How will John recover from seven months of this unmedicated crisis? Can he? We hope he can at least get back to where he was before he stopped taking the Invega. Is that a false hope? We have to hold on, regardless, write Edward and Bea Stricklan.
Hopefully by the time you read this, we’ll have seen his face — probably too skinny, probably scared, hopefully not still angry — at his next mental health court hearing or with a conservatorship in hand. Until then, we hope he is safe as he can be on the seventh floor of high-observation housing at L.A. County’s Twin Towers jail in Chinatown, there on a vandalism charge after being arrested in Walnut for breaking a bus window.
For the past 23 years, we’ve prayed and fought for John to have a good independent life that we see his church and high school buddies experiencing — maybe a family, good friends, a good career . That’s what we always imagined John having. And at first, it was an easy dream to believe in. The fact that he used “paranoid” really threw us. “My God,” we thought. “What are you smoking or drinking, John?” We had no idea the biology of his brain was changing.
That was 2001. For the next 15 years, we worked really, really hard to find “the” answer. We kept thinking — and still do — that something would work.To help someone in psychosis, one psychologist says, it’s best to first just be there and listen. For the next nine weeks, we got up in the morning, held hands, and took walks around our neighborhood, crying together. Full of worry, we feared John would start abusing harder drugs, like heroin or opioids. We also feared for his physical safety. At Al-Anon meetings, we worked on our own codependent behaviors and how they might be exacerbating John’s behaviors and sickness.
So we attacked the disease from that angle. John saw a psychologist for a few years to help decrease his panic attacks and learn coping skills. We took him to a neurologist to learn how to address his involuntary shaking. He received noninvasiveto treat his depression. And for the first half of 2009, John was in biweekly group therapy for people with substance-abuse and mental health disorders. But the son we remembered from the first 17 years of his life wasn’t returning.
Two weeks after that hospitalization in 2009, he had finals at a community college and passed. Despite everything he’s been through, John has repeatedly found the resilience to keep working toward a future. Through the 2000s, he attended Chaffey College, Valley Community College and Mt. San Antonio College, always trying to enroll in far too many hours. “I have to make up for lost time,” he told us.
The men in the program would tell John, “We don’t have families like your family.” Most were older than John and poured into him that he had a chance. Even after he left, John went back to check in with the counselors there.A millionaire’s tax was helping fund new mental health programs in California. But the Great Recession changed things — and counties got desperate.
The hospital claimed John was stable enough to leave. We got a call that same night from the group home’s manager, who told us John was being inappropriate and loud and was filthy. “I don’t know how long your son’s going to last at the home being like this,” he said, kindly allowing John to stay.
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