Article from the British newspaper The Telegraph. Translated into Russian specially for the site "Paranormal News".
Januari Schofield turned her head and sank her teeth into her father's chin, this was her only way to attack, because her father was holding her arms and legs tightly. Moments before, Januari had tried to attack her newborn brother Bodhi.
“I have to hurt him,” she said firmly as her father Michael managed to prevent the attack and grab her, “I'm going to hurt him,” 5-year-old Januari continued.
Januari Schofield (left) with his parents and younger brother.
After that, the little blonde girl with an angelic appearance sank her teeth into her father's chin like a wild animal. And when her father loosened his grip, she instantly managed to free her hands and scratched his face.
But after a few seconds, this strange outburst of anger ended as suddenly as it began. Dzhanauri (or just Jani, as everyone called her) stopped twitching and biting and said in a calm tone that she was hungry and wanted macaroni and cheese.
“I didn't recognize her, it was like it wasn't her,” says Michael Schofield, who is a faculty member at the University of California in Northridge, Los Angeles, commenting on his daughter’s strange behavior changes that began in December 2007 shortly after his birth. son of Bodhi.
“It felt like something had taken over her body and took control of her. I remember trying to describe this incident to other people, making comparisons with the movie The Exorcist. Jani suddenly turned out to be so strong, she kicked me painfully, but I thought that in the first place it must be very painful for her legs, because she was barefoot. However, she did not react to pain at all."
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Januari Schofield was from birth an unusual girl with a very high level of intelligence. Already at 13 months she knew the whole alphabet, and at 18 months she spoke in grammatically correct sentences. By the age of three, she began to ask her parents about the elements of the Periodic Table of Mendeleev, and at the age of 4 she passed an IQ test and he indicated 146 points (a very high level, people with this IQ are called geniuses). Another test indicated that her mental development was equal to that of a 10-11 year old.
Januari could not sit still, she was constantly doing something, teaching, reading. She had almost no friends, but she perfectly replaced them with imaginary friends, among whom were cats, mice, dogs and little girls. She hated her real name and preferred to be called by various unusual nicknames like Blue Eyed Tree Frog or Rainbow.
Yes, Januari was very strange, but she had never shown signs of aggression and violence towards others before. On the contrary, she was very anxious even when the bee fell into the pool and she ran to her father, asking him to save her.
But in 2007, the whole family began to live in fear of her 15-minute outbursts of "pure rage", which now happened several times a day and were usually triggered by the crying of her younger brother Bodhi. Michael and his wife Susan were afraid that Jani would eventually get to his brother and kill him or cripple him.
“She immediately rushed to the attack, and I'm still not ready to accept that this is happening, for me it is still one big mistake,” says Michael.
The Schofield family lives in Valencia, 40 miles north of Los Angeles. They have a cozy and habitable house with toys scattered on the floor, and everything is calm here until Jani (who was 10 years old in 2013 when this article was written) and Bodhi at school. Michael and Susie take the journalists in the kitchen and Michael begins to talk about his forthcoming book, January First, in a month. In it, he tried to describe everything that has happened in his family since that moment in 2007.
After Jani's fits of rage after that incident began to recur more and more often, the girl's parents decided to take her to a psychologist, and then, on her advice, to a psychiatrist. After that, their lives turned into endless visits to doctors who prescribed powerful doses of various drugs to Jani, and hospitalizations with injuries after her next attack. And all this eventually led to a terrifying diagnosis for any person, especially for parents - Jani was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
According to psychiatrist Nitin Gogtei, schizophrenia in children is 20-30 times more severe than in adults.
“For these children, it is not surprising to see active hallucinations 95% of the time they are awake. And these hallucinations can be very intense and frightening. They can hear voices that try to force them to do very cruel and bloody things and in general it is extremely traumatic for the child,”says Gogtey, who is working to get Jani for a long-term examination at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
However, childhood schizophrenia is extremely rare. According to the NIMH study, begun in 1990, only 130 children under the age of 13 have been identified in the United States to date with this diagnosis. And this disease is extremely difficult to control and treat, because adult drugs practically do not work on children.
“It is a devastating disease and it is extremely difficult to understand how these children are suffering. I have not seen anything more difficult in any aspect of medicine,”says Gogtey.
Moreover, Jani is one of the youngest children with such a diagnosis in the United States. According to doctors at the Reznik Psychoneurological Hospital in Los Angeles, they went through a variety of diagnoses when they studied Jani's case. She was suspected of having autism, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and extreme anxiety. Schizophrenia was not initially considered at all.
“She was like an 800-foot gorilla to them in a room that no one noticed,” says the girl's father.
At the same time, Michael admits that he had a long glimmer of hope that the doctors were wrong.
“I still thought she was just like Stephen Hawking, trapped in the body of a 5-year-old girl. I thought that we just need to find a normal psychologist who will learn how to work with her and then everything will be fine. It never occurred to me that it was a mental illness."
Jani's first fictional friend, who happens to be a dog, showed up shortly after her third birthday.
“We didn't think about it, but then there were more and more of them. Not two, but exponentially. When she was 4 years old, I no longer had time to memorize everyone."
These fictional friends of Jani lived on an island called Kalanini, which, according to the girl, is "on the border of my world and your world." Some were her friends like a girl named 24 hours and a cat named Midnight. Others, like a cat named Four hundred and a rat named Wednesday (Wednesday), ordered Jani to attack and injure people, especially Bodhi's brother. And if she refuses to follow their orders, they attack Jani herself and bite and scratch her.
“We treated them like ordinary children's fictional friends. We didn't know they were hallucinations with their own thinking,”says Susie.
When Jani's behavior became rude and aggressive, her father realized that he was afraid of his own daughter. He still remembered little Jani, who loved animals and could not associate this image with that Jani, who angrily kicked Hani's family dog and screamed at her in such a voice like Jack Nicholson from the horror movie The Shining.
At the same time, Jani's aggression extended to herself. One evening she almost strangled herself with the sleeve of her shirt, and on Christmas 2008 (she was then only 6 years old) tried to throw herself out of her bedroom window, shouting at the same time that she needed to "Get out."
Jani was prescribed huge doses of suppressive drugs, but they had little effect. Even her psychiatrist eventually admitted that Jani had "the highest drug resistance of any patient he had treated."
Jani increasingly ended up in psychiatric hospitals, but when she returned home, her behavior did not change. Some hospital staff directly said that Jani needed to be kept in much stricter conditions.
In early 2009, Jani started a panic at the school, trying to break down the office door, and then jump out the window. Only after that was she locked up in a special psychiatric clinic, where forced hospitalization is allowed. From there she was sent for examination, which finally led to the diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia. And to the conclusion that this is practically incurable.
Once Michael visited his daughter at the clinic and she didn't even recognize him. “I thought that she was going to leave for her world forever and not come back. And I realized that if she dies, I will also die after her."
The family was saved by the decision to live in two apartments. In one lived Jani, in the other Bodhi. Parents were with both, changing every other day. Jani's condition improved without Bodhi, her voices no longer made her attack her brother, and she became much calmer.
Seeing such an improvement, in 2011 the family began to live in the same house again, and Jani is still quite stable, thanks to a whole cocktail of drugs specially developed for her. They contain clozapine, a “last resort” for children who do not respond to other treatment for schizophrenia.
By 2013, Jani had long since had the violent attacks that had happened to her in her earlier years. The doctors admit that the girl will probably have to take her medications for the rest of her life. She had her last desire to kill herself in 2012, when she almost jumped from the 4th floor, but since then nothing like this has happened again.