Where I looked for help

When your child comes to you and says “Remember how you always ask me if I hear voices? Well actually I do.” Your mind screams at you to find help NOW! The thing was I had no idea where to look. I’m thinking, well this is to do with the mind so let’s start with a psychologist. Now while a psychologist can be helpful working through therapies to deal with things he cannot prescribe medication. One thing he did do was tell us that he believed it was schizophrenia and when my son became very distressed he told us to get him to our GP as soon as possible. We knew that he was at a point where suicide was a very real possibility.

I now feel stupid not having thought of going to our GP to begin with. Although mental illness is affects the brain, it is very much a physical condition. Our GP evaluated him and immediately referred him to a psychiatrist. Now here is the thing about psychiatrists. They are not all good. The first one we saw was a piece of work. First thing we are told going to his office is if we miss one appointment we will no longer be patients. What? We are talking about people with mental illness, what are the chances they will remember every appointment, I even miss appointments. It didn’t matter because at that point I went to google in desperation and found EPI (early psychosis intervention) which was our saving grace. It is a program for young people who have just experienced psychosis but haven’t been under a psychiatrists care for a long time.

EPI meant that rather than seeing a psychiatrist ever 2 months, trying to figure our medications, we actually went weekly. Weekly to begin with and also a weekly meeting with a social worker that oversaw his case. She was an incredible resource for us as parents. EPI has the philosophy that the whole family is needed in the recovery journey so they advocate for the parents/loved ones to be included in meetings and appointments. They have education series that helped us understand more about schizophrenia. Well actually we learned how little is know about schizophrenia, but we did learn that it wasn’t our fault.

First thing you do when you find out your child is sick, is you run commentary through your brain over and over and over trying to figure out what you did that made him/her sick. You blame yourself and feel loss, shame, fear, self loathing, loss of hope and every other emotion you can think of that would go along with finding out you made your child so very ill. Finding out that it is not your fault but rather a cocktail of environment, trauma, birth order, birth date, pregnancy issues, substance abuse etc. that affects us. The other very important thing we realized is that EVERYONE can develop schizophrenia it is just a matter of some of us being a little more susceptible than others. 1 in 100 people develop schizophrenia so it is by no means a rare disease. The sad thing is that your neighbour, neighbour’s child, family member don’t say anything because of the stigma attached to it. That is what I want to change. I want everyone to be able to ask for help and feel secure knowing that others will not judge them as weak. I tell you this. Anyone who lives with schizophrenia is NOT weak. They are so strong to get up every day and face what they face.