Showing results for "mother" in Schizophrenia & Psychotic Disorders

This is the moving yet deeply disturbing story of a middle-aged mother and a teenaged daughter torn apart by the sudden onset of the mother’s insanity. It details the severe paranoia and absurd delusions that began to control my mother’s behavior. It follows her transformation from loving parent to violent psychotic and my transformation from obedient daughter to terrified runaway. And it depicts the overwhelming revelatory moment when I finally learned she had died - six years before.

It was the spring of 1989. I was 16 years old, a junior in high school and an honors student. I had what every teenager wants: a stable family, a nice home in the suburbs, a great group of friends, big plans for my future, and no reason to believe that any of that would ever change. Then came my mother's psychosis.

Dan Mathews knew that his witty, bawdy 78-year-old mother, Perry, was unable to maintain her fierce independence - so he flew her across the country to Virginia to live with him in an 1870 townhouse badly in need of repairs. But to Dan, a screwdriver is a cocktail not a tool, and he was soon overwhelmed with two fixer-uppers: the house and his mother.

At the age of 30, Jake found himself hospitalized, grappling with the weight of anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Soon, he received the life-altering diagnosis of schizophrenia. In this intimate and illuminating book, you are invited into Jake's world, a world he shares with his mother, Laurette, through alternating chapters.

You might think this book is about pain. It is not. It is about the journey of two women who loved Clayton unconditionally. It is a tale of overcoming devastating loss, turning hopelessness into hope, sadness into joy and trauma into healing. It spotlights the magnification of love and a shifting of lives in surprising and unpredictable directions.