Loss of Control

The last two weeks have been all about a loss of control. My daughter’s loss of control over her situation as the “Team” has finally come together to provide a framework for consistent messaging, consistent responses and expectations. In two weeks she as only gone missing once and there was a definite external trigger for that which is a huge and quite frankly unexpected improvement. Up to this point her mantra was to try and control everyone with threats of self-harm, threats of legal action, threats of disappearing…all because she doesn’t want to be where she is, but at the same time she doesn’t know where she wants or needs to be. The paranoid delusions were running the show.

 

I’m taking down all my enemies ’cause they’re all so fucking useless

A bunch of shit talking drama queens and they’re all filled with excuses

I wanna find me a better scene where it’s not the same opinion

I’d rather go to a funeral than to this high school reunion

 

We’re all crazy, you’re all crazy now

Well we’re so crazy, you’ve all gone insane

Loss of control, loss of control

Green Day…

My daughter’s lawyer has lost some control because the group has collectively singled her out as part of the problem and pointed out that she isn’t helping. Perhaps she has been shamed into backing off, perhaps she now realizes that she is doing more harm than good…quite frankly I don’t know and I don’t care. She will never be on “our side”, but as long as she is not actively contributing to the chaos I have no choice but to live with it.

The interesting thing is that by losing control, my daughter seems to have gained some control over herself and her behaviors. The running has stopped and in the short-term she has become calmer and more settled. She has had a couple of positive interactions with us, she is talking about re-engaging in some sports that she loved…school is still rocky, but progress is progress.

We haven’t gained control, but we haven’t lost it either so we will take that as a win. The situation “is what it is” and whether you want to call it understanding the serenity prayer or radical acceptance we are inching forward on the mental health front. Our family is going through a different crisis right now because when shit happens it seems to happen to us….but that’s a topic for another day.

Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)

Ah yes, here we go – the blogger guy with Daddy issues…I have become a living, breathing, writing cliché! Not really, but I am trying to avoid becoming bitter and angry and thought that I would be more reflective because I am feeling the need to write.

My father was, is and always will be an alcoholic. I can recount negative incident after negative incident involving my father and booze.  Christmas in particular was a difficult time for my father because his mother died when he was a teenager so there was always drinking and never a real sense of warmth or happiness in our household growing up.  I have many vivid memories of my father’s drinking…and very few positive or happy memories of quality time with my father:

Just last year when I was only seven 

Now I'm almost eight, as you can see 

You came home a quarter past eleven 

And fell down underneath our Christmas tree

Allan Jackson

In many ways I had a crappy childhood – well crappier than many, although not nearly as bad as some.  I was verbally abused and emotionally starved, but in the end I turned out okay. The one thing that my father did give me was a strong desire to have a better relationship with my own kids and to give them the things that I needed and didn’t get.  The intent of this isn’t to dump all over my father and somehow blame him for my family’s current predicament.  My father did the best that he could with the tools that he had and most of the time I can live with that.  He didn’t beat me, I had a roof over my head and food on the table and from his perspective that was what he was required to do.  I wanted to do more for my family.

I am far from the perfect father and husband and in many ways I am my own worst critic. While what makes a good father and husband varies from person to person, my definition or perception is based on the concept of being a good provider.  Not just being a “breadwinner” in the traditional sense, but also someone who provides his family with his time, his attention, his love and support.  A good father and husband is someone who is a positive role model for his kids and is a loving, supportive partner for his spouse.

I wanted to swing for the fences as a husband and as a parent and while there are times I can visualize the ball sailing over the wall in right field there are others where I can only see myself standing there with the bat on my shoulder as three straight strikes go whizzing by me. This makes me…human, fallible and just like many other husbands and fathers out there.

I have worked hard to ensure that we have a solid financial footing and aside from the very early years money has never really been an issue. We can do the things we want, we can travel, the kids have been able to participate in a wide range of activities so I’m comfortable with what I’ve been able to achieve for my family in this regard.

I probably do work too much, but as much as possible I have tried to do it at the expense of time for “me” as opposed to being at the expense of time with the kids. My wife may be the one who gets neglected in the time department (oddly enough this has changed for the better since mental illness turned our world up-side-down), but we are both busy and I think (hope) that she understands and sees that I am trying.  I may not attend every practice, but I am at many.  I am at almost all events (concerts, athletic competitions, etc.), I help with homework, I have always handled bedtime and I have volunteered to help out in my kids’ sports and with charities that involve causes that affect my kids’ lives.

I don’t do nearly as much around the house as I used to, although I justify that in my own mind by saying that I have a stay-at-home spouse and that should be part of the “deal”. I try – some days I try harder than others and I don’t believe that it is a “male/ female thing,” it is more of an issue of time.  I sometimes forget that my wife doesn’t stay home to make watch soap operas, bake muffins and have my slippers waiting by the door…she stays home because the kids are our priority and both of our girls have busy schedules.  She occasionally reminds me of this, I improve for a bit; back slide to old habits and the cycle repeats itself.

