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Parents Suffer Too
By Richard | May 5, 2008
Parents are autism’s hidden victims
Paul Nyhan | Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sharky Munat was 2 years old when the police came.
For 45 minutes the toddler’s screams pierced the thin walls of his mother’s two-bedroom apartment, until a neighbor finally called the cops.
His mother was used to screaming from her unusual child, who cried for hours if she simply laughed while watching television. But Lillie Addams felt sick when a police officer stopped them to check her son for bruises as they walked to the park.
The officer quickly realized there was no attack — he was just one of “those kinds of kids” — but his mother wouldn’t know the kind was autistic for two more years.
“Check it out, buddy. If you keep it up, they are going to take you away,” the one-time ballet dancer told her son once the officer let them go. Then she sat on a park bench and cried for an hour.
Children have autism, but parents are often invisible casualties. Their child’s disorder ricochets through their lives, breaking up marriages, draining bank accounts and robbing them of sleep. University of Washington researchers found these parents, among all with disabled children, suffer the highest levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and parenting stress.
Since Sharky was diagnosed, his mother has dealt with depression, chest-seizing anxiety attacks, insomnia and incessant guilt that she wasn’t doing enough.
“It’s this overwhelming sense of powerlessness,” Addams said. “I feel blamed by society, by insurance companies. As if it was somehow our fault.” MORE
Topics: Parents |