Personal experience with mental illness and treatment Essay

Personal experience with mental illness and treatment - Essay Example As a young baby, he seldom played with any of us, and preferred to play with his toys. None of us thought anything of it. When he turned 3, and still didn’t utter a single word, our parents became concerned and consulted a few doctors and psychotherapists. Initially my brother was misdiagnosed with Down’s syndrome. A chromosomal disorder, in which individuals range from mild to profoundly mentally disabled. His speech therapy started when he was 3 years old with minimum results and no results whatsoever in trying to get him to socialize with other children. Our parents thought the doctors were not doing their job properly and kept changing schools and doctors, speech therapists and other professionals. People who came in contact with my brother did not realize he had some sort of disability till they tried to interact with him. After which they tried to socialize but getting no response from my brother, left him alone. We continued to treat him according to what the doctor initially diagnosed as Down’s syndrome, not understanding why he wouldn’t talk and why he wouldn’t socialize. It is characteristic of a Down’s syndrome child to be friendly, and have some form of speech, where as my brother had very limited, 2-3 word sentence speech and hardly any friends. He was most friendly with his nanny and both me and my elder sister, and managed to communicate with us. Mostly the speech therapy sessions were very discouraging and had no results to show. My brother refused to interact with the therapist and every kind of therapy he tried, ended in vain. On a conference on autism and its types, I went through the symptoms of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and realized my brother did not have Down’s syndrome, but Autism. This explained all his primary behaviors, which were all characteristic of ASD, such as not having developed