My wife and I are affectionate with each other and with our kids. This is a conscious decision on my part because quite frankly I don’t remember ever getting a hug from my father as a child…unless he was drinking.  I can say the same thing for my parents – the only time my father ever tried to put his arm around my mother or give her a hug or a kiss (at least in public) was when he was drinking and it was not well-received.  I don’t think that I ever heard my parents say “I love you” to each other or to me.  I wanted my kids to know that I loved them, to know that I love their mother and to know that it was okay to show it and say it.

I can be sarcastic and in hindsight that’s not something that my daughter would have understood and I should have been more careful with my words.  When I am “off my game” I can get “snippy” with my wife and frustrated with my daughters.  This isn’t constant, but it shouldn’t happen and I need to try harder to not bring outside frustrations home.  I have a temper.  It can be a long, slow burn, but when I lose it I can really lose it.  I have never been physical when angry, but I can get loud.  Again, not something that happens all of the time, but it shouldn’t happen at all.  None of this makes me a failure as a partner or a parent…it makes me human.

So why am I writing this? I am writing it for myself as much as I am for others, because it just highlights to me why at times I have felt like such a complete and utter failure as a father.  My emotionally detached, uninvolved and alcoholic father who once called me “effing useless and a waste of time” did a better job of raising his kids than I did.  Logically I know that this statement is complete bullshit, but in many of my darker moments I have wholeheartedly believed that this was true.

I was a straight A student, I worked hard, got a degree and made something out of myself. My sister was a little more rebellious when she was younger, but she got a degree and had the strength to leave a failing marriage and is carving out a life for herself as a strong, independent woman.  My father’s kids both turned out okay.

My youngest daughter is not living at home, she is cutting, has been suicidal, is paranoid, delusional and suffering from mental illness. She won’t talk to me, is afraid of me and has had more run-ins with the police in the last week than I have in a lifetime.  How could I not think that I’ve been a terrible father – look how my daughter turned out!

The point of this isn’t to seek pity, or have people tell me that it’s not my fault.  Logically I know that, but when I look at my childhood and my daughter’s and I track the trajectories it just shows that mental illness doesn’t discriminate.  It doesn’t care if you as a parent are supportive and loving or drunk and abusive, it can strike anyone at anytime.  It isn’t always your fault, you didn’t always cause this…as much as in those dark moments the only person you want to blame is yourself.

Stand By You

 

There were a number of songs that I though of when I started this post, but a line from this song always stood out to me so I went with it.  The line that came to mind was “Even if we’re breaking down, we can find a way to break through.  Even if we can’t find heaven, I’ll walk through hell with you” from Rachel Platten’s hit Stand By You.

Hands
 Put your empty hands in mine
 And scars
 Show me all the scars you hide
 And hey, if your wings are broken
 Please take mine so yours can open too
 Cause I'm gonna stand by you

Rachel Platten

I mentioned in an earlier entry “All Things Must Pass” that I am trying very hard to not let this entire experience turn me into an angry and bitter man. This has become more and more challenging as the chaos surrounding my daughter becomes more tumultuous, as we move into what is bound to be an expensive legal proceeding, while the limited information we receive on her activities becomes more disturbing and as all of this continues to distract from the real issue of getting her help.

With this in mind, I am not going to ramble on about the situation and instead I am going to focus on two of the connected skills that we learned in Family Connections – empathy and validation. They are intimately connected because without empathy you can’t have validation.  In my opinion these are the two of the core aspects of the Family Connections program – you need empathy to be able to not just understand why someone is feeling a certain way, but to get down and dirty with them and try to feel what they are feeling and make their emotion a shared experience.  To truly validate someone you need to try to understand them, know what they are feeling and why those feelings exist.

We have all heard the popular definition of empathy as being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes – in other words, walk the path they are walking, feel what they are feeling and experience what they are experiencing. It seems simple enough, but most people get it wrong and confuse empathy with sympathy.  The best explanation that I have seen for this is an animated video by Brene Brown, the link to which is as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw

She describes being empathetic as getting down into that dark, emotional hole with someone and sharing their experience. When being empathetic you have chosen to put yourself out there, to try to share in their pain and feel what they are feeling.  Sympathy on the other hand is looking down at the person who is in the hole and trying to make them feel better.  The sympathetic person doesn’t want to climb into that hole, they want to try and pull the person up out of it – whether they are ready to come out or not.  They can’t handle the thought of being in the hole, so they try and sugar coat things, paint a positive picture and use and platitudes to try and make the person feel better.

I will leave the Brene Brown video to speak for itself, but I will give you a couple of personal examples to try and explain what I mean and demonstrate the difference. As I have said before, I am an open book to family, friends and colleagues when it comes to my family’s battles with mental health, but there are some people who I open up to more than others and their empathetic approach is a primary reason why.  Here are some of the responses I have received:

1. “I can’t imagine what you are going through it must be really hard.”
2. “I don’t really know what to say but if you need to talk, I’m a good listener.”
3. “You and your wife are strong and God only gives these challenges to people who can handle them.”
4. “That’s just like our experience with Bob; we know exactly what you are going through.”

