The first time Jeremy Clark met his 18-year-old client, the teenager was sitting in his vice principal’s office, the drawstrings of his black hoodie pulled tight. Jacob had recently disclosed to his friends on Facebook that he was hearing voices, and their reaction had been less than sympathetic.
So Clark was relieved when a beaming Jacob showed up on time for their next meeting, at a comic book shop. As the pair bantered about “Star Wars” and a recent Captain America movie, however, Clark picked up troubling signs: Jacob said he was “detaching” from his family, often huddling alone in his room. As the visit ended, Clark gave the teen a bear hug and made a plan. “Let’s get together again next week,” he said.
The visit was part of a new approach being used nationwide to find and treat teenagers and young adults with early signs of schizophrenia. The goal is to bombard them with help even before they have had a psychotic episode — a dramatic and often devastating break with reality that is a telltale sign of the disease.
[For more of this story, written by Sandhya Somashekhar, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/promising-new-approach-helps-curb-early-schizophrenia-in-teens-young-adults/2014/08/06/82609e74-fd77-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html]
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