Hello everyone i am new to the forum and so happy that I found it , very helpful
First , English is not my first language, so I apologize for the mistakes in advance.
My son is 24 he thinks that me and my husband ( his biological parents) kidnapped him from his parents.
And that i am his aunt not mother and my husband is my husband not his dad.
He thinks that i am infertile that is why i took/stole him from his mother ( my sister)
I don’t have a sister btw i only have one brother.
He is currently admitted in a hospital for a week now
They gave him injection and resperadol pills.
I visited him yesterday, he still thinks the same way but calmer and wants to get out.
The hospital will release him soon.
They said they will give him another shot and send him home.
He was the sweetest boy ever .
Now he is very very verbally abusive
He hit me hard last week that is why I called the ambulance and they took him to the hospital.
He doesn’t think he is sick
My question is to you all , (since this is all new to me and husband and his sister and brother.)
What is the warning signs that I should look after?
I am afraid he will harm us, he keeps telling us send me back to my real parents.
Please give me any suggestions
Should i get a dog? Will he benefit from having a dog?
Is the Psychatrist service dog something real? Or just something they invent to get money?
How to protect my daughter ( she is 16) he thinks she is my husband daughter.
He loves her alot
But at this point I don’t trust his judgment.
Hello @Dinahhs3 and welcome to the forum. You will find lots of good advice, and compassion from people who understand severe mental illness.
To answer your questions, I do not know if a dog would help your son or not. My daughter, when ill, couldn’t take care of her own needs, let alone the needs of any else, or anything else. Now, 5 years into her new life recovered from her hallucinations and delusions, yes, but not for the 9 years before that.
The people on this forum have lived through problems that most “normal” families could not even imagine. I never got any good advice from people who were not familiar with schizophrenia, most gave bad advice. I suggest you read as much as you can from others here on schizophrenia.com
If your son hit you, that is alarming to me. And it is a crime. You are right to want to protect your daughter from him, in my opinion.
I am so sorry, it is such a shock when our children struggle with schizophrenia and we have to sort out how to move forward.
Your son is quite sick, hopefully the meds will help - calmer - but still believing you aren’t his parents is a serious problem. You have to keep yourselves safe, I’m glad you called for help quickly.
You are just now sorting things out and looking for a way to help him. He doesn’t need a dog, sometimes I have recommended that families have a dog for protection if their family members has a history of being dangerous when during a psychotic episode. One of my friends was saved by her dog when her daughter was choking her.
If the situation doesn’t improve, you need to consider having your son live somewhere else if that option is available. Some of our family members with schizophenia do better away from home when their delusions are focused on family.
Hello, so sorry you are going through this. It may be hard when he gets out to get him to keep taking the meds. You said something about a shot is it a long acting shot like Invega or something like that if it works for him that would be great.
I know right know you feel like your stuck in some unbelievable nightmare.
But you will get better when you find there are ways to help handle him a little.
You will have to let go of your beliefs of who is right or wrong. And keep in mind he is delusional he is not doing this to hurt you even though I know it does. In his mind this is all real. And he is probably scared and angry.
I don’t know where these thoughts and ideas come from in the mind could be a movie he once watched or a book he read, or even a friend who is actually going
through adoption problems. Hopefully the meds will work besides calming him down. So sorry you are going through this , so sorry for everyone going through this and prayers for you to have the strenth to handle this.
Thanks for your kind words
I am in shock
This is all knew to me
I never ever before read anything on SZ
I thought this is something i will never encounter
May God help us all and give us strength
Yes, I think that most of us were in shock when it first happened to our loved one. Good for ordering Dr. Amador’s book, I had to read it 3 times to fully understand how to use his LEAP method to communicate with my daughter. We started simple, with one thing at a time, (getting her to open her door and take a dinner plate from me), repeated every day until it was a “normal” occurrence.
The other thing you might find helpful, if there is one near you or a zoom meeting you can join, is NAMI. They have support groups and classes in some areas.
Take care of yourself while you are taking care of your son’s illness. That is important too.
Well done for getting help as soon as he was violent. Did you make sure that incident was recorded? You need that to be on his notes. Was he violent in the hospital?
Never accept any violence. Call the police if you need to. Check the state laws for how they handle a crisis. In Florida for example, they have the Baker act that empowers the police to detain someone for up to 72 hours to be assessed. In my experience in Florida and New Jersey it is better to have the police get them in to the hospital than try and take them yourself. You do not want him attacking you on the way there, or trying to leave the vehicle. It might be different in other states.
Always make sure you are informed what facility they go to. I would recommend clarifying the procedure for safe release with the facility. Most places will be quite good, but if they are assessed and they decide to release them rather than admit them, you want to make sure you are there before they get outside of the secure area of the building and go wandering.