The first two both felt empathetic.  Neither person offered me advice or tried to make me feel better with platitudes or compliments.  They just acknowledged how hard and crappy the situation was and they were listening to me.  They didn’t try to create a scenario where it was about them, they just listened and they were genuine and sincere.

The third is one that I absolutely hate for a couple of reasons.  The first – I’m not religious.  If you are that’s great, whatever floats your boat and whatever gets you through the day, but I’m not and people who know me are aware of this.  When I hear this well-intended statement (trying to tell me how strong I am) my first feeling is anger because it implies that “God” intentionally gave my daughter a mental illness and bestow this hell on my family because we were capable of dealing with the aftermath.  Really?  As someone who doesn’t believe in “God” my immediate reaction is that if this situation was contrived by the almighty and compassionate “God” that you believe in then you can have him.  I want no part of a deity that would intentionally do this to my daughter and my family.  The second reason is that even if I was religious this statement could be invalidating.  I don’t always feel strong and I am often vulnerable and out-of-control.  That statement invalidates my feelings about myself and if I was a person of faith, it would invalidate the strength of my faith.  In other words, I must not be faithful enough or strong enough because I don’t feel like I can handle this and I am letting down “God”.  Either way…the statement is made as part of someone’s attempt to make me feel better so they can feel better about being around me.

The last one (number four) is my favourite irritant because I routinely hear it said by someone all the time.  On the surface it seems empathetic – I mean it sounds like empathy – “I know exactly what you are going through”.  Except that I know the back story and while their family did have their own situation to deal with it was very different what we are dealing with aside from a couple of superficial parallels.  I don’t know exactly what the hell they went through was like and they certainly don’t understand what we have, are and will continue to endure.  This came across as minimizing what I was going through and trying to make my pain all about the other person.  This wasn’t empathy and under the circumstances it didn’t come across as sympathetic it came across as attention seeking – “hey look at me, I’ve had problems too you know!”

Empathy is the key to validation. If you can’t see things from the other person’s perspective, if you can’t feel what they are feeling then you can’t validate their feelings because it isn’t genuine.  You can’t fake empathy and you can’t fake validation because it will come across as insincere.

So what exactly is validation? Validation is recognizing what is real and letting the person know that you understand that what they are feeling or doing is important and meaningful to them.  You don’t have to agree with something to validate it – if someone is doing something you don’t like you can validate the feeling behind why they are behaving a certain way without actually condoning what they are doing.  It isn’t easy, especially when you are emotional and invested in a situation and even though I am writing about it here, validation is a skill that I am a long way from mastering.  Here is an example of a tough validation scenario and where you can find that thing, that emotion; that bit of truth to latch onto.

We did a role play and I was given a statement to read to different people in a group and they had to try to validate me.  The line I had to deliver…”You’re a fucking bitch.”  After I got past the idea of actually saying this to someone, I listened to about eight different people’s reactions.  They ranged from sarcastic comments like “You must be talking to someone else” and “stunned silence” because when put on the spot people really didn’t know what to say.  Some of the respondents were combative, inviting further conflict because how else would you react to someone telling you that?  How can you validate someone calling you a “fucking bitch?”  What eventually worked was the person who focussed in on the emotion that was behind the statement – the anger that I must have felt towards them to say it.  When they identified the anger I was forced to agree with them and that opened the door a crack for up dialogue instead of conflict.

Initially validation will feel unnatural, especially when you are struggling to validate a behaviour or action that you disagree with.  You don’t want to validate, you want to help, you want to fix the problem, you want to make things better and point out that the person is wrong.  If you can’t see the emotion, if you can’t feel it then you will struggle with knowing what or how to validate.  When you do validation right you will know it, you will connect with the person and they will connect with you.  This connection will be the first step to gaining the trust of someone when they are emotionally dysregulated or vulnerable.  That trust is necessary to develop and strengthen a relationship.  That relationship is necessary if you are going to influence the other person’s life.

 

 

 

Wake Me Up When September Ends

 

Here comes the rain again

Falling from the stars

Drenched in my pain again

Becoming who we are

As my memory rests

But never forgets what I lost

Wake me up when September ends

Green Day

September has always been a transitional time of beginnings and endings. The end of summer and the beginning of autumn, the end of summer vacation and the beginning of a new school year, the end of a slow period at work and the beginning of the push to year end, the end of cycling and triathlon and the beginning of swimming, the end of time as I once knew it and the beginning of hell.

September of last year was the time that our lives first began to be turned upside down by mental illness. The first attempts at running away, the first police encounters, the first outward signs of cutting and suicidal thoughts, the first false allegations of abuse, the first signs of fear and paranoia, the first steps down a path that has ripped apart the life I knew and devastated my family.  It has been a year and we are further behind now than we were when we started.

