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Product Description
Foreword by Terrie Moffitt, PhD Professor of Neuroscience, Kings College London, Institute of Psychiatry, and Duke University
Every family has secrets; only some secrets are lethal. In Victoria Costello's family mental illness had been given many names over at least four generations until this inherited conspiracy of silence finally endangered the youngest members of the family, her children.
In this riveting story--part memoir, detective story, and scientific investigation--in the tradition of the story of Henrietta Lacks, Costello recounts how the mental unraveling of her seventeen-year-old son Alex compelled her to look back into family history for clues to his condition. Eventually she tied Alex's descent into hallucinations and months of shoeless wandering on the streets of Los Angeles to his great grandfather's suicide on a New York City railroad track in 1913.
But this insight brought no quick relief. Within two years of Alex's di! agnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, both she and her youngest son succumbed to two different mental disorders: major depression and anxiety disorder.
Costello depicts her struggle to get the best possible mental health care for her sons and herself, treatment that ultimately brings each of them to full recovery. In the process, she discovers startling new neuroscience and genetic findings that explain how clusters of mental illness traverse family generations.
From this intensely personal and carefully documented account of her full decade of treatment and international research, readers will come away with a better understanding of the negative emotional and behavioral patterns that continue to wreak havoc in many families--including new evidence linking and explaining generations of depression and anxiety, self-medication with alcohol and drugs, even psychosis and suicides.
For example, Costello shares the results of long-term U.K. and European family ! studies identifying the earliest signs of this "lethal inherit! ance" th at can be passed on from grandparents to parents and grandchildren. She tracks ongoing clinical trials to reverse the courses of these diseases through early intervention with the latest evidence-based treatments.
The author closes by translating what she's learned into a set of ground rules for "New, New Parenting," advice to help individuals and families recover from addictions and mental disorders, and prevent their return in future generations.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #544124 in Books
- Published on: 2012-01-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 220 pages
