Your Child’s Disorder May Be Yours, Too

[Guest guest]

December 9, 2007

Your Child’s Disorder May Be Yours, Too

By BENEDICT CAREY

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/fashion/09diagnosis.html

BY age 2 it was clear that the boy had a sensibility all his own,

affectionate and distant at the same time, often more focused on

patterns and objects than the people around him.

He was neither naturally social like his mother, nor an early and gifted

reader like his father. Quirky, curious, exuberant, he would leap up and

dance across the floor after solving a problem or winning a game, duck

walking like an N.F.L. receiver posing for a highlight film.

Yet after Phil and Schwarz received a diagnosis for their son,

, of high functioning autism, they began to think carefully about

their own behaviors and histories.

Mr. Schwarz, a software developer in Framingham, Mass., found in his

son’s diagnosis a new language to understand his own life. His

sensitivities when growing up to loud noises and bright light, his own

diffidence through school, his parents’ and grandparents’ special

intellectual skills — all echoed through his and ’s behavior, like

some ancient rhythm.

His son’s diagnosis, Mr. Schwarz said, “provided a frame in which a

whole bunch of seemingly unrelated aspects of my own life growing up fit

together for the first time.”

Researchers have long known that many psychiatric disorders and

developmental problems run in families. Children born to parents with

bipolar disorder, in which moods cycle between euphoria and depression,

run about eight times the normal risk for developing a mood problem.

Those born to parents with depression run three times the usual risk.

Attention and developmental disorders like autism also have a genetic

component.

AS more youngsters than ever receive diagnoses of disorders — the number

has tripled since the early 1990s, to more than six million — many

parents have come to recognize that their own behavior is symptomatic of

those disorders, sometimes in a major, but more commonly, in a minor

way. In effect, the diagnosis may spread from the child to other family

members, forcing each to confront family frustrations and idiosyncrasies

that they might prefer to have left unacknowledged.

“It happens very frequently, with all sorts of disorders, from

attention-deficit difficulties to mood problems like bipolar disorder,”

said Dr. Fritz, a child psychiatrist and academic director of

Bradley Hospital in Providence, R.I., the largest child-psychiatry

hospital in the country. “Sometimes it’s a real surprise, because the

child is the first one in the family ever to get a thorough evaluation

and history. The parents are there, and they begin to see the pattern.”

But diagnosing an adult through his or her child has its risks,

psychiatrists say. In an act of solidarity, parents may exaggerate

similarities between their thinking and behavior and their son’s or

daughter’s. Families desperate to find a diagnosis for a troubled child

are also prone to adopt a vague label — bipolar disorder, say, which is

not well understood in young children — and attribute all variety of

difficulties to it, when the real source may be elsewhere.

But psychological experts say traces of a disorder in the family tree

are very often real, and the stickier issue is what to do once they surface.

Depending on the family, for instance, one parent may not want to

shoulder the responsibility for having “passed on” the behavior problem,

they say. “The adult may have spent a lifetime compensating for the

problem, as well, and is still struggling with it and would rather not

be identified that way,” said Dania Jekel, executive director of the

Asperger’s Association of New England.

Openness can nonetheless have its benefits, say parents who have chosen

to accept their contribution to a child’s diagnosis. Self-examination,

for instance, may lead to an appropriate diagnosis for the adult.

Norine Eaton, 51, of ville, N.Y., reared two boys who were

diagnosed with attention deficit disorders. “The younger one was

literally climbing out second-floor windows, climbing bookcases, onto

counters,” she said. “Nothing was safe in the house. It was insanity.”

After the boy and his brother each received a diagnosis of attention

deficit disorder, Ms. Eaton sought treatment at the Center for Children

and Families at the State University at Buffalo, where she now works.

She soon began thinking about her own behavior, past and present. She

had long had difficulty focusing on even simple jobs, like paying bills

on time and remembering and keeping appointments.

She decided to have one of her sons’ psychologists evaluate her for

attention problems. The symptoms of attention deficit disorder, which

some scientists now see as a temporary delay in the maturing of the

brain, can last through adulthood, but it almost always shows up first

in childhood. To make a proper diagnosis, doctors like to see some

evidence of a problem in childhood — evidence that can be hard to come by.

“In my case, I went to school here in Buffalo, and I dug through some

boxes and found reports going back to elementary school,” Ms. Eaton

said. “Sure enough, they said things like, ‘Disorganized,’ and ‘Has

trouble paying attention.’”

She now takes a stimulant medication, she said, that helps her focus

enough to compensate for the problem, by making calendars, notes to

herself, and responding to invitations and messages on time. Once it’s

out in the open, knowledge of a parent’s diagnosis or behavioral

tendencies can ease strained relations in a family, especially if the

previously unappreciated disability contributed to the rupture.

Halpern, 76, a retired physicist living in Massachusetts, began to

review his own life not long after hearing a radio interview with an

expert on Asperger’s syndrome. He immediately recognized himself as a

textbook case, he said, and decided to call his daughter, whom he hadn’t

spoken to in 10 years. He wanted to apologize, he said, “for my

inadequacy as both a father and a husband to her mother.”

But as soon as he started explaining, he said, his daughter cut him off.

“That’s Asperger’s,” she told him. “She knew,” he said. “She had been

looking into it herself, wondering if in fact I had it.”

Mr. Halpern said that over several calls they shared feelings and agreed

“to work on our new relationship and see how far we can take it.” The

two now talk regularly, at least once a week, he said.

Children made miserable by a psychiatric or developmental disorder may

not always want company; but they often long for evidence that they

aren’t the only ones putting a burden on the family, some psychiatrists

say. Having a parent with the same quirks who can talk about it eases

the guilt a child may feel. The child has a fellow traveler, and in some

families maybe more.

“When we got reports that our son was not interacting in school, that he

was very quiet, slouching, unusual — we said, ‘Well, that’s us; our

family is like that,’” said Shanfield, 54, a social worker living

in Newton, Mass.

AFTER her son’s difficulties were diagnosed as a learning deficit, a

neuro-lingual disorder, she quickly identified some of the same traits

in herself. “It was very therapeutic for me,” she said. “I had known I

was different from an early age, and now I had a definition that could

at least explain some of that. I also told my father, a man now in his

80s, and he was very moved by it.” He has since talked openly about

painful memories from growing up, and during his time raising his own

family, that were all but off-limits before, she said, and become more

tolerant of his own past mistakes and others’.

It can alter the present, too, if parent and child have enough common

ground. Mr. Schwarz, the software developer in Framingham, said he

became in some ways like a translator for his son, who’s now 16.

“I think there are a lot of parents of kids with these diagnoses who

have at least a little bit of the traits their kids have,” Mr. Schwarz

said. “But because of the stigma this society places on anything

associated with disability, they’re inhibited from embracing that part

of themselves and fully leveraging it to help their kids.”

New York Times Company

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