Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children

by Paul Raeburn

Book Overview

For those families dealing with children suffering from depression and mania, science reporter and writer Raeburn's memoir serves as a cautionary tale and an invaluable resource on the diseases and the various drugs and therapies available to ease the inner torment.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0767914376
• ISBN13: 9780767914376
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Does Diagnosis matter?

I had set this aside for reading as a professional duty but found it so compelling that I promoted it to my bedside. Paul Raeburn is a superb writer. That being said, I think it may be more useful to professionals than to parents. The mental health workers in this book do not come off well and it makes salutary reading. Raeburn is perturbed by his doctors' inability to make a "correct" diagnosis and proceed from diagnosis to specific treatment. Psychiatric diagnoses tend to be fuzzy (although this is by no means confined to psychiatry. How many diagnoses of "fibromyalgia" and "virus infection" are ever scientifically proven?). In children the labeling is further complicated by the wish to avoid diagnoses that stigmatize. The use of psychotropic medications in child psychiatry is often empirical with a "lets try this and see" approach. Some children are definitely made worse by Ritalin and Adderal and other "upper" type drugs. It may be that these include victims of a childhood version of manic-depressive illness, which Kraepelin originally described in adults. The Papalos's, in their book "The Bipolar Child", have extended the definition of this disorder rather more widely than most experts would agree with. For a more balanced viewpoint I would recommend "Do They Grow Out of It?" edited by Lily Hechtman and "Child Psychopharmacology" edited by B Timothy Walsh. I was surprised that no mention was made of telephone hotlines, which are a valuable resource for the suicidal teenager (the national line is 1-800-SUICIDE)and of WEB sites for cutters (see my review of Tracy Alderman's "Scarred Soul.")

Disturbing and Powerful

I just finished reading Acquainted With the Night and could relate to much of the struggle, frustration and helplessness felt by the author. It is a full time job raising a bipolar teen and I felt the author was able to capture the craziness that each episode can throw everyone in the family into - from the parents to the other siblings. No amount of psychotherapy ever really helps - it all boils down to the brain chemistry balance. That was made very clear in the last chapter when Alex is interviewed. If science can find the right mixture of meds, you can have the child back - if not, the child is lost and confused and angry and just left behind. We live in a community just like Ridgewood, but in Connecticut. Our special ed programs throw all the bipolar kids, ADD kids, other emotionally disturbed kids into one program and then let them get away with whatever they want. Very little learning really takes place. Yet, their IEP's will note significant progress toward achieving the goals. All of this is to keep the costs down so that the school district does not have to pay for specialized private school. There is very little structure, no follow through, no guidance, no real therapy, no learning. Raeburn touches on this point, but only briefly. While this book is a very honest and real account of life with emotionally and mentally ill children, it does not provide any direction, any solutions, any hope beyond "just wait and they might grow out of it..." which I find to be very troubling, especially from a writer and father who does have as many resources at his disposal as are and were available to Raeburn. While I do not agree with his wife's parenting style, it appear that Raeburn did very little but follow the advice of "professionals" without questionning any of their direction. I can't say that I would recommend this book to parents who are in the middle of this quest with their children. It is probably better for the insurance industry executives, public school administrators and policy makers in government. It may give them a better understanding of what it is really like. Those of us who are living through it already know.

Memoir at its searing best

Paul Raeburn is a brave and compassionate writer. In this narrative about his children's mental illness and the failure of his marriage, he has confessed his own failings and weaknesses about as much as I think is humanly possible. He has been faulted by other reviewers for the very failings that he has had the insight to recognize and report in himself, and surely he must have known that his book would garner such judgmental responses. He wrote it anyway, and I'm grateful to have been able to read it. Acquainted With the Night is powerful, memorable, and likely to be helpful for families who are dealing with mental illness. It is also a riveting story.

The best book I've ever read about mental illness

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

Essential reading for parents

Paul Raeburn is not perfect--no parent is. The author's painful self-examination of his family's response to the emergence of bipolar disorder in their son and the subsequent depression of their daughter, while the parents' marriage was unraveling, is difficult reading at times--and riveting. The ties of a family in which some members suffer from mood disorders are stretched to the breaking point. It is difficult to stay centered and remain calm as a parent of a child who has see-sawing mood swings, delusional thinking, and whose energy shifts from the mission-driven hyperactivity of mania to the near-catatonic lethargy of despair to the point of suicidality. Raeburn tells it like it was, not sparing himself nor his wife, and the only (minor) bit that I took issue with was his rhetorical question whether the marital strife caused the mood disorders in his kids. To that I say, not likely--many children with mood disorders live in happy, well-adjusted families--and they get bipolar disorder or depression all the same. It's genetic.