# January ("Jani") Schofield - Child with Schizophrenia



## armyofdreamers

PaladinX said:


> When I read this post, I asked myself, is this person an INFJ? It has the whole conspiracy theory vibe to it.
> 
> With that said, I'm not sure about the facts that you are bringing up, but her story didn't sit right with me either. Children are not normally diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Usually it is diagnosed in adulthood.


Haha, you mean you thought I was an INFJ?  I'm interested in conspiracy theories even if they aren't plausible, I just find the stuff people come up with interesting.

That is one of the biggest things that made me doubt schizophrenia as well--childhood onset is very, very rare, and the fact that her parents were insisting on it when she was a month old was just ridiculous.




ashkadash said:


> This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.


Do you mean my theory, or do you mean Jani's story? 




luemb said:


> Hm, just I came across this story.
> 
> From the vid @_armyofdreamers_ posted, she looks pretty 'normal' and not like she was really trying to cut herself.
> 
> And the father really didn't believe the autistic diagnoses for his son, he seemed like he was diagnoses shopping again... :/


There's news on Jani's little brother, Bodhi, too. Apparently, in Michael's words, Jani is for lack of a better word "cured" (she still has hallucinations but she functions normally and is very aware of the real world now. I think Jani is 10 years old at this point). But... now, suddenly, her little brother Bodhi is so bad he needs to be hospitalized. 

I saw in one of their Youtube videos that Bodhi was having what looked like a temper tantrum, but they said he was going into psychosis. Despite the fact that Bodhi was visibly very upset, they did nothing to remove a dog that was barking loudly from the room--which could only add to his stress. The more Michael tried to hold Bodhi, the more upset Bodhi became. Someone who wasn't a member of the family held Bodhi and he was instantly quiet and calm. This reinforces my thought that whatever is 'wrong' with the kids (for lack of a better word) came from the parents.




FlaviaGemina said:


> Er? WHO THE F*** IS THIS GIRL?
> Your thread title sounded interesting, but how's about an introductory sentence that explains who this person is?


Wow, I can't believe I neglected that! It was probably because I had just finished my case study at the time of posting, so it must have slipped my mind that I had to summarize who she was. My bad, sorry. :\ I can't edit my post anymore, but I hope anyone who looks through the topic sees this if they don't know who she is:

January ("Jani") Schofield is a young girl who was diagnosed with childhood onset schizophrenia at age 6. She is the child of Michael and Susan Schofield, and has a little brother Bodhi--who is apparently also mentally ill. At first glance it seems like the diagnosis is correct. But many things about Jani's "schizophrenia" just don't fit together or seem right, and many people suspect something else--autism, abuse, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, etc. Jani is now 10, I believe. She has been on Oprah and Dr. Phil and has had a small handful of documentaries made about her. 

Does that help clear up who she is?


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## oddmodout

I know this is old, but I I'm wrapping up the _third_ documentary in the _Born Schizophrenic_ series, and I'm actually glad that I'm not the only person who suspects some kind of abuse being behind her case, even though I don't really have an education or interest in abnormal psychology, I came from a household where my own father was shopping around for a diagnosis to fit his ideas. What arguably made my situation maybe a little bit better on me in the long run is that we wrre poor, and he was limited in his options, but I was jusg unlucky enough that the County Mental Health place let him cycle through three psychiatrists.

My younger sister has a high functioning ASD (before it was trendy!) and I do think that's true for both my sister and Jani --they've got the physical "ticks" that a lot of autistic people have (Jani is often rubbing her hands, my sister rocks, at least as much as Jani's hand-rubbing, if not more); my sister doesn’t have the high IQ (but that's not usually an ASD symptom, like a lot of people believe), and when my sister was Jani's age, she did have similar episodes that conflicted with logic or reality (like insisting a nun couldn't hear her speak at a normal indoor volume from three feet away), but nothing really too far off from a kid who is slightly emotionally immature for their age (maybe two or three years behind).

My father really wanted me to be bipolar --it was the hip diagnosis in the early-to-mid 1990s-- and he briefly got the psychiatrist to try on some kind of psychotic disorder, until a severe allergy to lithium (which he initially attributed to walking around barefoot at home??? My feet and hands swelled up and shook so much, it took going septic and three ER docs to convince him it had nothing to do with being barefoot) made him suddenly drop it. I was also highly gifted, easily distracted, and I think I do genuinely have a case of adult-onset ADHD that maybe the stress of psychiatric abuse triggered, and I know that and his physical abuse triggered a moderate-almost-high-but-manageable General Anxiety Disorder. I also had gender identity issues (I'm FTM) as young as four or five, which maybe just seemed immensely less acceptable than, well, whatever diagnoses he could get to stick. He also put a lot of this off until after my parents divorced, he gained sole custody, and moved us to a tiny town in the next state --I remember going to psychologists maybe two or three times, a few years apart each, before I was eleven, he was clearly fixated on finding something wrong with me and I have reason to believe my mother actually kept me from going more, cos at that age I probably just didn't need it, and I saw that kind of fixation "turned up to eleven" in Jani and Bodhi's father, and to a lesser extent, their mother. If these kids ever learn that they were initially "just" ASD, it would not surprise me if the medications and constant psychological exploitation ends up triggering anxiety disorders, depression, and so on.

One of my best friends has schizoaffective disorder (she describesvit as basically a random mix of bipolar and schizophrenic symptoms), and I have an idea that most psychologists are extremely resistent to giving a schizophrenic diagnosis in children, cos it's often something else --abused kids might also be especially invested in dissociative fantasies and relatively normal things like imaginary friends, cos it's nicer, or atleast something that, unlike the home situation, they can control.


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