[HeadlessHorseman]

Girl With Schizophrenia Loses Touch With Reality and her poor family must deal with her.

[Robert440]

I don't suffer from my Schizophrenia i enjoy it....Muhahahaha some of the f'ed up thoughts that i have are pretty entertaining....Some of the Delusions are even better....

[Oswald2001]

Life has it's challenges.

That's for sure.

Best of luck to them all.

[mintycbo]

I seen their story on Discovery channel awhile back.
That's terrible for the family, but I feel some sort a way for the little girl.
She's going to have a rough life...

[Karma]

Haven't watched all the vids, but it's actually quite scary when you think about it. If at the age of 5 her thoughts already turned violent, what happens when she's a teenager and an adult? Hopefully meds will keep her stable, but I remember reading somewhere about some woman stabbing someone to death because she was schizophrenic and the voices told her to. It's also interesting to me because I have always been of the opinion that evil people are born, not necessarily turning evil later. I think it's something missing or mis-wiring in the brain.
That is one scary little girl. How many other are out there like it!

[Sharon]

Thanks, will watch these later with interest when I get more time

[Pollucy]

Michael actually admitted to hitting and starving Jani when she was younger, as well as shaking her at 2 months old and being violent towards his wife in front of their daughter. These confessions were on his blog but were later deleted, although a lot of people saw it and can verify them word for word, some people even took screenshots.

If Jani wasn't held ALL the time, she would scream. In retrospect, yes, I should have let her cry. The pediatrician said she would cry for 15 or 20 minutes and fall asleep. Except she didn't. 2 hours later she was still going. I couldn't listen to her crying because I assumed she was suffering and needed me. So I kept going to her, over and over and over and over again. If you want to know what that is like, go to bed and have somebody wake up every 20 minutes. Continue this for weeks on end. Severe sleep deprivation has a similar effect to psychosis: it deprives you of the ability to process logically. When Jani was screaming in her crib that night, I should have just let her cry it out. But I didn't. I went to her again and in the process, for a second, I snapped. I picked her up and screamed "Why won't you sleep?" She started crying harder, which immediately snapped me back to what I had done. I felt awful. I sat in the hall, holding her as she cried, wishing to God I could rewind seconds back in time. Eventually, she calmed down and fell asleep.

From Michael's May 2, 2009 blog post, about his rages and his violent anger:
“I have had to recall a memory of once trying to throw Susan out of our moving car because I was so angry.”
“Jani saw some of my violent rages. She has seen me hit her mother and her mother hit me back.”

“We tried everything. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Hitting her back (I won't tell you how many people told us that all she needed was a good beating). We took all her toys away. We gave her toys away. We tried starving her. We did EVERYTHING we could to try and break her. Nothing worked.”

The following quote is still on Michael's blog:
“The violence became so bad that at times Susan and I both lost it and hit Jani as hard as we could. We hit in impotent rage.”
These quotes, especially in context, raise some alarming red flags, among with questioning thoughts. Was Jani actually violent before her parents were, or was it the other way around? Was Jani simply defending herself? Why would her parents try to 'break her' if she was a misbehaving child, rather than 'make her obedient'? And a child will learn the behavior they are exposed to the most and adopt it. Jani saw many of Michael's fits and often was the one comforting Susan afterward, according to Michael's blog. If Jani was exposed to that behavior often, it was no wonder that she became violent and struck out, if she wasn't the one being hit first. She was likely rarely exposed to anything else, what with how Michael reported that him and Susan had to constantly be with Jani to wear her out.

Also, another slightly related quote from Michael's blog shows that he may not be the best person to deal with Jani's illness, even though he claims that without him around she falls apart.
“We saw Jani today and she was at her most psychotic in several weeks. I have a nice welt on my arm where she hit me when I refused to call her toy rat '99.' Of course, I was goading her, but I wanted to see if she could deal with it. Of course, she couldn’t.” The bold part is concerning. He would goad his own mentally unstable daughter, knowingly and purposefully, into a state of mind where she would be dangerous to herself and to others? An argument that could be presented to support his side is, “But he shouldn’t let his child have her way all the time, especially if she throws temper tantrums like that.” Which would be sensible in any other case, except in the placement of his blog, the timing of it and the date it was posted. He knew that Jani was ill. She was in the hospital at this time, and, as he says, “the most psychotic he had seen her in weeks,” yet he purposefully goaded her on when he knew that she would be a danger to herself if he made her frustrated or angry. He was also well aware that if he said her “friends” weren’t real, she would be upset and a danger to herself and those surrounding her, as he had posted about it, before this entry, in his blog. Goading your mentally unstable, psychotic daughter into an angry mood isn’t frustration or a simple mistake, it’s bad parenting.

So yeah, maybe they aren't such incredible parents as they'd like us to believe..