Epilepsy, Adoption, Pharmaceuticals: Suicide

Lorraine and daughter in 1982, happier times

National Suicide Prevention Week was earlier this month. Those who know my story know that my daughter committed suicide. This is one of the "Facts and Commentaries" from my recent book, Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption. My hope is that those suffering with any of the maladies listed here, or their friends and families, will see this as a cautionary message, and get help before it is too late. I tried, but could not save, my daughter.--lorraine

A few days after the first anniversary of my daughter’s suicide, in December of 2008, the Federal Drug Administration announced that it would require makers of epilepsy drugs to add a warning about the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors to the products' prescribing information or labeling. Behaviors, I assume, means suicide attempts, some of them successful. Depakote, the drug Jane took, is on the list. The FDA actions are based on the agency's review of 199 clinical trials of 11 epilepsy drugs—released only a month after her death—showing that patients taking those drugs had almost twice the risk of suicidal behavior or thoughts than those taking a placebo.

But what was not answered was this: had the epileptics taking the placebo had their lives upended by as many seizures, great and small, as my daughter had?

I mentally add in the cocktail of drugs—an anti-depressant and Depakote—that Jane was taking. What about that? And what about the adoption?

Thanksgiving: Finding something to be thankful for when we're feeling low

Lorraine,surrounded by brother, sister-in-law, nieces and husband, T'giving  2014

It's that time of the year again when all the family that we miss comes leaping out of the background to appear front and center in our hearts and minds. It can't be helped. While we are trying to focus on what we are truly thankful for, we find ourselves thinking about what and who is missing.

I'm no different. 

This year my brother and his wife are driving from Michigan for Thanksgiving. They are picking up my two nieces in Manhattan (one in art school there, the other just back from Thailand) and

Adoptees more likely to commit suicide

Lorraine

A new study has found that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior such as psychiatric disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic disengagement. Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide. About 75 percent of the adopted teens (more than 1,200 all living in Minnesota) in the study were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from South Korea. [1]

All of the adopted kids, who were between 11 and 21 years old during the study period, had been taken in by their families before age two, and had a biologically unrelated teenage sibling in the same home. Although this study could not determine why the adopted teens were more likely to attempt suicide,

What are the happy birth moms celebrating?

Note: For those coming here from Tyler Baltierra's Tweet, we have answered his rant against us and published it at a current post:   Tyler of 16 and Pregnant Tells FMF Off!

 (Below is the original post that he first responded to)

 November 18, 2012 8:39 AM

Lorraine

Open adoption or keeping the baby? We know that while overall very few teens--around one percent*--give up their babies for adoption anywhere anymore, the United States is far ahead of other developed nations in this regard. This is not a statistic to be cheering about--even if the impact of giving up a child in a fully open adoption does not lead to the depth of sorrow that we mothers from closed adoptions have dealt with. This is the perceived wisdom of those who compare the effect of closed adoptions versus open adoptions on the mothers who relinquish their children.

In the recent Donaldson report, Openness in Adoption, the authors state that the degree of openness generally does not affect their level of behavioral or socio-emotional adjustment [to being adopted]. The Minnesota-Texas Adoption Research Project study found, however, that higher degrees of collaboration in the adoptive kinship network [emphasis added] were associated with better

Adoption: Then, and Now

When my daughter was born in 1966 at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, I shared a room with another young mother, also unwed. She was undecided over whether she should give up her child for adoption.  From a work in progress: 

By Lorraine Dusky
copyright (c) 2010

My particular roommate turned out to be a chubby teenager with acne and over-bleached hair the color of white sand. That afternoon there had been three women crowding around her bed, talking low. Yet at some point our eyes caught each others across the room as eyes sometimes do.