Sorry for not updating on the situation. It has been pretty stressful. We managed to get the mental hygiene warrant and currently my dad is in the hospital. It’s sad but it’s definitely what he needs right now. I’m just annoyed that we had to make him a borderline criminal to do it.
Now the problem is that he is denying medicine at the hospital. He apparently took it one day then said it made him unable to walk and refused it afterwards. It has been about a week and so they will try to get a medication override. Meanwhile, he switches between being very guarded towards to making rather delusional statements to us when we speak to him on the phone. We visited him at the hospital and he luckily ate the food we brought, but otherwise tried to get us to leave once he was done eating.
I hope this all goes quickly and that he can return to being med-compliant soon. I understand that he must be very alone at the hospital and hope he can be released soon. We’re thinking of switching to another hospital for outpatient care, since the staff at his current hospital aren’t that good in communicating with us.
Thank you for taking the time to update us. Hopefully they can get him on some meds soon. My thoughts are with you and your family.
So he has been in the hospital for nearly three weeks now with no medication. His trial will be on Tuesday. Last week he had another trial which we had to go to in order to lengthen his hospital stay, since he kept requesting to be released. Thankfully the judge ruled in our favor.
He just really needs medicine asap. His paranoia increases everyday, though he is perfectly calm in front of nurses and doctors so they don’t realize it. But he has started to call home more and more. At first it was just to tell us to be careful of strangers coming in and to ask what we were eating. Then it suddenly became warnings because he said he has a lot of enemies. His doctor said he needed consent to fill out a medical leave form from my dad’s workplace, so once my dad learned about this form he got super suspicious of it. He also got the court notice for the medication override on Saturday, which probably triggered something. He called 4 times in the span of 20 minutes to repeatedly tell us that they gave him a false court notice, to not correspond with his workplace because he doesn’t have to fill out a form, to not speak to his doctor because he lies, and to not go to court.
We visited him Saturday night to show him these forms because he demanded it (including other forms sent to him - he tried filing for unemployment prior to his hospitalization even though he was employed, which has caused quite a mess). He immediately took the letters from us, telling us he would read them on his own time and to stop worrying about his matters because we “threw him in a place full of crazy people.” He continuously said that his and our lives are over. Today he called to say thatthe forms we brbrought him were also false and not from his workplace, that there’s no problem if he loses his job. Even when my sister pointed out he would lose his health insurance… he refused to acknowledge the importance. He just told us that we don’t understand.
It’s really hard to keep calm during all of this. It’s hard to not react when he just denies everything. The nurses said that we should just suggest to him to take his medicine but even if we do that he’ll refuse. He carries around the side effects of the medicine in his back pocket. It’s just really hard to think of a time when he is taking medication and it starts to work. How will all of this anger towards us and everyone else just disappear? I feel it may subside but he’ll always have a grudge towards us.
Edit: forgot to mention this in this super long post but the hospital managed to get in contact with the “specialist” my dad saw. He never said for him to stop taking the medicine.
These links may help you to gain some understanding:
Treatment Advocacy Center - under problems you will see anosognosia
Anosognosia looks like denial but is different.
Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders - LessWrong - helped my understand delusions
I know with my son that his anger is apparent when he is not stable however when he is stable the anger does seem to fall away. Just recently we had a what I call hiccups when we tried him on Adderall of ADHD. His anger came back and as of last week he had some pretty awful things to say about me to his grandmother. It’s taken about 3 weeks for him to recover but as of two days ago the anger has left him. His memories of these times seem to morph into different scenarios depending on his mood.