What Can We Do?

After the tragedy in Tucson there is again going to be lots of talk about the mentally ill and what to do about someone that seems dangerous or maybe a little off balance. Years ago our laws changed. We cannot lock up the mentally ill if they don't want to be locked up. We cannot make them take meds if they do not want to take meds! I have written some about my son with schizophrenia. Living with someone with schizophrenia day to day can be very stressful. Some days he seems just like everyone else. Then there are days he rants and raves through the house about being poisoned...the air is poison...the food is poison... Not fun. When someone is mentally ill like my son they can seem so normal. They can have rational conversations. Yet we need to watch what we say. They can take something said out of context. It is easy to forget and we must not ever forget that we are talking to someone that has a brain that doesn't think the way we do.

As parents we raise a child we love. They are cute and lively and wonderful. The care about animals. They do well in school. They have friends. Then sometime in their late teens that slowly changes. They become someone else. We still love them and we don't know what to do. My son went to counseling and took meds. That doesn't last. So as his mother I sort of became his counselor. I listen to him and when his ideas get too strange I tell him no. That is not how it is. I have always told him that he does not have the right to hurt anyone else. He has to try to understand that most people out in the world are doing their own thing and are not concerned with giving him poison or in any way harming his life. It is a never ending process. I feel like I walk a thin line. My son is basically a kind person. I am not saying that what I do would work with every child that becomes schizophrenic. Still listening and talking does help.

I have no idea what there is for parents when they know the child they raised and loved becomes mentally ill and seemingly dangerous. Dangerous is hard to prove. There are no facilities for the dangerously mentally ill. As a society we have to wait until they commit a serious crime...like killing people...and then send them to prison.

If as a society we give the parents of the mentally ill no help, no way to get their child help, how can we point fingers at them? How can we say they didn't do something. Like what?

Our San Diego news paper did a story about a homeless young woman that was found dead in a park here. They interviewed her stepmother in another state. When the girl's father was alive he would find a hospital for her when her illness got out of control. This happened over and over and cost the father a lot of money. The stepmother resented the girl and felt that the girl could stop being a problem if she wanted to. The father died and the stepmother blamed the girl for breaking her father's heart. No more hospitals or help and the girl was truly homeless and it isn't safe for women on the street. She met up with the wrong person and was raped and murdered.

The mentally ill have committed crimes and when caught are sent to prison. Still I truly believe that when the mentally ill have no family to help them or provide a home for them they are much more likely to become victims of crime. It is a burden I would never wish on another family.