ABSTRACT
These children are often deeply cut off and immersed in their private delusory world. The extreme psychological pain which characterises their experience can easily overwhelm them - terror, confusion, panic, and madness take over. In attempting to gain relief from their mental tortures, they sometimes find it through inflicting their distress on others, and sometimes through bizarre behaviour whose purpose is to protect them from unbearable states of tension. When these defensive measures shut out or confuse the adults attempting to care for and educate them, the consequences can be devastating. Families, teachers and others in close contact become baffled, upset and acutely anxious. Below the surface of their conscious emotions, those affected by the children’s disturbance are likely to be enraged, terrified and disturbed in turn by their own emotional response, since these children do not respond in comprehensible ways to the ordinary demands of life, and they bewilder those around them. Having a psychotic child as part of a family usually means that the family home to some degree becomes like a hospital, providing special care for a distressingly fragile member, and making it hard for the rest of the family to recognise themselves as part of the ordinary world. To find ways to treat these children and help them to rejoin the human community, so that their appalling isolation and their family’s suffering can be ameliorated, is the aim of the work described in these pages.
