LIVING IN AN INSANE WORLD...

UP CLOSE & PERSONAL

Living with someone living with Paranoid Schizophrenia is STRESSFUL & DEPRESSING! 

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.

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 you 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, YET!!! 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.  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 mass shootings and even if they come before who is really charged in our society with doing anything about sick minds. MENTAL HEALTH REFORM is critically needed, now!!!

 Who can help people experiencing MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES? ANSWER:  No one, really. The law is narrowly defined: an individual has to be a danger to self or others to get any kind of immediate treatment. But, there aren't enough beds in hospitals or jails for the mentally wounded. And many are quite functional some of the time and do not always display a danger to self or others 24/7. Plus mental health is not a top priority in a society that continues to stigmatize those with mental health concerns or conditions. Even though many relationships exhibit some semblance of compromised thinking, the lack of public discourse about mental illness leaves people generally uneducated about non-physical health conditions. We're more likely to freely talk about cardiac arrest, cancer, or diabetes because these are more acceptable "diseases." AND, when it comes to mental diseases research shows more people are now admitting they are depressed, BiPolar, or have PTSD but few are willing to reveal they have  Schizophrenia or problems with their mind... usually because they can't.  

 

SO... how do we help individuals LIVING WITH individuals LIVING WITH Schizophrenia? THE ANSWER:  You're pretty much on your own! One ends up suffering alone without viable options. Family members end up enduring and being terrorized by the frontal lobe disease called schizophrenia.

For example, what do you do when you're being domestically abused by someone with schizophrenia? Do you call the police and risk criminalizing a schizophrenic or do you seek an Emergency Petition from the Court only to have someone with schizophrenia taken to an Emergency Room but released after 72 hours on a psych ward; not surprisingly that individual is even angrier once released. OR... Do you force treatment on those with broken brains via the legal system as advocated by the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC)?

While there are some resources to increase understanding about the behavior of someone with schizophrenia and support groups... so much more is still needed.  NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) is to be commended for its free education courses, awareness campaigns, and lobbying of Congress for more help. Thanks to NAMI, TAC, and other organizations, Congress is finally recognizing the "critical need for mental health reform."  Meanwhile... the friends and relatives of those with mental health issues wait.

And until more help comes families and loved ones are having to have to themselves!!!  The first step for now is sound the alarm and become a critical mass for alerting the nation that too many parents, spouses, older adults and others are being held hostage by the deteriorating minds of of untreated schizophrenics.

HOW CAN A LOVED ONE NOT BECOME STRESSED AND/OR DEPRESSED? How tempting it is to use alcohol, drugs or food to cope with the unrelenting behavior of someone with schizophrenia.  But best-selling author Marianne Williamson uses her newest book - TEARS TO TRIUMPH -  to encourage all of us to face the pain rather than trying to numb or ignore it.  TEARS TO TRIUMPH (2016) offers some useful insights for extending a much needed discourse about what to do when confronted by compromised minds. The national health care system benefits from familes trying to help those who are not cognitively at their best.
  The book below is a reminder that anxiety and depression are frequent outcomes when living in an insane world or with insane people.

May you find daily Peace & Love!