My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.
You can blame the schools for misdiagnosing ADHD, and you can blame them for a poor IEP, but you can't blame them for a child not having a normal life due to one of the most tragic diseases known to man.<p>Schizophrenia is not the kind of disease you can treat with an IEP, and it sounds like the author's son fell out of the system from a very young age. Trying to blame anything but genetics and development for his son's state is disingenuous - treating schizophrenia is a complicated, involved, and ultimately very stressful process for everyone involved, and in the end it can only bring someone on the brink of homelessness or self-harm into a situation where they can be stable most of the time, but never <i>all</i> of the time, or even almost always.<p>> The word “disability,” for instance, should have covered Tim and children like him.<p>ADHD or blindness are not even in the same room a schizophrenia. It's like comparing having six toes on your left foot to being comatose.<p>> If I were a legislator today, I’d mandate — and provide funding to ensure — that every teacher receive training in recognizing symptoms of mental illnesses.<p>Teachers have enough on their plate, and more importantly, that's not what teachers are for. It sounds like the author took his son to plenty of mental health professionals, and he still wasn't properly diagnosed until he was nearly an adult.<p>> I’d see that pediatricians are trained to make screening for mental health concerns a regular part of well-child exams.<p>Many mental health diseases don't manifest to the levels for proper diagnosis until adulthood, and even then the process of diagnosis is not scientific.<p>> I’d put much more money into community mental health services...<p>All of that sounds great, but mental health services are one of the first things cut into in a down economy.<p>> Tim is where he is today because of a host of public policy decisions we’ve made in this country.<p>No, he isn't. The author is wrong, and I'm sorry for that, but it's very unlikely that his son would have ever been a contributing member of society. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disease that cannot be treated like a 'special need.'