At the age of 38, my son lives alone in a flat in Nairobi. He has no girlfriend or any other friend. He is a well-paid engineer whose only love seems to be cars and casual engagements with teenage girls. Is he mentally sick?
It is hard to be sure what is going on with your son, and so the best thing is to try to get a mental health expert to see him. Sadly, and as you might already be aware, this is easier said than done. In most cases, there is denial on the part of the patient that anything could be wrong. It sometimes takes a catastrophic incident for things to come to light and to get such a person the help that he might need.
Some years ago, a 35-year-old investment banker was brought to us following a life-threatening incident involving him and two teenage girls who had been living in his flat for some weeks. The problem arose when some money went missing from the safe and the two girls were taken to the police to explain which of the two had stolen the money.
What followed was a series of events the man had not expected. Asked to produce their IDs, the girls said they were both 16 and had no form of identification. Asked what they were doing in the home of such an old man, the girls said that they had been abducted and were his sexual slaves! The man who went to report a crime had become a criminal and was soon behind bars.
His brother was asked to take some change of clothes the following day and what he found in the flat led both the police and the family to conclude that the man, must have had a mental illness. The flat was full of all manner of women’s underwear carefully placed in every room. The differently coloured and textured garments were labelled with the real or imagined name of the owner. The police released the man to the care of the family hence our first contact with them.
The history was typical of what was, in past classification systems referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome. The new system puts the condition under the Autistic Spectrum Disorders. The man was of normal intelligence, went through school normally and obtained his banking qualification easily. That, however, was the short story.
Upon closer evaluation, it became clear that this man was different in many ways from his siblings and peers. His social interactions were very few. He spent most of his time alone. He seemed obsessed with orderliness and talked about nothing but cars.
Many around him avoided him because he did not seem able to pick social cues. He had no capacity for embarrassment and once insisted on talking about his favourite car to his elderly aunt, who was not in the mood. He could not read facial expressions and even when people were tired, angry or simply bored, he seemed to take no notice.
Asked which one word might best describe her son, his mother said “clumsy”. Asked to explain, she said he was, since childhood, emotionally, psychologically, socially clumsy and uncoordinated. After the family had been allowed to read around the subject, no one was in doubt about the diagnosis and because of the fear of prosecution, he submitted himself to a treatment programme that lasted several years.
Eventually, all agreed that he had improved but he was still a loner who remained aloof. His job at the bank suited him perfectly because as an investment analyst, he interacted with numbers and concepts without much contact with people.
This is just one possibility in your son’s case and you must get an expert to examine him.