I wish that I could curl up in bed, go to sleep and wake up when the nightmare was over. I wish that this was all just a bad dream or a horrible nightmare – like the “Who Shot JR” season of the show Dallas or the rumored ending of “The Walking Dead”, but this isn’t television and there is no resolution in sight, no reset button or do-over.

September will be followed by the first hospitalization in October, the second and third hospitalizations in November, having to agree to have my child stay in the care of Children’s Aid because she was too afraid to come home on my birthday in December.  If we were further ahead, it would be worth it.  If there was an end in sight, if my daughter was getting help and getting better it would be worth it.  Thanks to the tangled skein that is our treatment system it was a few small steps forward followed by a several giant steps back.

I’m not sure if I want to wake up when September ends because the months that followed weren’t any better and the months ahead look like they could be even worse. I will endure, I will keep waking up and moving on because my family needs me to, because I won’t quit on them or on myself.  I just hope that someday the wound created when a huge part of my life was hacked away by mental illness will heal because right now every time a scab starts to form it get ripped off and the bloodletting continues.  I can only imagine how much worse it must be for parents and families who have lost a loved one to suicide.  My daughter is still alive and I am grieving the loss of our relationship, the loss of the child I knew and loved.

Wake me up when September ends, wake me up when this nightmare ends…

All Things Must Pass

Sunrise doesn’t last all morning

A cloudburst doesn’t last all day

Seems my love is up

And has left you with no warning

But it’s not always going

To be this grey

The Late, Great George Harrison

I was becoming an angry and bitter man. The entire situation with my daughter – the fear for her safety, the unknown of her future, the struggles we have endured to get her help and the obstacles that kept getting in the way had me walking a knife’s edge between sadness and anger, depression and rage.  I was an emotional mess, was becoming dysregulated by trivial things and living inside a personal hell that was consuming me from the inside.

In some ways this has given me some insight into how my daughter feels. While we don’t have a complete picture of her mental health, we are fairly certain that Borderline Personality Disorder is part of her condition.  There have been periods over the last couple of weeks when I was simply not in control of my emotions.  On the verge of sobbing as I couldn’t help but blame myself for the entire situation, then enraged that I could do nothing about it only moments later.  I learned that rage feels better than sadness, but only because it allowed me to thrust my emotions outward instead of pulling them back inside me.  Neither emotion was helpful, but the pitfall of rage is that it can be unleashed on unintended targets, with unfortunate consequences.

After a particularly bad stretch (road rage at 150 km an hour, a sore hand from punching a wall and yelling at my 78 year old mother-in-law over something stupid) I knew that I had to get things under control. The question was how?  My first thought was to go to the gym and work myself to the point of exhaustion – knock the crap out of body physically and maybe it would fix me emotionally.  It couldn’t hurt so I hopped on a treadmill and started to run.  It was a struggle at first, but as I ran I began to block out the world and focus on me and on the moment.  The rise and fall of my feet, the sound of the belt turning, my breathing, the distance and time numbers steadily rising and gradually I felt better.

That was my “aha” moment as I realized that I was inadvertently (or perhaps subconsciously) using skills that I had learned in the Family Connections program that my wife and I had taken. As much as we had immediately recognized the benefits of the program when it came to communicating with our daughter, the truth is that because of our somewhat “unique” situation we hadn’t had an opportunity to use them with her in a meaningful way.

I was being mindful instead of letting my mind be full. I was blocking out all of the background noise, the negative thoughts, the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the fear….wait the fear?  Where did that come from?  Of course, the reason I was so angry was because I was afraid, terrified that my daughter wasn’t going to get help, was going to commit suicide, that she was going to end up slipping through the cracks of the system and be away from us forever.  The self reflection and focus that mindfulness provides if you allow (or force) yourself to so it can be incredibly insightful.

It has only been a few days since I was at my lowest (or most enraged depending on the moment) and so far things are better. The sample size is relatively small, I think I am on the right track or at the very least on a better path by actually using some of the skills that I learned during Family Connections.  As a natural cynic and someone who still cringes at the term “Trust Jar” and “Basket of Injustices”, I have to tell you that there are more than just kernels of truth in this program if you open yourself up to it.

I have been carrying around a basket of injustices (including the blame I have attached to myself) for so long that I feel like Atlas trying to balance the world on my shoulders. The good news is that I have realized that I need to put these aside before they crush me.  I am not optimistic enough to say that I have left the basket behind, or that I have completely emptied it because I am sure there will be moments where I will hoist it back up onto my shoulders.  This is however a start.

The very act of going to the gym is putting me first, taking care of my needs first so that I will be able to try and help my wife and my daughters. Family Connections uses the phrase “putting on your own oxygen mask first” and it makes sense – if you let it.  How can I muster up the energy to help someone else, to be their Bridge Over Troubled Waters (an earlier bog post for those of you who are new) unless I have a solid and stable foundation myself.

At the end of the day I am still working on myself and my skills. I have a long way to go before I can look at a situation in a completely non- judgmental way because being judgmental has been second nature to me for my entire life.  I struggle with validation – I can observe it, I can see it and when I am on the outside looking in I can see how it can be applied, but when I am in the moment I often struggle and freeze up.  There will be times when I will still blame myself or others for what is going on but much like an alcoholic –the first step is recognition.

