People Like Us, More Like: Dissecting Susan Vaught’s Freaks Like Us

So, every so often I read a YA book and it ends in a whirlwind that requires some serious time staring at a wall and thinking, just to let it all process. And by process, no, I don’t mean to decide whether I liked it or not, but instead to really stop and think about what it is I’ve read. In this case, it’s taken a week. I listened to Susan Vaught’s Freaks Like Us and enjoyed it, but found myself somewhat torn.

As with a number of other YA books released these last 12 months, it seems that mental health/disability and particularly schizophrenia has become a major talking point. For my studying/researching purposes, it’s great–there’s a lot of material to work with. In terms of general dissemination of information to your readers, I believe that this is an excellent way for young people to have a clearer idea of what’s happening in the world, to destigmatize traditionally maligned disabilities, to create a sense of empathy and to garner an understanding of what having a disability means on a more global level: for family, friends, teachers, classes, college, jobs, etc. Even the legal aspect of it–whether treatment can be had without including family, how much independence a young person has, and treatment requirements, as well as the necessary allowances schools must make for young people seeking medical help, are addressed in these texts. For all of these, I applaud–connecting this type of in-depth information to young people is a fantastic way to inform them and create social movement in an area that has been unknown for too long. At the same time, these texts walk a challenging line, as while they are fictional, they are, under the theory of critical citizenship, establishing some level of base-line knowledge for readers that, if incorrect, will not necessarily be recognized as such.

Either way, this book presents a first person narrative of the self-dubbed “Freak,” and his friends “Drip” and Sunshine. Together, as riders of the “short bus,” they’ve been lumped into classrooms with students who are far more aggressive than they; or, as Freak puts it, who have dangerous “alphabets.” Alphabets is a term that Freak uses regularly as a shorthand to refer to the diagnosis code that each of his peers has. While they don’t know the full extent of what the symptomology of these different codes is, they do know traits associated with each, and recognize certain bullies as more “dangerous.”

Intriguingly, the narrative indeed narrates the symptoms that Freak experiences from his illness: the reader hears the voices he hears, hears the confusion of his thoughts when he experiences it, understands why he clams up or freezes and hears his frustration when he’s not emoting in the manner he knows he wants to. This inside-out approach is telling, though not entirely new (see Zappia’s Made You Up, Leavitt’s Calvin, Scheff’s Schizo, and Shusterman’s Challenger Deep, amongst others). What it does do is emphasize the fact that, although schizophrenic, Freak is not dangerous, he’s not stupid, and he’s got an exciting future ahead of him.

The story itself is the unfolding investigation with both federal and local agents after Sunshine disappears. Throughout this investigation, there is the on-going question as to whether Freak might be responsible (and a critique of the assumption that mental illness=danger, which is disproven and highly criticized here) and in his own right, Freak struggles with medication needs/frustrations, with mental wanderings he can’t control, with deep-seeded doubt by the surrounding adults, including his father, as to whether he might be responsible. Tension is ratcheted up as no one knows whether Sunshine might have chosen to leave or whether she was abducted, and the first 24 hours–essential to the investigation–are equally trying for the friends she left behind.

What I Liked About It:

1. See above. The more knowledge, the better–and this one does some pretty interesting stuff in terms of mental health awareness. I like also that the protagonist is not a loner, which seems to be the default for YA schizophrenic protagonists.
2. I also really liked the tone of the book: there’s something earnestly accepting, even embracing, to it that strikes a cord with me.
3. Freak’s parents are military–something I *never* see in YA Lit! I really liked this element as an army brat myself, and really, really would like to see a narrative that develops this!
4. There is hope. No matter how bad things are, there is always this feeling of hope from Freak–he doesn’t give up on finding Sunshine, he isn’t crushed by others’ assumptions about him, he doesn’t even falter when bullies beat him to a point he has to be hospitalized. And that that scene–and it’s resulting legal ramifications is included in the text–I also really liked. Understanding that people are people, while a simple concept for some, seems to continually need to be addressed. Just watch the news.
5. Freak is no loner. It seems like in virtually all of the representations of YA schizophrenic kids I’ve seen, they tend to all be isolated, either by choice or necessity. Yet Freak has very close relationships with his two best friends, and is able to communicate with all quite clearly.  As schizophrenia is a unique diagnosis that can vary wildly from one individual to another, I believe that all sorts of different representations of how it manifests are essential to the canon . . . though I still like that this particular one is not alone.

