“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want” (Psalm 23).

 

1. “When I was born the common view was that nurture decided almost everything. In the decades that followed the emphasis shifted to nature. In the last twenty years, people have talked more broadly about the way nature and nurture propel each other… but having children has made me wonder if a third element is involved, some unknowable inflection of spirit or divinity.” Tomorrow’s Forum guest Andrew Solomon wrote these words in his book about exceptional children in ordinary families called Far from the Tree.[i]

 

It is one of the most important books I have read in the last decade with chapters titled “Deaf,” “Dwarfs,” “Down Syndrome,” “Autism,” “Disability,” “Prodigies,” “Rape,” “Crime,” “Transgender.” He writes about how important it is for parents of severely disabled children to believe in something bigger than one’s self, something like God.[ii] He feels convinced that love does not come in finite quantities but that every kind of love ultimately supports other kinds of love.

 

Solomon writes about the “great social experiment called deinstitutionalization” which reduced the number of people suffering from schizophrenia in long-term custodial care in the United States from more than a half a million in 1950 to some forty thousand today.[iii] Now “150,000 people with schizophrenia are homeless; one in five people with schizophrenia is homeless in any given year.”[iv]

 

Solomon explains the isolation and loneliness of schizophrenia. Usually this disease emerges in late adolescence after parents and children have bonded. He writes that like Alzheimer’s it is, “an illness not of accrual but of replacement and deletion, rather than obscuring the previously known person, this disease to some extent eliminates that person.” He explains the tragedy of this disease which can, “take away the ability to connect to or love or trust another person, the full use rational intelligence… the basic faculty of physical self-care and large areas of self-awareness and analytic clarity.”

 

Solomon says, “Most famously, the schizophrenic disappears into an alternative world of voices that he erroneously perceives to be external.” Sometimes this person experiences visual and even olfactory hallucinations that, “make a world full of actual threats into a writhing hell of inescapable terrorization.”[v]

[i] Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (NY: Scribner, 2012)

[ii] “Paradoxically, however, parents of disabled children often achieve a feeling of control by making a firm and positive affirmation of their lack of control. The most important thing, often, is a belief in something bigger than one’s own experience. The most common source of coherence is religion, but it has many mechanisms. You can believe in God, in the human capacity for good, in justice, or simply love.” “Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.” Ibid., 371 and 700.

[iii] Ibid., 314.

[iv] It probably goes without saying that from 1950 to 2010 the population increased from 157.8 million to 312.2 million. Ibid., 329.

[v] Ibid., 295.