72 CHAPTER 3
would explain to the family that they were running from federal investigators, who
were chasing him for some unnamed episode in the past; Rose Mary admitted to
the children that frequently they were running from bill collectors. Sometimes they
moved simply because Rex was bored.
Rex and Rose Mary tried to make their tumbleweed life into an adventure
for their children, and they succeeded to some extent when the children were young.
However, the parents’ own problems got in the way of their responsibilities.
When Rex would lose his job, sometimes he’d stay home. He drew up blueprints
for a solar-powered “glass castle” or worked on his design for a tool that would
fi nd gold in rocks. And increasingly during Jeannette’s childhood, he’d gamble
and drink (where he found the money for liquor wasn’t always clear, but some-
times he took the family’s food money or his children’s earnings from their
part-time jobs). In what Jeannette describes as his “beer phase,” Rex would drive
fast and sing loudly. When he began to drink the “hard stuff,” Rose Mary would
get frantic because Rex would become angry: He’d beat his wife, throw furniture
around, and yell. Then, he’d collapse.
When Jeannette was in elementary school and high school, her family was so
poor that the children ended up eating only one meal a day—the lunch leftovers
at school that they were able to scavenge from the trash. Under duress from her
children and the threat of visits from child welfare offi cials, Rose Mary tried two
different stints of working as a teacher, but she hated it so much that she had a
hard time getting out of bed to get ready for work, and she had diffi culty doing the
paperwork required by the job. After a year, Rose Mary refused to work anymore;
she claimed that she needed to put herself fi rst—to paint, sculpt, and write novels
and short stories—even though Rex still was not working and there was no other
regular income.
Did Rex and Rose Mary have psychological disorders? To answer that ques-
tion, we must return to the criteria for a psychological disorder that we discussed
in Chapter 1: a pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behavior that lead to distress,
impairment in daily life, and risk of harm, in the context of the culture. Did Rose
Mary or Rex experience signifi cant distress? Remarkably, Jeannette’s account of
her family conveys little sense that her parents were distressed by their situation.
What about impaired functioning? The fact that neither parent was able to hold
a job consistently certainly indicates impairment in daily life.
With regard to risk of harm, Rose Mary and Rex put themselves and their
children at risk countless times in various ways: They—and their children— regularly
went without food (and neither parent was suffi ciently motivated to earn money
in order to buy food). Rex repeatedly drove while intoxicated, sometimes at 90
miles an hour or more. The family members’ physical safety was put at risk
in other ways. Jeannette recalls how her parents insisted that the doors and win-
dows of the house be left open at night for better air circulation, but vagrants would
come in. One night when Jeannette was 10 years old, she woke up to fi nd a vagrant
sexually groping her. When the children asked their parents to close the doors at
night, their parents refused: “They wouldn’t consider it. We needed the fresh
air, they said, and it was essential that we refuse to surrender to fear” (Walls, 2005,
p. 103). The parents put themselves at risk of harm in other ways, including intense
fi ghting. For example, during one fi ght, Rex and Rose Mary went at each other
with knives—and then their fi ghting suddenly switched off, and the couple ended
up laughing and hugging. Rose Mary admitted to her children that she was an “excite-
ment addict,” and her quest for excitement and Rex’s drinking and related behavior
often led the family into dangerous situations.
According to Jeannette’s descriptions, then, both Rex and Rose Mary Walls
would seem to have had some type of psychopathology. On what basis should you
evaluate and classify their behavior? How would a mental health professional go
about identifying their psychological problems? How should you go about deter-
mining whether a specifi c diagnosis is warranted? For mental health professionals,