What Could Use More Work:

1. While I loved that Freak isn’t isolated, it’s strange that he and his friends insist on calling themselves by the nicknames they assume others will call them. I saw this also in James Patterson’s YA read, The Homeroom Journals. And, honestly, it was one of the reasons why I put it down. I’m all for all people embracing and owning their unique differences; not so much for them to self-stigmatize, to the extent that these names–especially for people unfamiliar with the individuals–are bound to do.
2. I’m not sure I fully understood the Sunshine/Freak dynamic. Yes, I  get that something happened and, yes, I get that it was wonderful for them, and that Sunshine instigated. Yet, while it seems so pivotal, it almost feels like the author was trying to shield it, as though suggesting that young people with mental illness can’t possibly want those relationships. Which is clearly unfair and not true; so I’m not sure why it was treated in this manner.
3. The story’s about finding Sunshine, but it’s really about the struggles that adolescents with diagnoses face. I would really have liked more of an exploration of what was happening in their classroom, why Freak’s mom wanted to push for governmental change, and generally a bit more background about the Freak/Drip/Sunshine dynamic . . . more so than Freak telling that it’s there.
4. So what was in the locket? Freak makes a huge deal throughout about Sunshine’s locket, about how he’d never seen inside it, but she used it as a type of security blanket to deal with social anxiety. Surprised he didn’t look inside when the Federal Agent finally handed it over.
5. I would have liked a bit more about the protection network that Sunshine accessed, as well as her relationships with her brother and stepfather. This was all highly glossed over, yet it seemed essential to the plot.

Overall:

Read it. Or better, treat yourself to the Audible version–the narrator does a fantastic job of reading all those different voices! BUT think critically of this text as you enjoy it–there’s some interesting developments in the field it’s making, but also a few places–as outlined above–where it seems the author fell short.

 

 

Seeing Past the Stereotypes: YA Lit, Mental Health, and Mental Health Parity Laws

This past semester I had the opportunity to really dive into the nitty-gritty of disability literature and the theory pertaining to this, along with some of the research that’s been presented. In taking a look-see at what people are studying and publishing on in academia, the connection between disability studies and YA Lit is certainly alive and strong! And this makes perfect sense in light of the plethora of books that have come out in recent times (and old, to be honest Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty is still one of the most interesting and least PC that I’ve seen of late). We’ve seen waves of disease/illness YA lit, we’ve seen stirrings in relation to physical disability YA Lit, and what I’ve found myself most intrigued by (just in case you missed it in all my postings about mental health and YA Lit) are those dealing with various mental health related illnesses. This spring, we saw quite a few books dealing with schizophrenia, notably coinciding with major Congressional efforts to pass legislation broadening mental health care insurance protection and offerings, especially for children and young adults.

Why is this important? Well, let’s pitch an argument here. Let’s say you’re 15 (a fairly common onset age for schizophrenia). Maybe you sense something strange happening, or maybe you don’t (schizophrenia hits in many different ways). You’re also 15: you don’t want to stand out particularly, you don’t want to be considered “weird” and you certainly don’t want to have to ask your parents for psychiatric evaluation, should you even be prescient enough to know you might want to. Your parents know you’re in the throes of puberty and can’t tell whether you’re, you know, puberty-ing or whether there’s something else going on. Schizophrenia, like a number of other mental illnesses, responds best to early treatment. But parents, counselors, friends, etc, may or may not notice until extreme behaviors make it clear that something’s afoot. As a 15-year-old, most of your exposure has been to mental illness in movies, news, etc–all of which is quite negative. So how do you get treatment? And do you have to?

That’s where this new legislation is becoming more important. If approved and implemented, it expands mental health coverage, along with adding the ability for a minor to seek treatment independently. This is a huge step that provides some element of autonomy for adolescent mental health care, but also provides the possibility of their receiving mental health care treatment even if their parents do not have insurance–an issue for young people whose parents couldn’t afford the cost of therapists and psychiatrists.

