The Girl Behind the Door
A Father's Quest to Understand His Daughter's Suicide
by John Brooks
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Pub Date Feb 09 2016 | Archive Date Feb 09 2016
Description
Early one Tuesday morning John Brooks went to his teenage daughter’s room to make sure she was getting up for school and found her room dark and “neater than usual.” Casey was gone but he found a note: The car is parked at the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m sorry.
Several hours later a security video was found that showed Casey stepping off the bridge.
Brooks spent months after Casey’s suicide trying to understand what led his seventeen-year-old daughter to take her life. He examines Casey’s journey from her abandonment at birth in Poland, to the orphanage where she lived for the first fourteen months of her life, to her adoption and life with John and his wife Erika in Northern California. He reads. He talks to Casey’s friends, teachers, doctors, therapists, and other parents. He consults adoption experts, researchers, clinicians, attachment therapists, and social workers.
In The Girl Behind the Door, Brooks shares what he learned and asks “What did everyone miss? What could have been done differently?” He’d come to realize that Casey might have been helped if someone had recognized that she’d likely suffered an attachment disorder from her infancy—an affliction common among children who’ve been orphaned, neglected, and abused. This emotional deprivation in early childhood, from the lack of a secure attachment to a primary caregiver, can lead to a wide range of serious behavioral issues later in life.
John’s hope is that Casey’s story, and what he discovered since her death, will help others. This important book is a wakeup call that parents, mental health professionals, and teens should read.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781501128349 |
| PRICE | $24.00 (USD) |
Average rating from 3 members
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 208013
The Girl Behind the Door was doubly sad and heartbreaking. John Brooks and his wife Erika adopted a Polish orphan in the early 1990s when she was around 10 months old. They renamed her Casey, and brought her to live an upper middle class life in the Bay Area in California. The book opens with Casey's suicide at the age of 17, when she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Throughout the rest of this memoir, Brooks recounts their tumultuous life with Casey from the time they brought her home -- her intelligence, wicked wit, intense mood swings, tantrums, insecurity, inconsistent academic performance, sporadic drug use, etc... They tried therapy, medication, imposing strict limits, punishments, being supportive -- but Casey's difficulties were persistent. Erika and John felt a deep love and commitment for Casey, but they were often exasperated, tired, worn down, and self doubting. And then after another bad weekend -- but no worse than others in the past -- Casey jumped off the bridge. The book is doubly sad because following the retelling of the events leading to Casey's death, Brooks recounts his search to understand what happened and ultimately in large part he lays the blame at his and Erika's feet. He realizes that they had never considered the effects of her early childhood, and he discovers a whole wealth of writing and expertise on the traumatic effects of early childhood in an orphanage and the resulting attachment disorder. More important than anything, he comes to feel that without this understanding, he and Erika did everything wrong -- that they should not have treated her like an ordinary misbehaving child but that they should have worked to reassure her over and over again that nothing she could do would lead them to abandon her. I feel teary as I write this. To lose a child is the worse thing that can happen. To feel that there's something you could have done and should have done to prevent the loss is unimaginable. But Brooks seems to have written this memoir as part of the healing process, and in the hopes that others adoptive parents in his shoes will be better informed. Although dealing with a hugely painful topic, in the end this book is readable because Brooks is so straightforward and sincere in sharing his story. This is a hard book to read, but it's definitely worthwhile. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an opportunity to read an advance copy.
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