Hi All,
My sister suffers from schizophrenia and already has had one baby taken off her (my Mum looks after the child) because she’s incapable. She just announced that she’s pregnant again. I know social services are going to take the baby and it breaks my heart.
She doesn’t understand consequences and it’s getting worse as she gets older. Does anyone have experience of this?
Unfortunately, irresponsibility and inability to understand consequences are common in those with this mental illness, and often the symptoms get worse over time. I am sorry, I have no real suggestions to help you. Your mom is very kind to have already taken care of one baby.
Yes I have experience with this, I am caring for my sister child who has the illness and she is trying to get pregnant again she too got her child taken from social services and If she gets Prego again they will take it away my heart goes out to you
I haven’t been through this as my brother hasn’t been able to maintain a relationship, but I have other friends who have dealt with adopting/providing guardianship to a child who was taken from their severely mentally ill parent.
It’s rough and often times, if you cannot convince the person to stay on their meds (i.e the person who wants to have more children) there’s nothing to be done. Obviously there is a huge moral grey area in regards to taking children away and to suggesting anything like sterilization (as the routine for birth control is too much for most patients) all the same, it’s better than the alternative of leaving the child where they are and letting “the world” have its way.
A family friend didn’t know how bad her step-sons situation was because the mentally ill ex-wife lived out of state. Fortunately, she (the MI bio-mom) lived around family and the kid basically lived at his aunts house because his mom was completely off her rocker. The problem for them was that she would mask her symptoms, and hide or only sporadically take her pills. Their breaking point (and hence the calling in of the in-laws,step-parents, and other family members) was when the step-son (6 y.o) was found wandering on the side of the road. His mom had kicked him out with nothing in the midst of her delusions (with to boot a HORRIBLE boyfriend somewhere in the mix.)
To make a long story short, the boy lives with his step mom and dad in another state and they make sure he has contact with his biological family but it’s been impossible to get his bio-mom stabilized on meds. Their (bio-mom’s) family couldn’t take another child as they were already dealing with unexpected familial losses that meant their family size hit double digits. Adding that amount of kids to the trauma, the son eventually made the decision to stay with his step-mom and bio-dad. Fortunately it wasn’t as though the kid had never been around them, he stayed with each other and split their time cross country visiting during spring and Summer breaks per the custody agreement.
Without going into too many details, the child has some life altering medical conditions and trauma to deal with thanks to his mother’s lack of awareness. While it’s not her fault, as she was ill, the reality of having severe chronic illness is, in my mind, never enough justification for what the poor child went through. He’s doing well now, but that’s because my friend is one of the salt of the earth types. He’s had TONS AND TONS of counseling, on top of a lot of supervised visits with his bio-mom when he was old enough to understand why she is the way she is. Unfortunately her delusions haven’t stabilized to stay together, but they’ve talked some things through at least. It was one of several huge breeches of trust in his young life that he couldn’t really forgive, even if he understands WHY it happened. There’s more that he hasn’t told my friend, or me, (which is totally O.K) but his bio-mom is someone he does not regard as safe. Part of the reason we became friends in the first place was because we’d dealt with MI related concerns and family members. Reaching out to the kid and helping him with some of realities of growing up with a MI parent was and is healing in a way. And, I have to admit, having a kid cry about some of the things I wished I could have cried about at that age, was cathartic. There wasn’t really a space for that when I was growing up.