First person account: growing up with a schizophrenic mother.
In this essay, I have tried to present the way in which I grew up and matured in an environment where there was little or no nurturing due to the disease process of paranoid schizophrenia in my mother. I have attempted to describe my own particular method of dealing with my feelings in my attempt to survive my early home life and somehow emerge intact. As an adult, I had to halt in the path I had chosen and seek professional help in the form of psychotherapy to begin to unlearn my early survival tactics. Although they had been effective during my childhood, once I was no longer living with an active schizophrenic patient, these tactics no longer served me well. Indeed, they could have been my undoing.
Crosby
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D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012563:Schizophrenia, Paranoid / Q000523:psychology*