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1. New Partnership to Help Teens With Depression
by Susan Resko, Executive Director

Tom and I just got home from six hours at the psychiatric hospital.  Not with our son, Tim, who I often write about in this blog, but with our daughter.

We adopted two of our three children – Tim and our daughter ('The Girl', I call her on my blog, as she prefers I not use her real name).  Tim’s mental health issues were a surprise, as we brought him home from the hospital 10 hours after birth, and we weren’t savvy enough to include mental health family history in the questions we asked of his birth parents.  The Girl is another story.  She came to us at age four from foster care, after being born severely premature, drug addicted, and cycling through approximately nine foster homes before ours, with a diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). We knew there would be issues. She’s come a long way, thanks to therapy and a more stable environment, but the years that Tim was home and seriously unstable took their toll, and two years ago her therapist said she was showing signs of PTSD, as we all were. 

Fast forward to three months ago when she suddenly stopped eating.

After an hour reviewing the recent issues with breakthrough psychosis, the extreme anxiety around the requisite blood draws to check white blood cell count, and the real issue of this being the least stable time of year, I heard Tim’s new psychiatrist say the words that I knew were the right decision, but vex me nonetheless: "let’s leave him on the Clozaril, add 100 mg at midday, and postpone any big medication changes until his impending move to an 18 and over facility in May."

I’ve heard and read a lot of accounts lately from parents and caregivers about other adults either giving unsolicited parenting advice or making crass comments about special needs kids when they are having a difficult time in public.

In August 1996, then First Lady Hillary Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was the now famous, “It Takes a Village” speech. In it, she details how, while parents are a child’s first and primary teachers and role models, it takes everyone in the community to raise a healthy, happy child.

This blog post is late. Four weeks late, to be exact. I had such great intentions at the beginning of August to put all of my blog obligations on a calendar, complete with topics for each post, intending to work on them in advance so I could not only fulfill all my obligations, but get them submitted in advance of their due dates. I was going to be Super Blogger. As is said, though, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray." And when my son Tim, who has a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, started to destabilize in mid-August, my plans most definitely fell by the wayside.