Child seemingly born mentally ill..

I think it is suffice to say that it is an awful situation all round..

 

Do you see anyone 'blaming' her for placing a burden on her family?

In situations like this, when people say 'poor parents', it is showing sympathy for an awful situation that no parent would want to have to face. It is a burden on her family as much as it is a burden on her, but it is not her doing. It is a disease, just one of those things that happens and her parents are having to deal with it to the best of their abilities. They are not to blame, nor is she.

Both have their downsides..

 

You can't compare depression to this girl's disease. It would be akin to comparing cancer to a stroke.

And it is a disease, something she has had since birth. As a parent, I cannot even begin to imagine the horror her parents are going through or what she is going through. This is what nightmares are made of for parents. That and someone taking your child or your child developing cancer, and all the other horror stories that keep parents up at night. Having to refuse to come and pick her up at school and legally abandoning her so that she could get some help.. This is the stuff that brings parents to their knees.. And they are trying to bring up another child and suffer from depression themselves..

As Marquis correctly points out, she will not have a choice. Never. One day the voices may tell her to kill herself or they may tell her to kill someone else. Depression is a debilitating illness and yes, suicide can at times look like a viable option in those darkest days. I too have been there, but I chose not to take that final step... But in no way can it even compare to the nightmare that is this girl's life presently or what her future will hold, however short or long as it may be.

 

Half way through the article, it discusses her intelligence and how she is a "voracious reader".

Although she can't sit still long enough to read a book, she is a voracious learner. She's also bright -- her IQ is 146. Over the years, Michael and Susan have entertained her by feeding her information well beyond her years: specifics of evolution, the Roman Empire, the periodic table of elements.

"What is the atomic symbol for tungsten?" Susan asks.

"W."

Jani talks about living in Calalini.

Where is Calalini?

She leans in to whisper her secret.

"Calalini is on the border between this world and my other world."
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I think her being so bright was quite clear throughout the article.

Is it her world at all or her psychosis speaking? Did she give it the name? Or one of the voices in her head?

The sad face is because that this is normal to this child.. This isn't imaginative play. This is full blown psychosis where she has no control over her actions, words or thoughts.

When I was 8 years of age, the son of my parents best friends had started to show signs of his psychosis when he was 12. To this day, and it has been many many years since then, I will never forget his balancing on our balcony, a couple of stories up, with half his body hanging off the balcony and his legs pointing towards the balcony while he laughed madly. And he was swaying.. Then he turned around and lay down lengthways across this balcony and I just remember his older sister begging him to come down and my being too terrified to speak. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia many years later, but the psychosis had started then.. And it was heartbreaking and terrifying. This kid would literally bounce off the walls. If he wasn't on the go, he would sit there and punch himself in the head. For him, it was the voices telling him to do it. It was not him.

He also gave his alternate world names.. But was it him? Or his psychosis?

The sad face is because this girl's identity, her true identity will never develop. Her personality will amount to the voices in her head. They direct her every thought, wants, likes and dislikes..

At five months, Jani would press whatever button on a toy you told her to push. She began to talk at 8 months. At 13 months she knew the alphabet and her numbers to ten. By 18 months, she was speaking in grammatically correct full sentences.

We thought we understood then. Jani was a genius. That was why she needed constant stimulation and never slept. We drove ourselves day after day, believing that one day Jani would be able to stimulate herself and this would end.

At two years old, Jani was precocious and adorable. She would chat up anybody and everybody. She had no fear of strangers or climbing six feet above the ground on the jungle gym. She was constantly on the move.

Shortly before her third birthday, Jani started to play with “Low,” an imaginary cat. Kids have imaginary friends all the time, so we thought nothing of it. She would say “Come on, Low! Let’s go play!” and run across the room. She talked with “Low” all the time.

By this time Jani could count to one thousand, so we didn’t find it strange when another imaginary friend appeared named “400”, who Jani described as an orange tabby cat.

But then Jani began to change. She started changing her name, often several times a day. She became Wednesday, then Hot Dog, then Blue Eyed Tree Frog. We didn’t find this strange, either. Kids often change their names. But we were growing uneasy now because when somebody called Jani by her name, she would scream in a rage at them: I’M NOT JANUARY! She started to withdraw from the other kids she had once loved playing with, spending more of her time alone with her imaginary friends. The happy, smiling girl started to fade, replaced by one who seemed angry at everything and everybody.

By four years old, people were starting to suggest that Jani might be autistic or have Asperger’s Syndrome. So we had her tested. She didn’t, but she did have a 146 IQ. Once again, we thought that Jani was just brilliant, if a little eccentric. She loved to learn. Whatever you cared to teach her, she would learn and she could retain anything. She learned the periodic table (her favorite element is Tungsten). She learned about evolution. She loved science and math. We started making plans to put her in a gifted school.

(source)
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The blog then goes on to talk about her rages and hysterics.. her loneliness.. her violence.. To her suicide attempts.. To this:

After three months with little improvement, UCLA diagnosed Jani with child onset schizophrenia. When in a psychotic state, no one could reach Jani. She would bite the furniture until her mouth bled because she said it made her teeth feel better. She hit her head against the wall. She tried to jump out the window at UCLA.

300 mg of Thorazine stopped all this. It did not drug Jani into a stupor. Rather, it made her social. On Thorazine, she would play with the other kids. On Thorazine, she stopped talking and playing with people and animals that weren’t there. On Thorazine she stopped kicking the hospital dog and staff who she loved (and us).

But that dose of Thorazine came at a terrible cost. It put her into Dystonia, and because she freed from the psychosis, she was terrified. We held her as she screamed in terror that she couldn’t swallow.

So the doctors had to come down on the Thorazine. And every day we would watch, heartbroken, as she slipped away from us again into the world of her delusions and violence, which isolated her from everybody but us. And eventually, even we couldn’t reach her anymore.

Unable to get Jani placed in a safe environment where we could still be a part of her life, I began to consider my original idea of sending Susan and Bodhi away so Bodhi would be safe. This came back to me the day that we visited Jani and had not brought her favorite foods. She starting trying to bite Bodhias if to eat him. She was trying to bite him but crying at the same time, saying “bye, bye, Bodhi. I love you.”

UCLA had no answers. The head psychiatrist there had never seen a case like this in his thirty years of work.

(Source)
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And the tragedy continues, page after page.. to his saying that because she is so intelligent, she is more likely to kill herself, but that risk is then lessened because she is in a loving home and is loved.

I guess I am looking at this from a parent's point of view and not as some sort of fascinating story. I have to admit, foolishly, by the time I got to the last page of the father's story, I was in tears. I am still crying. Imagine the absolute fear of the knowledge that your child's intelligence is more likely going to end in her suicide because of this disease?