A reasonably positive post from an angry, bitter man….who knew!

 

Help I’m Alive

“I tremble

They’re gonna eat me alive

If I stumble

They’re gonna eat me alive

Can you hear my heart

Beating like a hammer”

Metric

My daughter is screaming for help, but her mental illness has made too afraid to accept it from us. We want to help her, are trying to help her but she is in a dark place where she is pushing us away and her mind won’t let us in, can’t let us in.

My family is screaming for someone to help her and we are told that we have to be patient and that “things are in motion.”

I will keep patience in mind the next time I have a police spotlight shone in my face and am questioned by a cop who thinks that I am trying to abduct my daughter when I am out looking for her at night, find her and am waiting to make sure she is picked up before heading home (she wouldn’t get in the car and let me drive her).  Why would they think that I was a stalker?  Because she told them that she didn’t know who I was and that she was afraid of me.

It was comforting to know that “things are in motion” while I watched two officers handcuff her and throw her into the back of a police SUV to stop her going AWOL for a fourth time yesterday.  I exhibited patience while I gave them some of the history and listened to their comments – “someone needs to do something for her, why doesn’t a doctor form her (meaning force her into a lock down assessment / treatment facility) and she’s going to get herself in serious trouble and based on her history no one will believe her.”  Thanks for the advice…as if we haven’t been doing this for almost a year now.

I have tried to be patient for the last year while watching my smart, loving daughter completely fall apart in front of me.  She has left behind her entire life and walked away from everything and everyone that she loved out of fear.

It is almost ironic that the only thing in motion at night when she AWOLs is my vehicle driving around looking for her.  She has done this too many times for the police to seriously look for her.  They will stop her if they see her and if she calls 911 they will go get her (sometimes but not always), but she is too naïve and in no shape to be on the streets alone at night.

I have patiently taken communication courses to help me reach her and tried to educate myself about mental illness and the system.  I have bit my tongue and redirected conversations during the brief moments my daughter and I have had together, I have held in tears when I see the damage that she has done to her body.  I have patiently gone off by myself to vomit and cry and scream when I think about the torment she must be going through, the torment she is putting her mother through…me through.

It has been a little difficult to be content with the knowledge that “things are in motion” when the Sick Kids Center for Community Mental Health dropped her off at a remote hospital without a discharge plan.  They had her for seven months and felt that she was too complicated for them, but didn’t place any urgency on getting her somewhere who could help her.  Apparently they only take kids they can fix, success stories are good for the business of statistics and fundraising – my daughter, not so much.

My patience has been tested by the Emergency Room staff and “professionals” at Lakeridge Health who put stitches in a cut she made on her leg and determined that she was merely seeking attention and sent her back to the Group Home.  I believe that she was and is seeking attention, she was screaming for someone to help her.  This isn’t the first time they have sent her away when she has been brought in by cops concerned for her safety.  Why?  Well the psychiatrist with the God-Complex had her diagnosed nine months ago after seeing her two, maybe three times – an adjustment disorder with disturbance of conduct caused by the extreme pressure and stress we placed on her.  Too bad he didn’t get all of the facts, background and history or try to understand the full picture (the first time we met him was when he gave his diagnosis) before coming to his quick conclusion.  I wonder if he would be patient enough to explain why every other psychiatrist and mental health professional has said that he was wrong and that in their years of experience they have never come across a case as complicated as my daughter.

My daughter needs help. Her actions, her words, her behaviours are screaming for help, but we as her parents should be patient because things are in motion.  I am trying to be calm and thus far I have been incredibly patient, but things need to stop just being in motion and the system needs to take action or get out of our way so we can do something.

If she gets seriously hurt or dies because of mental illness I don’t know if I will ever be able to forgive myself.  I do know that I will have somewhere to channel the intense anger and rage that is bubbling up inside me.  One of my daughter’s psychiatrists (the one who dumped her out of the treatment program) would say that I am blaming others, not taking responsibility and that this behaviour is teaching my daughter to do the same.  An interesting take given how much I have already blamed myself, felt like a helpless failure as a parent and a human being, but if Doctor “O” thinks that makes me bitter and petty and spiteful I’m okay with that.  At this exact moment I am all of those things and more.

I will dedicate the rest of my bitter, spiteful life to being petty and making sure that the individual people and organizations who have failed in their responsibility to help my daughter are held accountable.  It may take time, but I have learned to be patient…

 

Satan is a Lawyer

Have I mentioned that my daughter has a lawyer? Perhaps you can get an idea about my feelings on this based on the song title that I chose for this post.

My daughter went into a locked-down assessment center on a voluntary basis. She was supposed to be there for a thirty day period during which time they would be able to do a deeper dive into some of her issues without the risk of her bolting.  She wasn’t forced to go against her will and she was nervous, but she agreed…at first.  The problems started when she got there and resisted everything they were trying to do have her do as part of the intake.  She eventually went, but immediately contested her placement which meant that she was provided with legal representation through the Office of the Children’s Lawyer.

