First person account: Growing up with a schizophrenic mother

Abstract

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. © 1989 Oxford University Press.