Loading ...I have a 25 year old son who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would go on the medication, then feel he was cured, stop the medication and his symptoms would get worse.
Because of the laws he could not be forced to stay on his medication and would eventually go back into the hospital on a form, in which an advocate would go in and ask him if he wanted to be there and of course he would say no.
He is now 25 years old, the voices in his head have become unstoppable and louder for him. His delusions have become increasingly violent and he has such beliefs that he can live forever if he drinks human blood (because God said, drink my blood) and that if he dies he will rise again. I assure you that I and my family, his probation officer, and his two psychiatrists have no doubt that if our son is not treated medically for his illness that he will eventually kill either himself or someone else.
He self medicates himself with drugs, as is common with this illness, to stop the 20 screaming voices in his head.
As a parent I am unable to help my son who so desperately deserves treatment because HE is the only one who can make this decision. All doors are locked to the people who love him the most. His family. We have to stand by and watch him disappear into someone we don’t know and who we all now fear for our lives.
Yes… this is our worst life experience … dealing with the law taking the rights away so that we cannot help our loved one.
I think if a loved one proves time and time again, and in our case when his doctors say he is a danger to himself and others, and cannot function without help, that a loved one of the mentally ill person should be able to step in and be his voice to make him take his medication and to make sure his medical needs are taken care of.
Currently our son is back in jail for threatening our lives. Do we think he will follow through with these plans? Yes we think so, so do his doctors, so does his probation officer, so do the police. You have to remember that when a paranoid schizophrenic is off his medication he doesn’t see family, friends as who they really are but in his delusional mind they are people that are trying to kill him.
My son deserves to be treated for his mental illness. But as the law stands now at this point they will wait for him to carry out his threats, and he will, and then all will suddenly stand up and say wow, why didn’t we see this coming.
So my simple answer to what could help make things easier on family members is simply to allow the family to help their loved one get better. Untie our hands and hear our pleas, give us back our loved one.
Is it not enough that they are sick? Do we have to punish them for being sick?
My biggest concern is that as a parent to a young man that we love so much, we cannot help him. That we have to watch him get worse and worse every day. We have to watch him being hurled into a justice system that he has no understanding of what wrong he did. He did what the voices told him to do, he did things out of desperation, he was hungry he needed food, he was scared, he was fighting for his life. Kill or be killed.
We know that when he calls us mom and dad he knows who we are, his parents. But when he refers to us by our first names we know that he thinks of us as his enemies. We have lived with locks on our bedroom doors for a few years now. —Brenda Valcheff
