He says now his mind worked like the television section at Circuit City — a bunch of screens set on different channels, and all talking at once. He couldn't focus on one. He didn't hear strange voices but familiar ones. Sometimes his mom's words would rattle around in his head. Sometimes an innocuous phrase would get twisted into something bad.

"It was just major chaos," Jake Short said recently.

"One night I was working on my homework and trying to write sentences using my spelling words. I couldn't do it, no matter hard I tried. My mom was trying to help me as she always did. I would get upset, anxious and cry. That night I couldn't complete my work at all. . . . I cried and told my parents I was going to run away. It was a very cold, dark, snowy night. I put on only a coat; no hat, gloves or boots. I just started walking, not knowing where I was going."

Jake was 8.

A frantic search ensued, and the boy eventually showed up at home an hour later to find his entire family in tears and sick with worry.

Through her tears Vicki Short asked, "Jake, what would make you feel better?"

"Just to be dead," he said crying.

The Shorts set up an appointment with a psychologist the next day. They knew then something was wrong. Jake was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, depression, severe anxiety and social phobias.

Several years of therapy and multiple medications followed. But it was always one step forward, two steps back.

Jake poked holes in his fingers and watched the blood drip from his hands. He chased his siblings around with a knife. He tried to drown himself in the bathtub.

He was seeing things, hearing things. He tried to hang himself. He overdosed on his pills.

He knew something was frightfully wrong, but it seemed no one could help him. His parents were beside themselves, and a doctor kept jockeying his medication trying to find the perfect mix.

"It was like living in a horror movie for a while. We thought we had this perfect family — a mom, a dad and all these children. It turned into a nightmare," Vicki Short said.

Every day the Shorts got a telephone call from Jake's school about some behavior or incident.

Vicki Short says now it nearly put her over the edge too. "Every day for six years there was something," she said.

Homework was impossible. Jake cried and rolled around on the floor. He held his head and yelled, "That black thing is in me again."