Hello again, LMo. I took your advice and wrote a "summary" about the situation with my son. It is a rather lengthy "summary" but I tried to give enough info to relate what he has been through, at least to some degree, and to relate where my confusion comes from. I posted it under "summary". Sometimes I think that he has been a depressed boy for a very long time. Other times I think he might be demonstrating PTSD or some other form of an anxiety related disorder. I have even wondered about some form of schiz. although I do not know enough about that really. Just that he has this terrible distain and distrust for the government. It is deep and dark and out of the ordinary. He reads book after book on conspiracies, etc. Sometimes I think that I must have been like a "Mommy Dearest" from his perspective and he has just had to internalize so much. Sometimes I worry that he has taken serious drugs like LSD or something that has just fried him. Then, sometimes I think that he is a brilliant boy that just has a difficult time focusing on mundane matters. I try very hard not to imply that "something is wrong" with him. See the vicious cycle. Okay, maybe something IS wrong with him. I don't know. All I know is that people perceive him as having slight mental problems because he has a hard time "performing" on the spot. He had to deliver the speech at his graduation. I read it and it was phenomenal. Yet, one can not imagine how grueling it was for him to deliver. It was the most painful experience to watch him go through. Pure anxiety. (Not that that incident in itself is abnormal.) He has a hard time procuring jobs, or housing. He has a hard time keeping them. He seems disorganized in his thoughts when responding on the spot or to strangers. He gets easily taken advantage of. Yet, when I finally get a chance to be alone with him he is wonderful, kind, gentle-spirited and very down-to-earth. I begin wondering why I was even worrying. Then he gets off into some sort of conspiracy theory and it gets weird.

You know, those red flags. Well, his brother and sisters adore him. He loves them, but they all seems so protective of him. Why? That is a behavior a family feels for a retarded child. He isn't retarded.

The very first time I saw anything different in his behavior was when he was around 10 or 11. He had always been very outgoing and made friends easily. All of the sudden he withdrew. He was in vacation bible school and just did not want to be there (seems natural), but he totally withdrew which was very out of the ordinary for him. Up until that time he was always the leader and the instigator, and very energetic and outspoken. The changes were subtle after that, at least at first. That was before the divorce.

In private school everyone loved him and accepted him openly. Yet, when we would leave school everyone would be waving and yelling goodbye and he would be in a daze. He would occassionally tell me that his perception was that no one liked him. On his birthday that year every kid in his class came and he could not understand why they were all there when they did not like him. Several girls had crushes on him. Yet, he never responded like he believed it, and continued to withdrawal. (Maybe drugs at this point?)

I took him to Hawaii with me one year. I have pictures. He was healthy looking, and smiling. By the next year he was sullen and dark and withdrawn and standoffish.

I kept thinking he was depressed and that he would pull out of it. He so totally underacheived from then on.