Discharge from secure faculty having made no progress

My 16year old step daughter has been abusing weed and alcohol for 2 years. 6 months ago she ran away to spend more time smoking pot and drinking. Not a word for 4 months. 2 months ago she walks into our home having a phycotic break. Police and Paramedics had to be called. She has been in 2 different secure facility’s each for 30 days. She has been diagnosed with Schizophrenia. She has not talked about anything while in a safe place with professionals that know how to help her. She has managed to fly below the radar and is about to be discharged. She says one thing to her therapist and her mom and I get a totally different story from her. She tells them she just wants to come home. She tells us that when she comes home she will not go to school and is planning to not take her meds and will continue to smoke pot. Does not believe the doctors when they tell her pot will cause more problems for her. I think she will come home start a fight and run away back to the street where she got so far out there before. We also have 3 other teenaged kids that are afraid she will stab them in there sleep. She has not talked to any of them in 6 months. She thinks it is going to be easier out of the safe treatment facility. It’s Not! She has been able to hide from everything and every one in there. The world is a big scary place and it is going to be coming right at her. She has learned no coping skills because she did not participate in groups and refused to talk to anybody but her therapist and that was 1 hour a week. So basicly she has repeated some version of her story 8 times adjusting it a littlebeach time to make it not as strange. What should we do? We wanted her to get the help she needed but she managed to avoid it for 2 months and is only slightly less paranoid and delusional than she was when she went in. And she is medicated now but swears to us she will not take meds once released. Our only choice seems to be to let whatever is going to happen, happen. But that option is sure to end badly for her and also be tramatic for the rest of us.

I’m sorry you’re going through this. There isn’t anything I can say to make it better, but I do wish for the best. Some people just don’t realize they need help.
Just remember it’s not your fault. She is sick and she needs help.
Again, I’m sorry and I hope for the best.

Sounds a lot like my sister - and she took her life last year, tragically, while living at a group home. There was virtually nothing we could do for her, but the medication she was taking, combined with her chronic cigarette smoking & occasional weed smoking was definitely a bad combination.

The worst case scenario is that you lose her in a tragic accident like that, but to be honest I felt relieved in a very odd way that my sister had taken her own life because she was suffering very intensely. Modern living is miserable, especially when you don’t want to obey the rules and are not drug-free.

Isn’t it funny how we can force people with Alzheimer’s to receive care and treatment but when parents of adults can’t keep them in treatment or care when they are clearly a danger to themselves and others? No one ever says victims of dementia should have the right to wander the streets eating out of garbage cans. This kind of neglect of the mentally ill did not happen before state hospitals were shut down. Care of the mentally ill is far, far worse than it was prior to the 1980’s. Somehow we need to turn this around. Pass HR 2646, Representative Tim Murphy’s - Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act - and then get state hospitals reopened with on-grounds supervised housing for lifelong care of the seriously mentally ill.

How are things going?