Rockland County Family Featured in Upcoming PBS Documentary 'This Emotional Life'

As soon as Lois Ross brought her newborn son, Jason, home from the hospital, she knew there was something not quite right with him. From the time he was just a few days old, Jason didn't interact with the world around him the same way his older brother did. As Jason grew, so did Lois's concern for her son's mental and emotional health, and when Jason turned 2 she demanded his pediatrician evaluate him. The outcome was the first of many misdiagnoses her son would receive over the next 17 years - a list that came to include ADHD, OCD, Tourette Syndrome, speech delay, and even schizophrenia.

Knowing that her son did not fit into any of these categories, Lois continued to search for an answer to her son's symptoms, the most debilitating of which, his complete lack of social skills, had become a daily source of emotional pain. Without the help of the internet, she scoured the library, made countless phone calls, and reached out to anyone she thought could help. "I was told by the owner of a nursery, 'If you do not fight for your children, no one else will,'" Lois recalls. "As a parent, you are the key ingredient."

Finally, in 1998, when he was 19 years old, Jason was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder on the Autism spectrum that affects senses, motor skills, social skills, and language. It was the first time Lois had heard of the disorder, but she knew that it fit her son perfectly.

The now 30-year-old Jason and his family, residents of New City in Rockland County, NY, are participants in a new PBS documentary called "This Emotional Life," due to air in January 2010. The documentary will explore "our ongoing and never-ending pursuit of happiness," says the show's host Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor of psychology and author of Stumbling on Happiness. "Happiness is the thing that all human beings are looking for," Gilbert says. "Each decision we make in our lives is based on what will make us happier." The problem, Gilbert says, is that we have no "road map" to happiness, and most people are, for some reason, poor predictors of what will make them happy.

"It's a topic so intuitive, yet so elusive," says A. Kathryn Power, M.Ed., director of the Center for Mental Health Services at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "No one ever gave us a class or taught us how to talk about our emotions, but we need to get America to the level where we can do that." These are conversations we have not been having, Power says, and a lack of dialogue leads to a lack of awareness, which in turn leads to a lack of action. Therefore the purpose of the documentary, she says, is to open up the discussion about emotional health and the pursuit of happiness in our society.

The three-part documentary will focus on three basic ideas: first, that you can't be happy alone; second, that you can't be happy all the time; and third, that you can be happier than you are.