Why Won’t You Take Your Medication?

“Why won’t you just take your medication? I take pills for my cholesterol every night and its no big deal?”

“Every psychiatrist we’ve seen has said you have a mental illness. Why won’t you accept it? Why would the doctors tell you that you’re sick, if it weren’t true?”

“Let’s look at when you were doing well and when you got into trouble. What was the difference? Medication. It was the difference. When you were on your meds, you were fine. And when you weren’t, you got into trouble. Can’t you see that?”

These quotes may sound familiar to you if you are a parent and have a a son or daughter with a severe mental illness. I’ve said everyone of them to my son, Mike.

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Serenity: Is it Possible?

     When my son, Mike, came over recently to play chess — or should I write to easily defeat me in several chess matches — he arrived carrying a DVD. The title was: The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
      Johnston is a cult figure among artists who have mental disorders because he is a song writer, singer, and artist who has struggled for years with mania.

Civil Rights Violated!

As part of its “medical mysteries” series, the Today Show on Friday aired a segment about Susannah Cahalan, a young New York woman who woke up one day with her left side feeling numb. By nightfall, she had become — as her father, Thomas, later put it — “totally psychotic.”

Susannah would begin “crying hysterically” and then “become giddy.” She was taken to the NYU medical center but doctors there didn’t have a clue why she was acting so oddly. Several times, Susannah tried to escape, and her father said she was “hallucinating.”

Susannah stayed in the hospital a month and a specialist finally diagnosed her as suffering from a rare auto-immune problem called ANTI-NMDAR Encephalitis. Here’s a link to the story

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