Rating: 
Summary: Powerfully accurate
Review: Absolutely on target. It is a relief to know that someone else understands the heartbreaking confusion of parenting a child with a mental illness. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Alarming and Disturbing
Review: As a parent of teen who struggled with major depresson and survived a suicide attempt, I was looking forward to reading this book. But I was stunned and dismayed at Mr. Raeburn's pitiful lack of abiltiy to come to terms with his childrens' suffering and further, his failture to take appropriate measures. The level of self-absorption and selfishness both he and his ex-wife (albeit we only hear his side of the story) exhibit, their inability to put the needs of their children first and their mutual failure to address the many behavioral and psychological needs of their struggling teens left me despairing. Are there really legions of parents out there who, when faced with severely disfunctional children, perform so badly?Raeburn gets points for honesty, and he adds to the literature on bi-polar chldren, but for all the good it does, the book is more about his own failings than the mental illnesses his children suffer.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing and Powerful
Review: I just finished reading Acquainted With the Night and could relate to much of the struggle, frustration and helplessness felt by the author. It is a full time job raising a bipolar teen and I felt the author was able to capture the craziness that each episode can throw everyone in the family into - from the parents to the other siblings. No amount of psychotherapy ever really helps - it all boils down to the brain chemistry balance. That was made very clear in the last chapter when Alex is interviewed. If science can find the right mixture of meds, you can have the child back - if not, the child is lost and confused and angry and just left behind.
We live in a community just like Ridgewood, but in Connecticut. Our special ed programs throw all the bipolar kids, ADD kids, other emotionally disturbed kids into one program and then let them get away with whatever they want. Very little learning really takes place. Yet, their IEP's will note significant progress toward achieving the goals. All of this is to keep the costs down so that the school district does not have to pay for specialized private school. There is very little structure, no follow through, no guidance, no real therapy, no learning. Raeburn touches on this point, but only briefly.
While this book is a very honest and real account of life with emotionally and mentally ill children, it does not provide any direction, any solutions, any hope beyond "just wait and they might grow out of it..." which I find to be very troubling, especially from a writer and father who does have as many resources at his disposal as are and were available to Raeburn. While I do not agree with his wife's parenting style, it appear that Raeburn did very little but follow the advice of "professionals" without questionning any of their direction.
I can't say that I would recommend this book to parents who are in the middle of this quest with their children. It is probably better for the insurance industry executives, public school administrators and policy makers in government. It may give them a better understanding of what it is really like. Those of us who are living through it already know.
Rating:
Summary: The best book I've ever read about mental illness
Review: I stayed up much too late reading this absolutely riveting true account of a family falling apart from mental illness and a therapeutic community utterly unable to help. I'm not sure what was more frustrating -- the astoundingly awful parenting on both sides, the ineptitude of the therapists consulted along the way, or the dreadful societal pressures exerted upon middle-school children. And I won't even get into the awful state of the health insurance industry and how it exacerbates the very illnesses it is purported to help. I have never before read an account of such an appallingly dysfunctional family on just about every level, dysfunction that still exists in the almost-absent relationship between the father and his eldest son.
If ever two people were destined for destruction, the author and his wife are them. References are made to the classic symptoms of clinical depression displayed by the author's wife from the time she had her first child, but it's obvious she has never received adequate help. The passivity and inappropriate parenting that resulted combined with the outrageously immature and explosive anger of the father/author would cause even the healthiest children to implode. Raeburn is exceptionally honest about his own contributions to this harrowing story but, throughout, I just wanted to throttle him. Raeburn complains about his long work commute and how that impacted family interactions and even visiting his hospitalized children, yet he never took the most obvious step -- moving closer to work. I grew up in a suburb similar to Ridgewood and I know there are exceptional public schools much closer to the city. But Raeburn was too blinded by the cache of such a rarified and wealthy community to see the dangers. As it turned out, all the struggles to afford the "great schools" were for naught when it turns out the community is not healthy for children either.
Raeburn probably did not intend to question the educational and social philosophies for dealing with middle-school-aged children but, the more I read, the more I came to believe middle schools that separate out 6th, 7th, and 8th graders do more harm than good. The children no longer have older students as role models (good and bad) and no longer serve as role models themselves for younger students. Instead, hundreds of hormonally and emotionally unstable adolescents are set out to sea in a microcosm of insanity and left to feed off each other's craziness unchecked by any examples of the normalcy that both precedes them and usually awaits them on the other side. Maybe this is one reason children fare better in smaller K-12 private schools that are able to maintain some semblance of age-disparate families.
Raeburn never actually voices but nonetheless demonstrates with each escalating crisis another very apparent fact - there are as many opinions (or non-opinions) about how to help mentally ill children as there are psychiatrists, therapists, and medications. If the reader is to come away with only one very unsettling conclusion, it is that no one really knows what is wrong with your child, what causes it, or how to treat it. Accept this, do the best you can, and hope your child lives long enough to grow out of the worst of it, as the author's children did. I can only pray the author's children never have children of their own.