 

                     

So it is, with these very exciting changes to stale federal mental health laws and this newfound attention to adolescent mental health, that this run of mental illness-related YA books has caught my attention. I previously wrote about All the Bright Places (teen depression/suicide), Dirty Secrets (hoarding–by mom, but depression of teen), Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar (various mental health issues, including obsesssion . . . and a fantasy world?) and Made You Look (schizophrenia). But so many more are being released weekly!

Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep is based on the struggles the author has seen has teen son, diagnosed with schizophrenia, try to overcome. The book itself is a beautiful blend of reality, ship life, and the confusing ups and downs related to the illness and the impact/constant fluctuation of medication. Ultimately, the reader feels Caden’s struggles, but also better understands the confusion of family and friends in trying to understand what’s happening, along with a closer understanding of the delicate balance treatment requires. There’s no “easy fix” or “one stop shop”–and the effects on the individual can be monumental. Shusterman walks the reader through both the emotional and physical impact of this experience, along with the balance necessary for treatment. Tellingly, we the readers see the exacerbation of Caden’s illness, even as the narrator doesn’t, even as his parents struggle with understanding that the behaviors are beyond the pale. Caden’s lengthy in-patient stint ends with the knowledge that treatment will continue, medication a necessary on-going need, and with pretty tamped-down expectations for the future.

Martine Leavitt’s Calvin is a bit more direct: the narrator has “an episode” in class, causing him to be taken to the hospital, and there the unraveling of his illness is made clear. His version of the illness covers visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as a sense of grandeur (the real life Calvin, a la Calvin and Hobbes fame? Only savable by the famous comic’s author? Hmmm.. . ) His functioning with the illness, though, is in marked contrast to what we see in Challenger Deep. While Caden has no sense that what he’s doing, thinking, feeling or experiencing is anything out of the normal, Calvin is struck with the contradiction: he recognizes that there can’t possibly be a live tiger speaking to him, yet it’s happening, and he can’t help but speak to it, feed it and care for it. While Caden’s experiences with the illness are generally debilitating, Calvin’s imbue him with a sense of purpose and desire to achieve a grandiose (ahem, stupid) journey midwinter across Lake Erie. While Caden’s friends abandon him, Calvin’s one friend rallies with him, taking the trek with him. In both, the parents are quite supportive, and have the financial means to help with the treatment. Ultimately, while Caden required extended in-treatment care to stabilize his illness with medication and therapy, Calvin has a couple of brief hospital stints, responds quite positively to medication seemingly right away, and continues on pondering college.

Both of these stand in contrast to Nic Scheff’s Schizo, where the schizophrenic narrator’s parents lack resources–emotional and financial–to help with this illness. Similarly, as previously elaborated on in a different post, Made You Look‘s protagonist has had a schizophrenic diagnosis since early childhood, resulting in years of treatment, therapy, medication, on and off swings and problems. While supportive and caring, treatment costs are an issue raised more than once in their family, and the lingering question of when in-treatment care is a necessary part of responsible parenting is also addressed. Yet her hope for the future eventually includes in-treatment care.

What does it all mean? Well, it means that authors are taking a close look at a highly-stigmatized, heavily maligned illness and humanizing it. Quite simply, they’re connecting young readers to individuals who aren’t mass murderers, who aren’t homeless, and who still have possibilities and exciting lives awaiting them. Also, they’re explaining a plethora of related issues that give pause to teens considering mental health treatment. In doing so, they explain and demonstrate the impact of their decision to seek this necessary treatment, leaving virtually no stone unturned, thereby allowing them to make informed–and hopefully smart–decisions related to their own health and well-being. These books explore emotional and financial impact on family; judgment of friends, teachers, and loved ones; long-term impact on the teen’s life and future; what treatment entails, and what it means in relation to schooling; medication, and what it means for the individual; and the list goes on.

Really interesting line of reading, clear legal/social/cultural connection–definitely some reads worth checking out!

