“Her birth was an omen,” tells Betty, Jasmine’s mother. “My contractions lasted terribly long. It was a Friday afternoon, and the staff was eager to go home. So they put me on a drip. I didn’t want it. I wanted to let nature run its course. But there you lie. You’re not asked anything. You don’t dare protest. You’re so dependent on the physician and the nurses. You can’t just get down from the stretcher and leave. So you reassure yourself with the thought that they’re professionals, they must know what they’re doing.”

During Jasmine’s first years, she had many problems with her health, but not her behavior. “Ah, she was a bit lively,” Betty reminisces, “but so what? I loved her the way she was.” Jasmine’s liveliness is conspicuous. While talking, she constantly swings her shoulders to and fro. What she’s says is lucid. If I shut my eyes, I wouldn’t notice anything unusual about her.

When Jasmine was four years old, she was registered at the village kindergarten. Betty took her there full of good will and confidence. But the teacher was not able to ignore Jasmine’s liveliness. Jasmine was constantly being locked up in the toilet as a punishment.

“Jasmine isn’t a bad child” Betty tries to convince me, even though I can see that for myself. Betty and I are seated at the dinner table so that I can take notes. Jasmine and a friend are busily playing on the other side of the kitchen door with a large family of dolls. During my entire three-hour visit in her home, Jasmine does not disturb us even once, nor does she give Betty a reason to go to her.

“Jasmine’s looks harm her,” Betty continues. “She is very large for her age, broad, physically precocious. So people are quick to think things that aren’t true.”
There’s another thing about her looks that distinguishes Jasmine from most other children in the village: her milk chocolate color. “I can’t help but notice that all of the brown children one by one are referred to special schools, even when they are perfectly ordinary children.”

Jasmine was placed in a psychiatric daycare center. There she grew unmanageable. At home, her behavior took a sharp turn for the worse as well. A dark cloud casts its shadow on Betty’s eyes as she recalls, “Only during vacations did she slowly become herself again.”

“They’re impenetrable” sighs Betty, referring to the center’s staff. “They never listened to me.” The psychiatrist wrote a prescription for Jasmine. By our law, a physician is required to fully inform the patient, or in this case, the parent. But he only said, “We want to try this.” He didn’t tell Betty what it was. It didn’t occur to her to ask. She had never heard of neuroleptics, nor had she any idea what they do to the central nervous system. It was the village pharmacist who alerted Betty to what pernicious poison the doctor had prescribed for her little girl. When the psychiatrist shoved a consent form under Betty’s nose to sign, regarding permanent incarceration for Jasmine, Betty knew one thing for sure: she had to get her child out of there as quickly as possible.

By luck there was a spot for Jasmine in a special education unit. It wasn’t really what Betty wanted for her. “They place all those easily over-stimulated children together in one classroom,” she explains. “That’s the most foolish thing you can do. The presence alone of so many lively children in one room immensely increases the stimuli. It makes them even more active and noisy. A vicious circle ensues, a spiral. It’s better to place lively children among their more sedentary peers.” But at that moment, Betty’s most urgent mission was extracting Jasmine from psychiatry, so, reluctantly, she settled for the special education class.

Already in her first two months there, Jasmine had five different teachers because of staff shortages. The fifth teacher was a man whose motto seemed to be: control by force. “He would lie down on top of the children,” Betty relates, the dark cloud hovering over her eyes again. “It was plain child abuse. Is it any wonder those children rebelled?”

For Betty, this was the last straw. One morning she phoned the school. “Jasmine is ill.” Jasmine would remain “ill” a half year. Around that same time, Betty ran into some books about raising children that appealed to her. She wanted to try the methods at home. “Jasmine is quite sociable,” Betty assures me gratuitously. “She does fine with stimuli in the home. It’s only the wretchedness in the psychiatric daycare center and at school she can’t handle.”

Jasmine was seven years old when her mother started keeping her home. During the next half year, she learned to cook, swim, and use the computer. She attended calisthenics classes and ran errands for her mother. When she and her friends wanted to erect a girls’ club, Betty taught the whole group to cooperate on projects, figure the club’s budget, read maps and train schedules for outings, and more.

Jasmine was a happy child again, developing and learning well. But the inevitable happened. In this country, home schooling is illegal. If Betty didn’t return Jasmine to a state school, she risked losing custody of her. As the mainstream school refused to try Jasmine again, Betty was compelled to return her daughter to the special ed unit.

How is Jasmine doing there? Again the dark cloud descends on Betty’s eyes. “This is the nicest teacher Jasmine has ever had. She understands and respects us, listens, isn’t arrogant. But her job is impossible. She has seventeen over-stimulated children in her classroom. While she’s calming down things in one corner of the classroom, in another mayhem bursts loose. She has no time for teaching, let alone making the most of the individual children’s interests and talents. Jasmine's wellbeing is rapidly sliding away again.”

How does Betty see Jasmine’s future? Now the cloud evaporates. “If only she can be sluiced safely through her years of compulsory education, she’ll be like any other young woman. She can hold a job if she wants, and raise children.” Her children will no doubt be well-cared for. The dolls, scrubbed clean and  dressed, are seated in a line on the kitchen counter. The kitchen's tidiness conceals that two girls were just playing there intensely for three hours.

“Come say good-bye girls,” Betty calls to Jasmine and her friend when the interview is over. Both comply cheerfully. Just as the door is falling closed behind me, I hear Jasmine politely ask, “Mom, may we bring the horse game down from the attic?”

So far Jasmine has been lucky, thanks to an alert pharmacist and her mother’s intuition. But how much longer? Psychiatry’s vicious clutch is poised to snap shut on her any day now. And she's only one little girl out of so, so many children, driven into psychiatry's waiting trap by compulsory schooling.

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