This is not a happy book with a satisfying ending but it is a very important book.
Rating:
Summary: Give the man a break!
Review: I'm amazed at how angry and judgmental these reviews are. Many readers seem confident that they would handle Paul Raeburn's situation better than he did. Unless they've walked in his exact shoes, they should give him a break. There's no recipe for perfect parenting, especially in such an unlooked-for situation. Have the rest of you all really managed it so well? Like Paul Raeburn, I'm still struggling to do okay.
Rating:
Summary: Twisted Parenting
Review: It's hard to say whether I would recommend this book, because it's a gripping read, but the anger I felt at the father/author colored everything I read. I suppose I could admire his honesty, but there is nothing to admire in the way he contributed to ruining his kids' childhoods. A few glaring examples: after his daughter's first suicide attempt, he goes back on his promise to find her a therapist, because she seems better. Arghghghgh! Then when his daughter has two weeks between hospital stays and needs to be watched constantly for fear of suicide, neither he nor his wife can get off work, so they arrange for friends and family to cover the two weeks. Please!!! And even when numerous therapists tell him he and his wife must stop fighting in front of the children, they are unable to do do. Can you get any more selfish??? In addition, you keep wondering when HE is going to get into therapy! His anger and his own issues are effecting everything he touches, but he seems oblivious to that. And the blamed heaped on the wife is over the top. Obviously, she has serious issues and was a bad parent, herself. But the author doesn't realize that when you point a finger at someone else, it's just another way of ignoring (or minimizing) your own responsibility. It takes two to maintain a disastorous relationship and he was an equal participant. Even writing this book seemed to be an intellectual exercise, with very little emotion -- a way to keep the feelings at arm's length.
Rating:
Summary: Memoir at its searing best
Review: Paul Raeburn is a brave and compassionate writer. In this narrative about his children's mental illness and the failure of his marriage, he has confessed his own failings and weaknesses about as much as I think is humanly possible. He has been faulted by other reviewers for the very failings that he has had the insight to recognize and report in himself, and surely he must have known that his book would garner such judgmental responses. He wrote it anyway, and I'm grateful to have been able to read it.
Acquainted With the Night is powerful, memorable, and likely to be helpful for families who are dealing with mental illness. It is also a riveting story.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for parents
Review: Paul Raeburn is not perfect--no parent is. The author's painful self-examination of his family's response to the emergence of bipolar disorder in their son and the subsequent depression of their daughter, while the parents' marriage was unraveling, is difficult reading at times--and riveting. The ties of a family in which some members suffer from mood disorders are stretched to the breaking point. It is difficult to stay centered and remain calm as a parent of a child who has see-sawing mood swings, delusional thinking, and whose energy shifts from the mission-driven hyperactivity of mania to the near-catatonic lethargy of despair to the point of suicidality. Raeburn tells it like it was, not sparing himself nor his wife, and the only (minor) bit that I took issue with was his rhetorical question whether the marital strife caused the mood disorders in his kids. To that I say, not likely--many children with mood disorders live in happy, well-adjusted families--and they get bipolar disorder or depression all the same. It's genetic.
Rating:
Summary: Brave and honest. Will help families going through this
Review: Paul Raeburn's honesty about his own travails and those of his children makes this a valuable book to families exploring their options in the face of a child's possible mental illness. He doesn't sugarcoat his own reactions nor what happens to his son and daughter as they struggle to come to terms with and find adequate treatment for their problems. Every parent going through this gets angry at his or her children, angry at doctors, and angry at teachers and schools. Every parent makes mistakes and no one handles every situation perfectly. Reading this detailed, fascinating, and sometimes harrowing account could help a parent avoid some of the pitfalls and teach compassion to teachers, doctors, friends, and family members. I urge anyone with a child suffering from bipolar disorder, ADD, or any other mental illness to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: A personal perspective
Review: The author of this book does an excellent job describing the many frustrations of parenting a mentally ill child, dealing with the medical community and insurance companies, and trying to keep a marriage strong during difficult times. Unfortunately, while it is interesting to read one person's perspective, this book doesn't provide any guidance or information that can help other parents handle similar situations without alienating their children, getting divorced, or feeling totally powerless against the medical community. The author, who researches and writes articles for a national news magazine, doesn't even mention--maybe he didn't take the time to do research regarding his children's disorders--that as a biologically-based mental illness, Bipolar Disorder receives the same level of insurance coverage as any other medical condition. That one piece of information alone could have helped him and other readers have an easier time finding appropriate treatment. If parents want to wallow in the disturbing experiences of other parents of mentally ill children, this is a good book. If they want a resource that can help them use appropriate parenting techniques for mentally ill children. take care of themselves and their marriages, and obtain successful treatment, there are other, better books.
Sheryl Gurrentz, author
"If Your Child is Bipolar: A Parent-to-Parent Guide to Living With and Loving a Bipolar Child"
"The Guilt-Free Guide to Your New Life as a Mom"
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