You are fortunate, but it is more the norm than the exception. Unfortunately where the exceptions occur it can be horrific and we family members, according to Dr E Fuller Torrey, are the most at risk.
An opinion from another parent…
Herschel has a child with schizophrenia, more of his thoughts can be found at mentalillnesspolicy.org particularly his article - “Uncivil Liberties”.
We are told that our family members ON medication are NOT more likely than the general population to commit violence. My F to F teacher asks that I stress the “ON medication” part.
When events of violence occur, they do get a lot of attention. To me, it seems as though the court system in some states according to their laws, will, -at that point- finally force medicate them in order to be able to put them on trial for an event that occurred during psychosis. To me, these high profile cases are similar to witch trials. Our family members are often portrayed as “evil”, the comment sections are merciless. A society that won’t force meds and won’t listen to our calls for forced meds when we express our concern, will suddenly line up to throw comment section tomatoes at our family members.
Of course “where meds are necessary” is the tricky bit. Who can make that decision in a country that has firmly established the rights of our family members to not be medicated? Some of the states, individual counties and cities are working to make it easier based, often its based on arrests and incarcerations. Yes, that is at least something. Many have new laws on the books that aren’t used -yet. Generally the current US plan for our family members, who we are concerned may commit violence, is to wait until they do have an incident and throw them into prison.
NAMI in Family to Family also teaches that the best indicator for violence is if the person had violent tendencies before they were mentally ill. My son did not have violent tendencies before he was ill. He still does not have violent tendencies. What he did do before he became neurodiverse/scz was defend himself. He would stand up to bullying and if challenged he would present ready to physically defend himself.
Add paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations and we have a person who, at times, firmly believes people are trying to kill him. He would buy guns and arm himself for the attack on his person. That is a dangerous situation and not a single law had been broken. As time passed, his delusions began to focus on his father.
We couldn’t get him to take meds, we tried all the recommended ways. We knew we would lose in a court battle to force meds where we live, because he had never done anything illegal or violent. We heard twice from the local mental health officer “its not illegal to have a mental illness”. Our son could have easily shown in court that he was making capable decisions in other areas. We had cameras outside with voice recording capability, we never heard or recorded a threat. He raged around the outside of our home demanding we stop harassing HIM. We were able to Amador’s methods to obtain other goals. We lessened his stress wherever we could - reducing his stress was probably the biggest impact item. Living in a space by himself reduced his stress. When we moved him away from his dad, that was another huge relief of stress for him.
Family to Family made the point over and over again - reduce their stress! For my son Amador’s LEAP method made that possible - one couple from our class has made absolutely no progress with their son. They attended the class, they read the books and didn’t follow any of the advice. The mom still pleads with the son to see a doctor for meds because he is SICK. The dad comes home and argues with the son about getting a job. Yeah, not much stress reduction or any sort of progress for them and its been 9 years since the class.
When a young Houston area man killed his parents (one parent attended my Family to Family class) the police found him just standing there covered in blood. At first the police thought the people on the ground with the sledgehammer next to them were some sort of Halloween decorations. They loaded the silent, compliant, blood covered young man into an ambulance and sent him to the hospital for treatment. At the hospital they discovered he was uninjured. Our Family to Family class met to process and grieve, not everyone attended and not everyone attended the funeral either.
He had been an only child. We learned at the reception that his parents had told friends and family members he was a drug addict.There was only one picture of him in the video of photos. He was a young boy and all three of the looked very happy together. I used to keep track of him on the court pubic records. Every now and then they bring him to court to simply remand him back into our state’s forensic prison. Last I knew, they have not been able to medicate him enough for him to stand trial for the deaths of his gentle parents. An only child, his mom told us in class that he was the pride of their life, her eyes glowed with love when she spoke of him. In other classes she told us he was threatening to kill them, she would imitate the voice he used. She said she often stopped her car at the entrance of her subdivision after work, she was afraid to go home. When they are violent, we family members are the most likely victims.
To say the least, it was a pretty startling introduction to the world of mental illness. Our teacher never taught again. While some classes keep in contact and do reunions, our class scrambled to exit.