"When he was seven years old I had to hide all the knives in the house," confides Susan.
"I can describe his behaviour in one word: hell," says Joseph.
"Say the wrong word and he's gone. It would come to blows if you did not move yourself fairly fast," Mary reveals.
Susan, Joseph and Mary are each the distressed parent of violent, uncontrollable teenage boys. All three have tried for 10 years to get psychological help for their sons, feeling at times like nobody understood or even cared, and all three have come up with different solutions with varying degrees of success.
They felt compelled to talk after hearing Today with Pat Kenny on RTE Radio 1 yesterday morning in which a mother, Maria, told of the appalling verbal abuse inflicted on her by her son despite all her efforts to help him. Afterwards, the radio programme received more than a hundred calls from parents who said she could have been talking about their sons, too.
"My son is beyond redemption," Mary told The Irish Times. Her son, Sean (19) gets drunk, drives a motorcycle recklessly (gardai have arrested him for dangerous driving) and recently put his head through a glass window and was admitted to a private psychiatric hospital, then released. Mary has recognised in Sean many of the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder, including impulsive behaviour, aggression, inability to concentrate and to follow things through, and mood swings. ADD is widely diagnosed in the US and treated with Ritalin, but in the Republic psychiatrists and psychologists seem reluctant to diagnose it. Like Mary, Joseph has done everything possible for his behaviourally-disturbed son, Martin, including paying for psychiatric help. Martin has a bad temper, gets depressed, is obstinate, has stolen from his parents and lies compulsively. He started sniffing paint and glue in sixth class, began smoking dope at 13 and was dealing in ecstasy at the age of 15. He got into debt to drug dealers, some of whom Joseph paid off personally when they threatened to break Martin's legs.
Eventually Joseph took advice from a garda with whom he was friendly and refused to pay a drug dealer off. "It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do," says Joseph. "No matter what your child does, he is still your baby, your flesh and blood and you have to keep communication open."
While still troubled, Martin has exceptional artistic talent for which he has received recognition and money, although his behaviour threatens to undermine his chances. Joseph feels the roots of his bad behaviour may be in an undiagnosed learning or behavioural difficulty which was ignored in school.
Susan's 15-year-old son was always more active than other children, emotionally explosive and verbally abusive. With the help of a therapist, she has realised that her son's problems are actually her own.
"I have learned that disturbed behaviour is always right because the child, like a baby crying, is trying unconsciously to tell the parents that something is wrong. It's the parents who have to change. Their parenting is not working. Since we accepted this, we at least have some handle on his behaviour. We didn't get into a mess like this overnight and we won't get rid of it overnight," she says.