Warning: patient's parents may experience vast relief

My mother sobbed and hitched about it.  My father was more serious and silent even then before.  They were both so terribly upset by what I'd done.

And so relieved.

So glad when I did something normal like "acting out," as they called it.  That's the kind of thing teenagers do all the time. So ordinary.  

And so sad, of course. If you're a perfectly normal middle-class couple who've always tried to be good parents -- gone to PTA meetings, baked cookies, lived in a good neighborhood -- then you get a year's free membership to the sympathy club (renewable annually) when your kid flips out and shatters all the breakables in your bedroom and threatens to do a lot worse than that.

Especially when you respond by getting her the help she needs.  Get some really good doctors, and the hell with the expense. Put her somewhere where she can't hurt herself or anyone else.  

They visited me for a while, until I made it really clear that it didn't matter how many drugs they pumped into me -- I was going to scream about what liars they were until they either admitted I was right or cleared out.  And the way I screamed, I could make it hurt.

Not that they ever said that was the reason they stopped coming.  They would go through any amount of pain for me, their only child. (And not that they would admit that there was any pain involved in getting near me when I didn't want them to, since that might get a little too close to the truth.  Psycho-child was acceptable in their reasonably enlightened and liberal circle of friends; psychic was something else.)

No, they got a doctor to agree that their presence might be having a painfully agitating impact on me.  

Which is the polite way of dumping your kid at the loony bin and going back to your normal lives.