This is the "worried well"

I’ve seen some of the most powerful psychopathology in a 14-year-old boy, but to most people he would seem like a relatively normal teen. He acts silly much of the time in session but speaks from a cover: adult-sounding. That’s the persona he’s grown from living with a mother who’s a scientist, and rather cold. It must be hard to live both lives, which are intertwined. In my office, he flops on her with a dumb smile, clings to her like a baby while casting her aside. “I told you I’m handling it” – the schoolwork which he doesn’t do. After three months, ups and downs and a most recent decline in functioning, I suggested that the time for silliness might be over. He spent the rest of the hour in silence, but for a few disembodied adult-sounding words and silly arm gesticulations.

That silence was a sealed door over feelings, I am positive, of despair. For our purposes, it’s not critically important what factors led to that. No father. Raised, significantly, by babysitters. A mother who was all business. Inside him, now in high school, was the twilight-zone terror of being frozen in a bleeding, alone childhood when his life was no longer there. Silence, sleep, goofiness, some video games and a little defiance: These were the entirety of his existence at this point.

We think people just move on. No, they don’t. They can stay frozen, like a transparent upright crypt in the beautiful day of an entire existence. Absent parent’s embrace of love and empathy, life stops, really. (This will become unnoticeable at fifteen, because of your obliviousness and mine.)