My Experience
We were sitting in the living room talking about something totally inconsequential and my son kept telling me to ‘ssshhh!’ After a few of these interruptions, I asked him why I had to be quiet and he told me that the people in the apartment upstairs would hear.1) They certainly couldn’t hear
2) Why would we care if they did?
If I think back, there were other clues to his growing paranoia, which I didn’t initially recognise, putting them down to his age.
He had been a popular, polite and charming boy at school. Intelligent, handsome and witty. He slowly descended in to something I didn’t really understand for many years, beginning when he was around 17, while he was theoretically doing his ‘A’ levels at school. And smoking dope. I would come home from work and I could tell if he was in the house before I saw him, by all I can describe as a black negativity hanging in the house. I didn’t know what to do or how to handle him. After many failed attempts to get him to see a doctor, I sneakily arranged for a mental health team to come around and assess him. They did and wanted him to attend the outpatients unit at hospital. He refused.
My biggest struggle has been, and still is, his refusal to acknowledge and accept his condition. He is now 28.
About 5 years ago, my son was picked up by the police and sectioned. It took me 4 months of tribunals to get my son released from the hospital that was like a scene from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. He was pumped full of drugs so he was like a zombie and knocked out cold at night. He has never fully recovered from this experience. He now has, and I certainly can’t blame him for this, a complete paranoia of doctors. Since then, I have managed to get him in to private hospitals twice, but with little long-term effect. He won’t take his medication every day and goes in to hospital for an injection every 2 weeks. At the time of writing this, he has refused his due injection twice and am hoping he will go in tomorrow.
It is a continuous struggle and as a single parent, a very lonely place. I am constantly wracked with guilt for my beautiful son who still has a beautiful heart.
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