He's home - now what? What is this anyway?

One other thing, my son gets a B12 shot once a month. According to my son, the shot doesn’t hurt - and he’s scared of shots. I believe it’s done with a very short/thin needle that goes under the skin and not into the muscle. Psychiatrists say some people get psychosis because they are very low in B12.

I decided to cancel the therapist appointment - if he does get into the FEP program, they have their own set of therapists. He now has a first interview with them scheduled for Sept. 10. They said go ahead and keep his Dr. appt for the 11th. So right now we’re just waiting to see what happens. How long would it take for bad effects from Risperdal to show up? He’s only been on it 4 or 5 days. He will have been on it for a little under 3 weeks by the time he sees the MD. I don’t know if it’s helping him or not - he doesn’t want to talk about it with me right now. But his mood has been good for the most part (I think the Sarcosine helps, too). Funny about the B vitamin shot - I happened to buy him some B-complex vitamins at the beginning of the summer because I read it was good for depression (and I thought that’s what was wrong with him). He wouldn’t take it then, but he is taking it now.

Hi, his breasts started growing between the second and third month. The B12 shot is not the same as the B vitamins. If he is willing to rank his hallucinations on a scale from 1 to 10, you can tell how the medication is working. A 1 would represent almost no sounds and a 10 would mean very bad.

Hi all, I thought I’d give an update on my son. He’s been home for over a month now, and is mostly a pleasure to have around. His sleep is still awful and irregular and his voices have’t let up, but other than that (and how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) he seems like his old self (actually his sleep has been horrible for years, so only the voices are new).

We went on the 10th together to meet the woman who runs the local FEP program. She was so kind and understanding. She talked to both of us for a short while, then met with him for about an hour, and then with me for maybe 40 min. She didn’t say for sure if he was “in” or not, but they made an appointment with him to see a therapist the following week, so it seemed positive.

He was due to see a psychiatrist (someone not in their program but with whom I’d made an appt earlier) the next day, but when he arrived, they told him they’d double booked and put him off until the 28th. I was really annoyed, as he would run out of meds well before then. I emailed the woman we’d talked to, and she managed to squeeze him in to see their MD this past Tuesday.

He came back from the appointment pretty cheerful, and told me that the doctor told him he could stop taking the meds, as they weren’t doing him any good. This is true, he’d been on Risperdal for 3 weeks and the voices hadn’t let up at all. I was a bit at a loss, because I didn’t think he’d actually lie about it, but I wasn’t sure what the whole story was - and he doesn’t like to talk about it much.

I emailed the director and told her what he’d said. I was never really sure how much they’d be able to share with me due to HIPPA and all, but she called me the next day and said that although they’d never share what he said in session (of course not), they would always share with me the direction of his treatment because they felt it was important that family be involved. Well, I loved hearing that. She said that he had an atypical psychosis and presented differently from most people that they saw. I was a little worried this meant they wouldn’t treat him, but that seems not to be the case. They cancelled his therapy appt for this past week, but he has another appt with the MD next week. She wants to order a series of tests for him, including an MRI, etc. to rule out physical causes, and they want to start him with someone who specializes in CBT.

I’m really hoping that he takes this seriously and puts in the work. His motivation is to get back to school, and they’re aware of that, and actively working to try to help him make it happen. It’s a big relief to have a team of people who know what they’re doing working as a team to try to help him.

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