(July 8, 2014) Kay has postponed her retirement indefinitely so she can support her son with untreated severe mental illness, writes Stephanie McCrummen in the Washington Post about a family torn apart by psychiatric disease (“Behind the yellow door, a man’s mental illness worsens,” the Washington Post, June 28).
This week, the Treatment Advocacy Center will share brief excerpts from the tale. Today, we share Kay’s perspective, who does not want to let her son hit rock bottom, as many suggest she should.
Kay’s perspective:
“She, too, wishes her son could be committed to a psychiatric facility of some kind, but because that is not possible she texts him that she is bringing groceries.
“The last time her mother saw him was several weeks before, when she was bringing food and he came outside. It was evening, and he would not let her inside, so they sat on the porch. She tried to talk to him, but he took almost every word as having a double meaning. When she said ‘hi,’ he said, ‘I’m not high.’ When she said she didn’t mean it like that, he said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’
“[T]he psychiatrist tells Kay that she needs to stop bringing food, stop paying for his car and take him off her credit card. He says that she is enabling her son’s delusional behavior and that any support should be conditional on him seeing a doctor. Otherwise, the psychiatrist says, she should cut him off and let him get worse.
“During his one involuntary commitment, she had visited him nearly every one of those 24 days. She still regrets how it happened, the handcuffs in the middle of the street. She regrets that he was in a locked ward with patients who she guessed were homeless and an elderly man who walked around naked one day, which she is sure embarrassed her son. She worried that he felt demeaned. She promised him then she’d never do anything to put him back there again.
“Only now, almost three years later, she knows he needs help, and she knows that cutting off his financial support might be the only means to that end.”
Read the entire story by Stephanie McCrummen.
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