UP CLOSE & PERSONAL
Living with someone living with Paranoid Schizophrenia is STRESSFUL, DEPRESSING, & DANGEROUS, if untreated!
I've watched helplessly as a loved one angrily throws things, breaks numerous cherished items, bangs violently on doors and walls, curses while raging, issues commands, uses hostile body language and threats, defends all actions, and refuses to leave my home. Do I really have to criminalize a mentally ill person to get help?
I've watched helplessly as a loved one shows obvious signs of mental deterioration after being off medication for more than two years. But what can I do? How do you deal with someone whose very disease (Schizophrenia) creates an inability to perceive there is a cognitive or thinking problem; a shift in reality that is different from the average person?
Who can help? No one!!! The physical health system is more developed than this country's Mental Health System. Break an arm, you get quick treatment. Have a broken brain, you don't get help, but stigma. No one wants to have a mental illness so the public discourse is already too little, too late. Questions about what's going on in someone head typically come AFTER violence or mass shootings. But even when there is discussion about mental illness... who really in our society is charged with doing anything about sick or compromised minds. The lack of parity between physical and mental health is thus obvious and demoralizing.
Who is available to help those who experience MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES? ANSWER: Not your doctor, minister, or correctional officer. In fact, there aren't enough beds in hospitals or jails for the mentally wounded. Why??? Because mental health is still not a top priority in the 21st century. Instead, we tend to stigmatize individuals with mental health concerns more often than those with physical conditions. More people typically talk more about cardiac arrest, cancer, or diabetes because they hear more about them. When it comes to mental diagnoses, people are more likely to admit they are depressed, BiPolar, or have PTSD, than they are to reveal they have Schizophrenia. Who wants to self-stigmatize, anyway.
SO... who can help RELATIVES LIVING WITH RELATIVES LIVING WITH MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES? ANSWER: You're on your own!
When you're being domestically abused by someone with schizophrenia, do you call the police and risk criminalizing them or do you seek an Emergency Petition from the Court to have someone with schizophrenia taken to an Emergency Room when after 72 hours on a psych ward they are released and come back, even angrier? Do you force treatment on those with broken brains via the legal system as advocated by the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC)?
Or... do you can seek to understand the behavior of someone with schizophrenia via such organizations as NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). While NAMI is to be commended for its free education courses, awareness campaigns, and lobbying of Congress for more help, the friends and relatives of those with mental health issues still need so much more.
UNTIL WE GET HELP... we're going to have to help ourselves!!! The first step for now is to make others aware that a problem exist, that many adults and families are being held hostage by the deteriorating minds of their loved ones.
THE KEY RIGHT NOW... is to avoid becoming DEPRESSED over the situation. According to best-selling author Marianne Williamson, we should work through the pain rather than trying to numb it. Her new book - TEARS TO TRIUMPH - is listed below, in case you want to join the discourse about what we can do to help the ones we love when they are not cognitively at their best. Peace & Love.
