dominated the book. ”
“The book is great on how difficult it is for both the parent and the child of metal illness. ”
“It may give them a better understanding of what it is really like. ”
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 starsThe best book I've ever read about mental illnessAugust 6, 2004
By K. G HavemannVINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover
I stayed up much too late reading this absolutely riveting true account of a family falling apart from mental illness and a therapeutic community utterly unable to help. I'm not sure what was more frustrating -- the astoundingly awful parenting on both sides, the ineptitude of the therapists consulted along the way, or the dreadful societal pressures exerted upon middle-school children. And I won't even get into the awful state of the health insurance industry and how it exacerbates the very illnesses it is purported to help. I have never before read an account of such an appallingly dysfunctional family on just about every level, dysfunction that still exists in the almost-absent relationship between the father and his eldest son. If ever two people were destined for destruction, the author and his wife are them. References are made to the classic symptoms of clinical depression displayed by the author's wife from the time she had her first child, but it's obvious she has never received adequate help. The passivity and inappropriate parenting that resulted combined with the outrageously immature and explosive anger of the father/author would cause even the healthiest children to implode. Raeburn is exceptionally honest about his own contributions to this harrowing story but, throughout, I just wanted to throttle him. Raeburn complains about his long work commute and how that impacted family interactions and even visiting his hospitalized children, yet he never took the most obvious step -- moving closer to work. I grew up in a suburb similar to Ridgewood and I know there are exceptional public schools much closer to the city. But Raeburn was too blinded by the cache of such a rarified and wealthy community to see the dangers. As it turned out, all the struggles to afford the "great schools" were for naught when it turns out the community is not healthy for children either. Raeburn probably did not intend to question the educational and social philosophies for dealing with middle-school-aged children but, the more I read, the more I came to believe middle schools that separate out 6th, 7th, and 8th graders do more harm than good. The children no longer have older students as role models (good and bad) and no longer serve as role models themselves for younger students. Instead, hundreds of hormonally and emotionally unstable adolescents are set out to sea in a microcosm of insanity and left to feed off each other's craziness unchecked by any examples of the normalcy that both precedes them and usually awaits them on the other side. Maybe this is one reason children fare better in smaller K-12 private schools that are able to maintain some semblance of age-disparate families. Raeburn never actually voices but nonetheless demonstrates with each escalating crisis another very apparent fact - there are as many opinions (or non-opinions) about how to help mentally ill children as there are psychiatrists, therapists, and medications. If the reader is to come away with only one very unsettling conclusion, it is that no one really knows what is wrong with your child, what causes it, or how to treat it. Accept this, do the best you can, and hope your child lives long enough to grow out of the worst of it, as the author's children did. I can only pray the author's children never have children of their own. This is not a happy book with a satisfying ending but it is a very important book.
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