Pain-Filled Pages Form a Revealing ‘Childhood’

The book landed on my desk in a pile of mail . . . hard to miss with its giant size and colorful cover--an acrylic painting in childlike hand of three faceless children stringing a kite on a grassy hill.

But a pass through the pages of “Childhood Revealed: Art Expressing Pain, Discovery and Hope” reveals no mere coffee-table collection of children’s drawings, but a journey through the anguish of troubled young minds and small wounded psyches.

“The kite represents life,” explains the artist, a 15-year-old boy with bipolar disorder, a psychiatric malady that causes abrupt, life-disrupting swings from depression to giddy euphoria. “I represent myself as the boy that is sitting . . . watching the others live their lives, learning from watching.”

The youth is one of 100 children whose art and essays are included in this collection compiled by the New York University Child Study Center to draw attention to the problems faced by millions of children living with mental illness and psychological trauma.

It is no easy read. The artwork in “Childhood Revealed” (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999) is, by turns, uplifting and chilling. But it succeeds like nothing I’ve ever seen at giving voice to the quiet suffering of children.

“This is not a book about art therapy,” says its editor, psychiatrist Harold S. Koplewicz, founder and director of the New York University center, one of the country’s leading centers for the study, prevention and treatment of mental illness among children.

“This is to give the world a glimpse of what life is like for these children, the pain of depression, the feeling of stupidity when you’re learning disabled . . . “

More than 10 million children in this country suffer from some sort of psychiatric problem, a mantle Koplewicz wraps around maladies ranging from depression to eating disorders, social phobia to schizophrenia, learning disabilities to attention-deficit disorder.

Yet only one in five of those children receives proper diagnosis and adequate treatment, he says, in part because of the stigma attached to mental illness, but also because community mental health centers have not been given the money and mandate to identify and treat children in need.

“It’s something people are hesitant to talk about, but any one of our children could be affected by untreated, undiagnosed mental illness. We can’t afford to ignore psychiatric disorders just because these are children.”

I cringe when I hear him using those terms. “Psychiatric disorders . . . mental illness.” Like many parents, I hide from that language, preferring the more benign labels that therapists and tutors have used to assess my own daughter’s “challenges,” to help me cope with her “special needs.”

But Koplewicz says our reluctance to confront the seriousness of childhood mental problems shortchanges us all.

“We talk about it when our kids have diabetes or asthma, but we find it very hard to talk about mental illness,” he says. “These are kids suffering from very real illnesses . . . they are disorders of the brain that affect behavior. To characterize them simply as “issues” or “challenges” might make us feel better, but it minimizes their impact on our children.

“If you can say the words ‘psychiatric illness,’ that makes it serious enough to be treated with money, to need research, to require accommodation in the same way we need ramps in public buildings and accessible bathrooms for those who are physically disabled.”

Still, Koplewicz understands our aversion. He remembers the pain he felt when his own son was diagnosed 10 years ago with a learning disorder. There was no remedy, no cure, the neuropsychologist told him. No way to rewire the circuitry of a brain that would forever make it hard for his son to read, to remember, to use language appropriately.

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And Koplewicz faced the same kind of challenge that the parents of his patients knew.

“These are problems that don’t go away. You treat them, you try to remove them as a barrier to learning, you make it easier for children to accomplish what they want to in life . . . to learn math, to sit still through social studies, to be calm enough to go to a party, happy enough to have a girlfriend or boyfriend, responsible enough to hold a job.”

And you acknowledge the very real and lingering pain they cause . . . for children, their families and society.

Raising public awareness of children’s mental health needs is the aim of “Childhood Revealed” and a touring exhibit--coming to Los Angeles this week--of the children’s artwork it features.

“In the same way that the AIDS quilt [exhibit] put a human face on the disastrous epidemic of AIDS, we hope this will raise the profile of childhood mental disorders,” Koplewicz said.

The book and exhibit reach beyond mental illness to explore the anguish children feel in the wake of all kinds of emotional trauma--divorce, abuse, physical illness, exposure to violence.

Accompanying every set of pictures is an explanation of each malady, and advice from experts on prognosis and treatment. At the back of the book is a directory of mental health resources.

The pictures--drawn from 600 submitted by therapists and treatment centers--are haunting, compelling both in their simple visual imagery and in the messages that they convey.

There is the scribbled, skeletal face drawn by a 10-year-old boy with autism, self-titled “Angry.” The line drawing by a 13-year-old with attention deficit disorder, who depicts his mom and dad, bug-eyed and confused. “My parents . . . “ he says, “don’t know what to do with me.”

Some are painful to look at, they show so clearly the damage inflicted on young psyches.

“This picture means all that I have seen has driven me mad,” writes a 14-year-old girl, whose painting depicts a big, black eyeball on a blood-red sea. “Anger takes over me . . .”

Others reflect the resilience of youth and the hope that treatment affords.

A hand reaches through from darkness to light, toward another hand, through the broken links of a chain. “In this painting, I am portraying myself on the dark side and other people on the light side,” explains the artist, a 15-year-old manic depressive. “There is a chain in the middle because I used to put up an emotional wall . . . Well, now the chain is broken and I let others help. I am not alone anymore.”

The exhibit opened last fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, then began a national tour that will take it to museums, libraries, universities and shopping malls around the country over the next two years. “The response,” Koplewicz said, “has been remarkable.”

Running Saturday through July 30, the exhibit will be on display in Los Angeles, at Every Picture Tells a Story gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., (323) 932-6070.

“I hope it piques people’s interest to say these kids are out there and if we don’t do something to help them, we’ll suffer for it,” Koplewicz says. “Because this is everybody’s problem.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.