(Oct. 4, 2013) I write the way I speak. The way I speak these days is with impatience at the hesitancy to implement or fully use involuntary treatment laws in every state.
I wasn't always this way. When my daughter had her second psychotic break, I went to our urgent psychiatric center to fill out the involuntary petition and found myself sitting in the chair unable to speak or write due to crying uncontrollably at the thought that I was there quite literally begging for my 19 year old to get the medical care she desperately needed.
And beg I would. I would have done anything. But they accepted that petition and the other three I have had to fill out during the course of her now almost 10-year battle with serious mental illness.
Getting the care she needed still didn't stop me from being curled up in the fetal position the third time we had to go through the same process worrying about how my precious girl was supposed to survive in a world that prefers to incarcerate her or leave her on the streets.
My daughter's illness included a lack of insight, which means she was too sick to know she was sick. I have never needed studies or medical expertise to explain to me that her illness affects her brain, therefore her ill brain may not allow her understand she is sick. Common sense told me that.
But due to the fact that she was allowed access via our involuntary program to the medical care she needed for almost eight years, her illness relented and she now has insight. For the last year and two months, she has been receiving care voluntarily.
I still worry though. She is still mentally ill. There are no guarantees the symptoms of her illness won't rear their ugly heads again. And she still lives in a world that would prefer to incarcerate her or leave her on the street.
But I am grateful she has made it this far. I no longer find myself curled up in a ball sobbing.
Now I'm just impatient waiting for everyone to have access to medical care, including those with brain disorders rendering them too sick to ask for it on their own.