A NYT story of psychosis following developmental delay recalls Andrew's story (emphases mine)...
Providing Comfort When a Cure Is Out of Reach - Tara Ebrahimi - NYTimes.com
... Although Takkin had been found to have development delay and fairly severe A.D.H.D. at a young age, he had managed to lead a “normal” life well into his teenage years. He stayed in the school system for as long as he could, participating in work and life-skills programs. He was doing data entry at the airport and held a steady part-time job as a greeter at Trader Joe’s.
His situation was complex, as is often the case for people who fall into the gray space between severe intellectual disability and borderline development delay. He knew he was different from others in their early 20s, recognized that he didn’t really have any friends and that he would never go to college as his two older siblings had. He wanted nothing more than to get his driver’s license. But he was happy at times, especially when he was socializing.
Then he had the dental surgeries, and it was as if a switch in him had been flipped. After a series of root-canal procedures and teeth extractions, he woke up from his final round of procedures and anesthesia, and was never the same...
... we began seeking psychiatric help for what eventually would be referred to as Takkin’s “psychosis” and “delusional thinking.”...
... he was already in the social services system, which in our state consisted of a labyrinthine series of hoops and hurdles and bureaucratic insanity that not even the most educated and competent can easily navigate...
... I came up with a plan of action. And then another when the first plan failed. And another when the second plan failed...
... I drove to the emergency room, where we waited eight hours for him to be admitted to the psychiatric ward...
... it was time for Takkin to leave the psychiatric ward for an outpatient home ... I called a dozen times a day and could never get a response on the status of his anticipated stay, so he never went....
... he was released from the psychiatric ward into my custody, I was unable to reach his case manager at the hospital despite my constant phone calls, e-mails and voice messages, which were alternately kind, threatening and pleading...
Tara tells a story of psychosis developing after low IQ/ADHD cognitive disorder, Andrew's story tells of psychosis developing after Asperger's/autism. Adam's story may add to this tragic set. We have no idea how often this happens; that's just one of the failures of modern mental health research [1].
Tara also describes the disaster of American mental health care. That story has been told before. Recently some have suggested taxing bullets to drive a renaissance in mental health care. We could hardly do worse than we do now.
For us these stories are personal. Our #1 son resembles the young Takkin. He lives in the "gray space", -- he has severe ADHD, cognitive disabilities, and the usual range of essential but near meaningless diagnostic labels. Will he, like Takkin and Andrew, develop a psychotic disorder over the next seven years? Does he, in a sense, have only a few relatively good years left?
We look at him, and we see features of an unnamed syndrome that continues to play out. We see uncoordinated growth, as though his cells were a mosaic of developmental clocks. Small feet, short legs, persistent mandibular growth after maxillary has stopped. He too will need dental surgery.
There is something we cannot name that is ongoing. We assume the same process will continue to affect his brain development over at least the next decade.
How do we live with this? How do other parents of children with short lifespans or degenerative neurologic disorders live?
We live in the moment and in the past. We take photographs of good times. We spend our time and our money to have good experiences for him now, because his future is grimmer than most. Not hopeless, but not particularly hopeful.
We don't spend our time looking for a fix or a cure. We are decades from being able to fix this type of problem. Maybe centuries. Better to spend the time we have building memories.
Being the best we can be.
- fn -
[1] While we known almost nothing of natural history or epidemiology of psychosis with developmental disorders, we have hints like this preprint.
Emphases mine, the research community suspects that our definitions of "autism" and "schizophrenia" are at best incomplete, at worst completely misleading. This knowledge has not made its way into the general psychiatric community.
Expression of autism spectrum and schizophreni... [Schizophr Res. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI
Copy number variants (CNVs) associated with neuropsychiatric disorders are increasingly being identified. While the initial reports were relatively specific, i.e. implicating vulnerability for a particular neuropsychiatric disorder, subsequent studies suggested that most of these CNVs can increase the risk for more than one neuropsychiatric disorder. Possibly, the different neuropsychiatric phenotypes associated with a single genetic variant are really distinct phenomena, indicating pleiotropy. Alternatively, seemingly different disorders could represent the same phenotype observed at different developmental stages or the same underlying pathogenesis with different phenotypic expressions.
... ASD and schizophrenia associated with 22q11.2DS should be regarded as two unrelated, distinct phenotypic manifestations, consistent with true neuropsychiatric pleiotropy...
In this particular small study with a particular autism-spectrum-related genotype, the incidence of psychosis resembled the general population.
I have created an RSS Feed to track research on the relationship between developmental disorders and psychosis.