The lawyer’s role was to ensure that my daughter was not involuntarily detained in a locked in facility unless she was a danger to herself or others and had to be there for her own safety. The lawyer won without even going to a review panel (the only way they had a chance of keeping her was if she had been brought in with bleeding wrists, a recently pumped stomach or having just been peeled off of train tracks).  The lawyer did her job and that should have been the end of her involvement, but it wasn’t.

The Office of the Children’s Lawyer (the OCL for short) is supposed to become involved to represent the best interests of the child in custody cases, child protection cases, estates/trust cases, personal rights and in some instances civil litigation.  My wife and I are not divorcing so custody isn’t an issue, there are no protection issues (documented by police and Children’s Aid), there is no trust or estate that we are aware of and my daughter hasn’t been named in a civil suit so there should be no need for the OCL to be involved.  I guess the area of personal rights did apply, but that would have been past tense as there are no immediate issues.  Except the OCL lawyer stayed involved and our lives and the lives of those trying to get help for my daughter became more difficult.

My daughter is apparently suing the treatment center that held her for too long (the one she went to voluntarily), she is using her lawyer to restrict our access to medical information, she is using her lawyer to turn down potential placements, she is trying to have her lawyer restrict her current placement from talking to us and we are waiting for something from her lawyer demanding visitation with her sister…without us.  The last one is the most interesting because her sister is 18, developmentally delayed (think of a 2 year old in and 18 year old body) and entirely dependent on us for care and support.

We have had very little interaction with her lawyer.  The lawyer will ignore our questions or requests for information, but try and demand an immediate response to her (infrequent) inquiries.  We are guarded around her because we definitely aren’t on the same team and we aren’t sure what outcome she is working towards.  The lawyer did tell us that she will stay involved as long as her boss at the OCL continues to approve her involvement…which is another way of saying as long as the government keeps paying her.  So this is a big “thank you” to all of the taxpayers of Ontario for helping provide my paranoid, delusional, possibly bi-polar and possibly schizophrenic daughter with a lawyer to feed into her paranoia, her delusions and ensure that the voices she says are telling her things have proper legal representation.

We are swimming against the riptides of the medical system, the child welfare system, government bureaucracy, my daughter’s mental health, time and the legal system as well.  We have been talking to a few lawyers ourselves and we can “lawyer up” as well, although it will be on our dime and I would rather have the $400+ an hour that the lawyer’s charge available for treatment if we can ever get to that stage.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the OCL should be acting in the child’s best interest and I’m not sure how helping to block treatment, block our access to information and distract from the real mental health issues are in her best interest.  She is not, was not and has never been abused by us (or by anyone that we are aware of), she has mental health issues that need to be properly assessed and properly treated and scaring the crap out of the mental health professionals and shutting out the only people who have always been and will always be in her corner is not in her best interest.

They say that justice is blind, but in this case I think that someone needs to take off the blindfold and look at the entire picture. As for my daughter’s lawyer, in my opinion she has blinders on – looking straight at my daughter and only seeing a bounty of billable hours before her.  This isn’t to say that all lawyers are evil, but if Satan had a chosen profession the law would seem to be a good place to hide.  To quote Gojira –

“Lawyer talks, he’s so correct, he is respect.  He learned how to make you feel safe.  And kill you with a smile…”

Prior to writing this I had never heard of Gojira, but when I did a bit of research on songs about lawyers the title stood out to me. Not because all lawyers are evil, but because I think that some lawyers are content to sit on the sidelines and allow bad things to happen.  They are either hiding behind the legal system or from a more cynical perspective, because bad things are good for business.  I liken it to Al Pacino’s “Satan” in the movie the Devil’s Apprentice.  He didn’t force people to do bad things, but he created the conditions that would allow human frailty and free will to create evil.

My daughter’s lawyer may be good at what she does, she may be respected in her field and she may be someone that my daughter trusts for the moment, but she is content to be a paid participant and allow the chaos to unfold.  She is not truly looking out for my daughter – she isn’t her parent or her friend and as soon as the billable hours stop she will melt away like a snow bank in the spring.  My daughter’s mental health issues will remain and hopefully we can get her help before she becomes another statistic.

HIGHWAY TO HELL

It has been a while since I’ve written and there are a few reasons for that. The first was a period of calm, where things were moving along without incident and in some ways it seemed that we were making progress when it came to our relationship with our daughter.  Slow, microscopic movement forward, but movement nonetheless.  I was toying with some topics and had started and stopped a few times, but couldn’t finish an entry.

Then all hell broke loose. We were careening down a road without brakes and everyone who could try and slow things down was backing away.

