| Family & Relationships |
| Nervous System |
| Children With Special Needs |
| Autism Spectrum Disorders |
| Psychology |
| Urban & Community |
| Health & Fitness |
| Medical |
| Psychopathology |
| Diseases |
Summary
Summary
When Jenny Lexhed and her husband have their first child, Lucas, they are living the dream. They're happily married, they've just bought a house, the company they built together from the ground up is starting to blossom. But with the arrival of their son, a feeling of anxiety slips into their life. What starts as a feeling becomes a conviction. Lucas is not like other children. Everything seems to indicate, and psychiatric evaluation concludes, that their son is severely autistic. Will he ever be able to communicate?
Jenny vows to do whatever she can to help Lucas connect with his parents and others and live an independent life. Tossed between hope and despair, she begins a frantic effort to research the best among many competing therapies and find exactly the right treatment for her son. Her obsession takes her to the brink of exhaustion--and over, when she suffers a psychotic breakdown and must be committed to a psychiatric clinic. There begins another journey, to find her balance and recover her strong, healthy life, before she can begin again to fight for her son.
Both brutally honest and deeply affecting, Love Is Not Enough is a page-turning memoir that offers insight into autism and what a parent goes through for her child.
Author Notes
Jenny Lexhed and her husband now have three children. In 1995, they founded the speakers bureau Talarforum in Scandinavia, which has grown to seventy employees and more than eight thousand speakers in its network. Now sixteen, Lucas has learned to communicate, read, write, and do math; he is an independent and happy young adult. Jenny has become a sought-after speaker in Scandinavia and a contributor to various publications. She and her family have lived since 2013 in Florida. Visit her website at www.jennylexhed.com.
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
Mentally and physically exhausted supermoms of kids with special needs will identify with Lexhed, who gives a warts-and-all account of how she struggles to raise a son with autism. In fact, the effort takes so much out of her that she develops akathisia, a temporary psychosis triggered by a life crisis and lack of sleep. Against her will, she is committed to psychiatric treatment and given a slew of drugs. (The pills turned me into a medieval knight in a clumsy, rickety, enormous suit of armor.) It's easy to see why this memoir is a best-seller in Lexhed's home country of Sweden. A reassuring afterword notes that Lucas, a kindhearted person and the happy owner of a Lab named Titus, is now 16. By the end of the story, Lexhed and her husband, who run a successful speakers' bureau with 70 employees, have moved to Florida. A family tale well worth reading, especially for parents of kids with disabilities.--Springen, Karen Copyright 2015 Booklist
