What's you opinion of the Jani Schofield media circus? I've only just found out about this girl after seeing her on Australian 60 Minutes.

What do you think of her diagnosis of child-onset schizophrenia?

I've written about her at my blog. She has been the subject of a mountain of words written on the internet, most of it utter nonsense.

Stuff to read and view (if you have endless free time)

Link to video of a news story about Jani and other girls diagnosed with “childhood schizophrenia”
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/inside-...a-10090286

Link to the ABC 20/20 story at the Australian 60 Minutes web site
"The lost children"
reporter Jay Schadler, producer Claire Weinraub.
http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/artic...id=1037278

"Jani’s at the mercy of her mind"
Shari Roan
Los Angeles Times August 1st 2009.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/l...ory?page=1
[Jani has been the subject of many stories in the Los Angeles Times newspaper]

"Hushing the intruders in her brain"
Shari Roan
Los Angeles Times December 29th 2009.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/29/...-2009dec29

Jani’s Journey.org
http://www.janisjourney.org/

"The 7-year-old-schizophrenic"
Oprah.com
http://www.oprah.com/health/The-7-Year-O...izophrenic

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification for short)
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_lin...nification

Synesthesia
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Daniel Tammet (an intellectually gifted autistic synesthete savant who experiences Ordinal Linguistic Personification)
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet

This post was last modified: 04-19-2010 05:28 AM by Lili Marlene.

Again? I only saw the 20/20 report on her.

That poor girl... I heard she is doing a bit better now.

http://www.janisjourney.org/ That is her website.

I read about this girl a few weeks ago when I stumbled across an article written about her.  I really don't know what to think as I don't know enough to say, but I don't think the medical profession does either.  I felt so incredibly sad for her and her family, they have all suffered so much, and it makes me shudder reading about those incredibly powerful drugs that she has had pumped into her.

Maybe she does have schizophrenia, or maybe she has autism and Synesthesia, or maybe all 3, who knows?  I think she is very rare and incredibly gifted, I think she is so unusual, different and intelligent that she experiences the world in a very different way and walks on a different plane to the majority of people.

I did think that the descriptions of her sounded very similar to my son when he was younger.  He had up to 12 imaginary cats and he rarely slept, was incredibly active even in the womb just like Jani's mother described and had a very short attention span, he was almost permanently distraught, and to this day he HATES being called by his given name, he insists on being called by names of his choosing.

I hope they can get to the bottom of it, get the support they need and that Jani and her family can be happy.

Very interesting. Childhood schizophrenia is rare.

It took forever just watching the first link. It's fascinating but also probably the saddest and most disturbing thing I've ever seen. I don't see any autism there. Jani seems much more afflicted. The other girls I'm not sure what's going on but it could also be some behavioral problems. Children are growing up way too fast these days and the things they see and hear all the time can't help in our world. The drugs are terrible and can also cause so many problems. Schizophrenia and psychosis makes sense with Jani. Her parents are also kind of peculiar in some ways too. Maybe it's the stress and everything their daughter is going through.

I was distracted at the abcnews link by...

Video: Man smothered by his lover's breast.
Man Nearly Killed by His Lover's Breast

^ That seems kind of funny.

Obviously a top quality news service!

I thought that kind of thing only happened to nursing infants.

On a serious note, while I have no reason to expect to find people who know a heap about schizophrenia here, has anyone heard of any other case in which a schizophrenic's hallucinations consist of imaginary friends who all have names that are things that are learned in a set sequence (numbers, degrees, hours in the day, days of the week, the planets etc)? I've never heard of any other case of schizophrenia that is remotely like this.

The whole Jani thing brings to mind two movies and a book - the autobiography "Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet, and those wonderfully creepy 1940s "Cat People" movies directed by Val Lewton.

I think the doctors have it right with schizophrenia. If there's a spectrum with schizophrenia, it might be on the more severe end. It's very troubling and clearly biological. She will likely need to be institutionalized if she can't improve with the violent behavior. I question the parenting as well to some extent the way they were fighting in another room during filming. Things like that can certainly exacerbate things. She needs and deserves the very best care and treatment available.

Savantism isn't limited to autists, so Jani may be the picture of what a numerical savant and synesthete combined with severe schizophrenia looks like.

Unrelated to that thought, there has been confusion of diagnosis between autistic spectrum and schizophrenia due to the hypersensitivities of autists being perceived as the hallucinations of schizophrenics, though probably not visa-versa, as schizophrenics generally assign a perpetrator for the sensation (Jani's rat). I suspect my pre-ASD schizoaffective diagnosis was due in part to this sort of confusion.

QFT ^

I really truly think that the timing of treatments (for whatever ails one and especially a child) is soooooooo important....

How easy would it be to create a defense mechanism to escape the pain of the world....I am surprised there are not more people with this kind of issue.. BUT the fact is not long ago NO CHILD was ever Dx'd..this is new... (and why must be looked at!)

What I really mean to say is this:   The drugs that are given (and given more and more freely) are not meant for children (and are still not actually ok'd for children).  

These strong drugs - that are used on kids and used BEFORE any (or correct!) dx's are made ... HAVE REAL DAMAGING side effects.  A developing brain can be altered Irrevocably!

I believe this strongly... (if anyone wants I can post a fairly common (in the US) story of 3 and 4 year old kids on 6 or 8 drugs....oh, and the kid gets worse...and they called that "helping")

Heck - how many adults do we personally know who were given a drig for one thing - and then afterwards got dx'd with something else?! ( a neighbor was thought to (DX'D WITH!!) have alzeimers-- it turned out her other medications caused it.... sorry I could and would go on and on and on  on the dangers of drugs...

PARTICULARLY Anti-psychotics.

I found it sad how parents couldn't find treatment for their daughter because she was too young. Most places don't treat 6 year old schizophrenics and it looked like she had it from birth.

They even had to get two apartments, one for their son and one for their daughter to keep them apart because she was violent towards him. That makes it hard for the parents too because now they can't sleep together or even have sex because you can't leave a child alone in the apartment while you sleep in the other apartment. Plus it was more expensive because of double rent and bills to pay.

So did I. lol That video was funny.

I share Atypical's great concern about the types of drugs this child has been given, and I also share Atypical's concern about the too-common practice of medicos prescribing drugs before they make a correct diagnosis.

Two things amaze me about the many comments and responses I've read about Jani's story:

- I've not seen anyone else consider the full implications of the child's reported IQ score in understanding the child's condition and situation. I do a Google search on the terms "Highly gifted" and "Jani Schofield" and I only find 1 page - written by me. The term "highly gifted" isn't just a nice compliment that I've plucked out of the air, it could be regarded as a type of diagnosis, an educational or psychological diagnosis. There's a whole body of literature about children who are in the various ranges of giftedness, but I've seen no evidence that Jani's parents or doctors have read any of it.

- there don't seem to be too many people identifying one obvious possible reason why Jani's schizophrenia medications aren't working - that she doesn't have schizophrenia.