No stop signs, speed limit 

Nobody's gonna slow me down 

Like a wheel, gonna spin it 

Nobody's gonna mess me around

We believe that the trigger was my daughter getting some medical news that she didn’t like, didn’t understand and couldn’t handle. She was being assessed for Autism and was told that she was in the spectrum.  Very high functioning autism (although not in the DSM V, Asperger’s Syndrome would be a reasonable description) and this confirmed a conclusion that my wife and I had come to some time ago.  Perhaps some of you are now saying “well if you suspected this some time ago, why didn’t you have her assessed before” and there are reasons for that.  My older daughter has the autism label and my youngest has always bristled and reacted negatively when the world autism was attached to her because she “wasn’t like her sister.”  We didn’t push the diagnosis because she was managing and the “label” would put her into a tailspin because she has always been very black and white about things:

AUTISM = SISTER, SISTER = DISABLED and that wasn’t her.

We could have helped the Doctor involved to manage the messaging, but he wouldn’t talk to us because my daughter (through her Government sponsored lawyer) has been forbidding anyone from providing medical information to my wife and I.  To be honest, I am not sure how a physician was able to make a diagnosis of autism without speaking to family and having various questionnaires completed but even if they won’t provide us with information, there is nothing stopping them with taking information and feedback from us.  We could have warned them to be careful about “how” or “when” or even “if” they provided my daughter with this information directly, but we are now persona non grata in my daughter’s medical life.

With all of this being said, my daughter didn’t handle the news well and our best guess is that this was a trigger that started a spiral of anxiety, fear and paranoia.  A spiral that culminated with her writing; “they’re trying to hurt me, help” (or something to that effect); on a piece of paper and displaying it while being driven back to the treatment center.  Creative and oddly enough, our Highway to Hell began on an actual highway.  Someone called the police and thankfully the police officer(s) ran the plates, called the treatment center and figured out what was happening before overreacting.

You see, the car was being driven by a black male staff member and although race relations are better in Canada than in the United States there have been issues with police and this could have ended poorly for the staff member.  Thankfully it didn’t, however when they pulled off at a coffee shop to wait for police the female staff member (due to the possibility of an accusation my daughter has two people with her at all times) went to the washroom and in those five minutes or so, my daughter claims to have been assaulted (choked) by the male staff member.

The police arrived and my daughter was taken to a small town hospital without mental health capabilities – for an assessment and then abandoned by the treatment center. Essentially she was too difficult, they couldn’t help her, her accusations were putting their staff at risk and they had left her in the care of a medical facility, so they were done.  My personal opinion is that they only want the kids that they can parade out as success stories.  After all when you are running extensive fundraising campaigns negative stories don’t tend to attract donations.

So now what?  She won’t come home with us – we tried to bring her home from the hospital with us while we figured things out.  Her “professional Psychiatrist” – yes I used quotation marks there intentionally – wouldn’t form her to place a medical hold on her because she knew that she didn’t meet the criteria to be in hospital.  The hospital where she was couldn’t handle her and felt that she needed to be in a mental health treatment centre.  The treatment center (now the Sick Kids Center for Community Mental Health) washed their hands of her.  The medical community seemed determined to make her a ward of Children’s Aid and let them figure things out.  Apparently CAS has magic powers and can find placements that Complex Case Managers and the Ministry can’t…who knew!

My daughter is a difficult case and no doubt she is complicating things with her actions, but if what she needs is treatment for mental illness why is the system that is supposed to be there to provide care and treatment walking away when things get difficult?

We are on a highway to hell, but my message to the people and facilities who have walked away – well all of you can go straight to hell, I’ll keep things warm for you.

Closer Together

A funny thing happened on the way to the mental health crisis in our family…my wife and I became closer.  When I think of this fact, a song from my youth always comes to mind and ergo, this particular blog post was born.  Closer Together by The Box was a repetitive, but catchy ear worm from the 1980’s that achieved status in Canada (the band can thank the CRTC and Canadian Content rules), but I don’t believe that it really hit anywhere else.  In the context of this post and this topic, the lyrics that stand out to me are:

(Closer together)

Oh, we can only make it work

(Closer together)

Just can’t go wrong

The thing is, many couples in crisis do go wrong, can’t make it work and they ultimately cease being a couple.  This hasn’t happened with my wife and I, in fact when this latest crisis hit (there were actually a series of stressors – the health of our parents, my wife’s health, a new boss) our relationship moved out of that rut that couples can sometimes find themselves in after years of marriage.  If we didn’t communicate, if we didn’t explore how we were feeling, if we didn’t trust each other or get on the same page we could have been torn apart.  Instead we realized how much we needed each other to get through this.

We’ve certainly seen the breakups before.  Our older daughter is disabled and we have been living in the disability community since she was only a couple of months old.  We have come across many broken families over the years – families where the parents’ marriage simply couldn’t survive the additional stress that a significant crisis placed on their relationship.  It’s sad, but I get it.  If both partners can’t handle the situation, if both partners aren’t on the same page or at the very least appreciate the other person’s point of view then the relationship is in for a rough ride.

