A Lethal Inheritance, A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
Every family has secrets; only some secrets are lethal. In A Lethal Inheritance, I recount how the mental unraveling of my 17 year old son Alex compels my look back into our family history for clues to his condition, eventually tying Alex’s descent into hallucinations and months of shoeless wandering on the streets of Los Angeles to his great grandfather’s suicide on a New York City railroad track in 1913. I use my journalism skills to search out and assemble the startling new neuroscience that explains how clusters of mental illness traverse families such as ours; findings that the clinicians I meet are using to identify and reverse early signs of inherited depression in patients as young as five and psychosis in nine to 12 year olds.