 

Blurring Those Hazy Grays of Sanity v. Insanity: Francesca Zappia’s Made You Up

This summer, I’ve been working my buns off preparing research on a potential PhD topic blending the worlds of Law & Lit with YA Lit (my favorite worlds!) and tapping into the trends in overlap between them, of which there are many. Along the way, in addition to noticing trends, I’ve become aware of the fact that a) scholars need to be paying attention to what’s going on in this field!!, b) YA Lit today is doing things that no other literary field has done and in ways that are new; and c) what’s up with the fact that serious, genetic mental health in YA Lit has kind of been brushed to the side?

Of course, YA Lit touching on more  “acceptable” YA mental health matters like depression, suicide and eating disorders is out there. YA Lit delving into schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar disorder, and the like? Well, until very recently, there really hasn’t been much of it.

Francesca Zappia’s Made You Up hit an interesting chord here: on the one hand, I don’t know that I just loved the story itself (it felt a little. . . I dunno, twee?, at times) but the ideas that she’s rolled into this little enchilada are definitely worth taking a look see.

The story follows Alex, recently ejected from one high school and forced to do community service at another until she’s graduated. Alex’s family is on the lower middle class side, and she tries to help out at home with a part time job. She’s trying to move past her faux pas that landed her in a different high school for one year, trying to get through the coursework and apply to colleges and generally stay under the radar, but it’s unavoidable for her to do so.

Not because of her fire engine red hair, not because she rides a giant ancient bike in a cars-only kind of school, not because she’s the new girl, but because there are only so many ways for a high schooler to hide paranoid schizophrenia from her classmates. Alex is quite the heroine, though, when it comes to trying to tackle the problem: she knows this is an issue for her and has some interesting coping strategies to help her work her way through this. Because she’s still heart-breakingly young and naive, and because it’s not difficult to see the mistakes she makes in trying to fit in and conform at the school, it’s hard not to sympathize with her plight.

But the new school isn’t the worst thing that can happen for her, and she’s actually pleasantly surprised to find herself immersed in a small circle of friends, intrigued by the school’s super-genius bad boy, and trying to see the light at the end of the high school tunnel with her college applications. Not everything at this new school is quite as it seems, though, and the number and type of eccentricities unique to it are enough to cause Alex to question what’s really happening, who’s really there and what she’s really seeing often.

What I Liked About the Book:

1. Severe mental health issues–particularly from a first person perspective–are issues that we really haven’t seen as much of as one would expect in YA Lit. This book really does an intriguing job of getting the reader into the head of someone forced to face daily delusions, to understand the basis for the constant scrutiny and self doubt the individual must live with and to try to understand why that individual would necessarily have to rely on coping strategies for survival. By the end, she’s no longer “weird” or “other” but simply doing what she’s got to do to make sense of the world around her.
2. Alex actively talks the reader through her most common delusions, how they manifest, and her tricks for coping with them. This is another way the author does a great job of normalizing this serious mental illness. Notably, in some ways, Alex reminded me of the protagonist in Sarah Smith’s The Other Side of Dark, which dealt with a protagonist who came across as being schizophrenic to others because she could actually see ghosts. Here, we have the real deal, which feels fairer and truer in comparison.
3. A range of treatment options are also presented, which is at once informative and illustrative of an important point: simply because someone has a mental illness does not, as a result, automatically mean that they need to be institutionalized, that they’re a danger to society or that they’re too ill to function. Alex is taking a heavy load of advanced courses in school, applying to and excited about college and drawn to her new group of friends rather than avoiding classmates, which seems to be a trend in YA Lit for persons facing mental illness.
4. More than one depiction of mental illness is offered, and indeed one of the major themes in the book seems to be an underlying question of how to define mental illness. Through the various other characters–mothers, friends, school administrators, community members–we as readers get the sense that there is no normal; there is no baseline for perfect mental health, just as there is no clear cut cut off point for mental illness. Instead, they are all different shades of each other. I actually thought this was a fantastic point that the author does a good job of bringing up and one that I can imagine would truly hit home with the audience in questioning what makes for well v. not well, crazy v. normal quirks, mental deficiencies v. normal human behavior.
5. The importance of support for the individual facing mental illness is well and truly underscored. Indeed, to a certain extent the author even juxtaposes physical unwellness against the mental unwellness in both Alex and her bad boy’s familial situations, which was another powerful point made: why are we so willing to accept physical injury as temporary and acceptable but any lapse in mental ability or functioning is not?
6. The author brings in a number of different types of mental unwellness. Of course, Alex’s is the most severe, but we also see her bad boy’s inability to understand emotions, which greatly affects his interactions with his peers throughout the story; the bad boy’s father’s alcoholism, leading to severe injury both physical and emotional to said bad boy; we see how the principal’s obsession can be hidden, but it’s no less real and creepy than anything else happening in the story; we see how jealousy can cause actions that are every bit as extreme as those performed by someone with a significant mental illness. These juxtapositions brought out through the well-mapped (if a little overwhelming) cast of characters really hammer home the infirmity of that fine line between normal and abnormal thinking and behavior, and with it, how easily it is to cross that line.

