If I have been able to help others, it would be really nice because other people who have family members with scz have helped me every step of the way. Sometimes dragging me to back to my feet with their experiences when it feels hopeless at my end.
When your family member is unmedicated due to anosognosia you never really know what is the next step to take. After you take steps to help, you often never know if you helped your family member or not.
We would like to think we helped Jeb by bringing him home and building the garage apartment so he could have his own space. Maybe it did help, thanks to ssdi and ssi he didn’t have to work and could just focus on living with his scz while he was out there all by himself. At first we grocery shopped for him and I prepared his meals. Maybe, we don’t know, but maybe, he did learn to handle his scz somewhat during those 2 years. If nothing else, he figured out he did NOT want to keep living there and he did take steps to get himself back out on his own.
I do think his scz continued its slow worsening. We’ve lost his presence at holidays, his really bad days have become worse and there are less and less better days. That he wanted to do CBT so he could grocery shop for himself because he became convinced I was medicating him through the groceries was a bad news/good news event. His paranoia worsened, yet he took steps that helped him. He researched and came up with CBT all on his own. He also came up with his idea of a job that he could do and only had to work when he was having a good enough day. No worries about working days when the psychosis has him spun up.
This isn’t the first time he has left here to try it on his own. Over the years, before we knew he had scz, we restarted him over and over. Same story always, it goes well until it doesn’t. Now that we know its scz, at least we don’t sit here and hope that this will the time he suddenly becomes the person that he was going to be before the scz took that away.
He has stayed alive, whether that’s been sheer luck or what, I don’t know.
I do think Dr Amador is correct in that Jeb will never take meds unless he wants to take meds, or has a reason to take meds that I have not been able to provide.
I used to question - way back in the beginning- whether or not Jeb had the “right to not be medicated”. The last deputy we had here after the rock event used the more crude phrase when he wouldn’t help us. He said “its not against the law to be crazy”.
I’ve written this quote before, I agree with it.
“The opposition to involuntary committal and treatment betrays a profound misunderstanding of the principle of civil liberties. Medication can free victims from their illness—free them from the Bastille of their psychoses—and restore their dignity, their free will and the meaningful exercise of their liberties.” Herschel Hardin, 1993
From my standpoint of Jeb not being unmedicated, I think I would be okay if he were one of the folks that just improved somewhat with medication. I would like to have his torment eased, even if it was only somewhat better. Some what better seems like much more than nothing, but what a huge disappointment it would be if we finally got him on meds and didn’t get our Jeb back.