I think that the two keys for us have been trust and communication.  Trust because of the allegations that the psychosis or pseudologia fantastica have created and for those who have been following this for awhile – no the experts still don’t have a real handle on my daughter’s complete mental health picture.  If I didn’t trust my wife and if she didn’t trust me, there could be some kernel of doubt created and we would be battling each other as well as the system.  To be honest there was never even a thought or question that even a tiny sliver of what she was accusing us of was true.

The communication aspect is self evident in many ways, but open and honest communication isn’t always easy, especially in a crisis.  We admittedly had some moments early on, mainly because I was keeping everything bottled up inside.  My wife would go from “Tigress Advocate” to “Weepy Mess” in a matter of moments and I didn’t want to burden her with my problems so I suffered in silence.  I wasn’t sleeping, I was physically ill and there were probably a few people at the park near our house that wondered what was wrong with the guy wandering around in the dark throwing up and sobbing uncontrollably.  It actually took a disagreement about a treatment option to reopen up the doors of communication and things have been better since.

This isn’t to say that couples who couldn’t make it work are inferior or flawed somehow.  In many ways, the custodial parent of a child with a disability or a mental health issue has a strength that I don’t know if I would have because they are doing things alone, without the support of a partner.

 

Fight The Power

What the hell is Public Enemy’s song about fighting authority and oppression doing in a father’s blog about mental illness? Although we have been at odds with many aspects of Ontario’s disjointed mental health treatment system since this whole process began, this entry isn’t about our fight with the system.  No, much to my chagrin the person who is fighting the power is my daughter.

“Lemme hear you say

Fight the power 

Lemme hear you say 

Fight the power”

Fighting the power has become my daughter’s latest obsession and while I can appreciate her tenacity, she is not helping herself get the help that she needs. Every time she throws up another road block I can’t help, but think about the movie Jerry Maguire.  I want to scream “help me, help you, help ME, help YOU!”  She needs help, she says that she wants help and then she tries to torpedo the life boat that has been sent to take her off the island.  To make matters worse, the system that we are working with to get her help gave her the torpedo, the co-ordinates of the life boat and a sailor to push the button.  What the fuck?

Can anyone explain to me or justify why our society allows a 15 year old child, with mental health issues has the ability to override the recommendations of Psychiatrists and her Parents (to her own detriment) because of course like every 15 year old – she knows best?  At what point did the system think it would be a good idea to give the child with the mental illness the keys to the Kingdom?

Am I saying that my daughter should have no rights?  Absolutely not, but she is too young to drive, too young to vote, too young to serve in the military, too young to drink, too young to drop out of school, too young to smoke, too young to sign a legal contract…and she is living in a mental health treatment center, but she can legally get herself removed from a safe, secure assessment center for no legitimate reason?  Again I repeat…what the fuck?

The lead Psychiatrist at the treatment center where my daughter is staying has come up against a bit of a diagnostic brick wall.  Her recommendation was and is that my daughter be transferred to a secure facility (i.e., a place with doors that lock) for a period of time so they can delve deeper into some of the tough issues with her in a safe, secure environment.  A spot finally opened up at such a place and we reluctantly agreed to her being transferred there…we had reservations about how it would go, but trusted the system and the professionals.  The caveat was that she also had to go voluntarily (which she did) and the treatment center had to agree to take her back after the 30 day assessment period ended (which they also did).

The problems began when she arrived and was told about the appeal process. You see in Ontario, fifteen year old with mental health issues are given publically funded legal representation to get them out of treatment facilities with locked doors…even mental health facilities that they agreed to go to and that were recommended by a Psychiatrist.  She heard the words “Advocate” and “Lawyer” and jumped at the chance.  That’s right Ontarians…your tax dollars at work!  There isn’t enough money in the publically funded system to provide proper mental health treatment and support, but we need to make sure things are even more difficult by throwing money at Advocates and Lawyers to make sure that children with mental health issues (including irrational fear, paranoia and a penchant for fantastical accusations) can fight the system.  The assigned lawyer and advocate aren’t tasked with doing what is in the best interest of their new found client, no their role is to get her out.

We were ready for a fight – if that’s what it takes to get her the help she needs then bring it on.  We contacted her lawyer, we sought out a lawyer to represent us in this whole fiasco and then were told that she was being discharged.  Wait, what…discharged?  Why the hell is she being discharged – she hasn’t had any assessments done, in fact all she managed to do was accuse another kid of uttering death threats and involving another police force in our lives.  You aren’t going to fight?

The truth is, they almost always lose.  In 90% of the cases where a placement is appealed, they lose.  Unless she came in with freshly stitched wrists, a newly pumped stomach or had been pulled off of a set of train tracks the patient wins the appeal.  I knew that they wouldn’t win every case, but they only win 10%…again I say “What the fuck?”

Approximately 120 hour after admission to the place where we were hoping we would be able to get some answers my daughter was being transferred back to the treatment center that needs help in getting her a complete diagnosis.  She leaves with new knowledge of how to work the system and the names and numbers of a lawyer and an advocate who have said that she can call them anytime.

Oh and she is now contesting her placement in the treatment center as well.

What the fuck?  Someone, anyone please help her….just HELP HER!!!!