   What I Didn’t Love About the Book:

1. This is well and truly a pet peeve, but Alex obsesses about how much she dislikes the beacon-of-redness color of her hair almost as much as Anne from Anne of Green Gables. Except seriously? If she really doesn’t want to stand out and she truly feels quite so self-conscious about it, why not just grab a box of dye?

2. Alex puts a lot of weight on her lobster moment when she was a kid, both as the moment when her schizophrenia was brought to light and as the moment where she clicked with the little boy who helped her liberate the sea spiders. However, what seemed really strange to me was that, even after her bad boy love interest admits to an interest in her, even after her confirms that he knows of her illness, she’s still uncertain about asking him about that event? Why? Maybe I missed something, but I was confused as to how this was such a catching point for her.

3. I thought that the number of different conspiracy-type plot lines occurring in such a small high school were way too incredible. There was just too much happening at too many levels and honestly, too obviously. I appreciated the author’s attempts to draw so many parallels, but I wasn’t able to suspend that much disbelief.

4. If Alex is meeting so often with her on-speed-dial therapist, how could she have possibly gotten away with thinking Charlie was still alive 4 or 5 years after her death? That doesn’t make sense–I can’t imagine a therapist supporting the decision to just not clarify this for her. And to wonder why she still thinks it at all.

5. I absolutely can not even begin to imagine how a giant, potentially dangerous snake could have successfully lived in the walls of a school for decades. Just can’t.

6. There were some minor plot inconsistencies throughout. For example, how would it possibly have been that school uniforms were mandatory but that Alex wouldn’t have learned this until the first day of school? And, when she gets one from the janitor’s closet, she makes a deal about how it’s ginormous on her, but then never mentions it again? I can’t imagine her either attempting to rectify this or else getting teased for it. She’s constantly taking pictures, but again, in school, I can’t imagine this flying, particularly with personal privacy rights and the like. Bad boy’s mom somehow ended up in a long-term mental hospital stay for supposed attempted suicide once? Really? And just how is he planning to spring her? She’s not a danger to anyone, so I’m not sure how the hospital could hold her this long? The whole issue at the end–after Alex is crushed by the scoreboard but she wants to go back to see graduation–why is she handcuffed again? What danger has she been to anyone? Why won’t they let her walk exactly? I dunno. There were a number of raised eyebrow, huh? moments sprinkled throughout what otherwise was a pretty interesting story.

7. In retrospect, I’m not actually sure I completely understand what the goal of the story was. To “out” Alex as having a mental illness? To “out” the principal about his obsession? To “out” bad boy’s dad for his abusive, alcohol-fueled behaviors? To confirm that sick people need hospital care to get better? I’m not sure I agree with that based on what very little bit I know about psychology, but I have to assume it’s not true based on the pushes I have read about to minimalize mental health in-patient treatments.

8. Apparently everyone in this school/town is white–with the distinction of socio-economic class based on the house in which someone’s family lives, there seems to be no other distinction made between people.

Overall:

This book is doing something with a topic that other books are really, really not. While there is a little much going on, and while the author is really forcing the reader to do some pretty major suspension of disbelief to get into it, the story is a quick read and really delves into some of the mystery surrounding mental illness. I haven’t had a chance yet to read Nick Scheff’s Schizo, but I’m curious now to see how that representation compares. Definitely worth a read!

Anyone out there pick this one up? Have an opinion on accuracy in mental health representations?