It might take a while before they find a medication that works for your son. Invega was horrible for my wife, and it can cause breast tissue to develop (I am actually suprised it doesn’t get abused for breast enlargement, despite the potential side affects). I know a lot of people have side effects on aripripazole (brand name Abilify), but it is a generic, extremely cheap, and it seems to be effective in a good proportion of people with violence as a feature of their illness, but they will probably try every other medication before they get to that one.
Do you have any idea of anything that could have triggered this episode?
One other thing, I would recommend that you speak frankly with your daughter, make sure she knows to tell you if she is worried, if she thinks something might happen, or if something does happen. Make sure she knows to call the police. But also, consider that you do need to protect the siblings in their own right. If one of your kids poses a threat to the others, you might need to work out another arrangement. You kids can not live in an situation where they are feeling under threat from their unwell brother. You will get to know the signs of an episode coming and you will learn to react as time goes on.
I really don’t know what triggered it
But he was on medications and stopped it that is why.
He is very very sweet non violent young man
But I don’t know what happened that day
Alcohol maybe? God knows why
True i have to learn the signs
This is all new to me
He was diagnosed four years ago, but it was very mild and his dilutions was different.
Before he did know and say that we are his parents
But he thought that he was extremely rich and that his dad took his money, then after two years he started saying that his dad is not his real dad( I think to justify his dad stealing his money)
It is very tiring
God help us all
If he was on Invega and he suddenly stopped taking it, it does seem there is some evidence of people having rebound episodes of psychosis if they come off of it suddenly. There is an argument that the brain tries to keep in homeostasis, so it will generally try and work against the medication. If you suddenly stop the medication and the brain does not have that resistance from the medication, you might actually be in a worse position because the brain is pumping out whatever was unbalancing it before, plus whatever it was pumping out to fight the medication. When my wife was on Invega it did not seem to do much good. I began to feel that she was in a cycle of having an episode whilst on Invega, she would go to hospital, be put on Haldol for a few days to get her out of the psychosis, but by the time she was home she would be going back into psychosis from the withdrawal of Invega whilst she was in the hospital and it would start over again.
All the time she was miserable on Invega, saying it just wiped out her emotions. It also caused her breasts to swell and her period to stop. It was only when her period stopped that they moved her to Abilfy (aripripazole).
Only the Haloperidol Dec Shot worked for my daughter, she has been on it since 2019. Several other medicines were tried first. After 4 years on the correct medicine, no one would know she had been psychotic in the past. She has insight into her illness now, but she never used to have insight. She still hears voices but they “stay in their little box” now. Her voices are from out-of-body men around the country. There used to be 14 or so, now there are only 3 and one is friendly and protects her from the other 2. It took 2 arrests and 5 total Baker Acts to get her onto a medicine that worked, and a court order to keep her on that medicine. I thank God for the little miracles that added up over the years of her psychosis, delusions and hallucinations to lead her to her current state. It wouldn’t have happened without police intervention, court orders and Baker Acts. It almost destroyed me mentally and physically to win this battle, but we came out of it.
I am so happy for you and your daughter
My son was stable for 3years until he decided he doesn’t want to be medicated
Then hell doors where open
He is in the hospital right now for two weeks
But i feel that the shots is not working yet
Hope he gets better
And wish you luck and good health
Your story reminds me of the tough times my family went through to bring my daughter out of her psychosis. It took many months after release from hospitalization to get the medicine right. What I learnt is that communication with the psychiatrist helps tremendously. My daughter allowed me to sit in during the consultation, so I have the phone on speaker and to make the conversation as open and transparent as possible. I find that psychiatrist works better when they have knowledge if a particular medicine and dosage is working or not, and what other physio-psychological effects it may have. It is good to have a third person view and one who can describe the situation as medicine and dosage change. That I believe had sped up my daughter’s recovery. It’s tough as many here have attested. I am comforted to hear many success stories and that brings me hope. I wish you the best in the months and years ahead, and like they said don’t forget to take care of yourself.
I do believe as @LowProfiler said, that when your son stopped his medicine it resulted in this episode. Thank you @Dinahhs3, that you are happy for me and my daughter. I am thankful daily. Hopefully the hospital will keep your son until he is stable. My daughter was often let go before being stable for insurance reasons. At 30 days, her insurance wouldn’t pay anymore. Also, as @Chong said, being allowed in the meetings with psychiatrists was vital for my daughter’s successfully staying medicated on the one medicine that worked for her. She has always signed the papers allowing me full communication with her psychiatrists.