The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog - Reflections

In the third chapter, Stairway to Heaven, Perry recounts working with some of the children who had been released from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in the early 1990s. Having myself been born in 1991, this event is just outside the scope of my memory – though I do vaguely recall hearing news stories and conversations between the adults in my life, especially in the late 1990s when the incident was officially investigated, and piecing together some aspects of the story in the years after. I've never revisited this piece of history, until now. For those of you who, like me, would appreciate some additional background on the incident, please watch the following short clip.   It's interesting to watch this brief summary of the events of the Waco Siege from the perspective of a reporter or historian rather than reading about them from the perspective of a clinician. In watching this clip, and bearing in mind Perry's own perspective on the events and the work he w...

In the second chapter of Perry's book we follow the case of Sandy, a four-year-old girl with an unfathomably tragic and traumatic story who is being asked to testify in the case of her mother's murder, to which she herself, at only three years old, was a witness – and very nearly a victim. Perry recounts being contacted by a lawyer, Sandy's guardian-ad-litem, in the hopes that he might be able to prepare Sandy for her testimony, and being unable to keep himself from intervening in this case. As I'm sure it did for many, if not all, readers, this chapter struck particularly hard for me but in a highly specific way. The case of Sandy is by every measure horrific and graphic; but it is maybe due in large part to that dark and sinister aspect of Sandy's story that drew me, as it did Perry, so deeply into her case. Had I been in Perry's place at the time, I too could not have restrained myself from taking up her case, no matter how much else I had going on in my...

In the first chapter of Perry's book, Perry recounts his experiences with his first patient as a child psychiatrist, Tina, who we learn has been repeatedly and egregiously sexually abused between the ages of four and six, resulting in significant trauma and developmental disturbances. Considering the entire chapter, two things stood out to me overall: firstly, I was struck by the degree of uncertainty that Perry describes feeling with respect to Tina's symptomatology, being in hindsight an obvious case of trauma resulting in severe PTSD, among other things surely; secondly, I was fascinated by the aside that Perry tells of giving Sara and her family a ride to the grocery store and subsequently home on a freezing Chicago night in winter, rather than watch them wait for the bus in the snow, and the implications this has for me as a social worker rather than as a physician. To speak to my first observation, in light of Perry's research and uncertainty around Tina's ...