Author, how is your daughter doing now on the GAD med solo?
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Everyone gets bullied at some point in their life so don’t beat yourself up with not taking it seriously. Some kids handle it better than others too. But you never know how it will play out.
I have a very strong willed child who was well liked by his classmates until two girls suddenly decided to systematically destroy his self confidence. This was over a decade ago, before on line bullying was acknowledged by the schools–none the less it impacted him to the point I pulled him out of school. (He is not my sz child).
My point is–did something happen at school that has not come out yet? Especially as she does better at home. Kids today are doing more than just bullying IMHO…Sometimes they are intent on total destruction of another child’s sense of well being. And that is downright scary.
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So far so good at the moment. She says she feels much better and I believe her. It’s always a huge Transformation when she is released. She will be home for the next four days with me monitoring her. The real test will be when I go back to work on 12/28. And then the next phase will be her return to school on 1/4. It will at least be a somewhat controlled return to normal. I should know pretty soon if there are any issues cropping up (I hope).
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The teachers don’t report an outright behavior like that. And the students have reported some really bizarre behavior from her which would of course get her alienated. Kids do talk and gossip at this age so I have no doubt there is something like that. The problem is she is accusing people of doing things that aren’t actually happening. A recent example at the bus stop was her running around screaming and crying at the kids for taking her backpack. My son and two other kids swear it was on the ground behind her but she swears they hung up on the top of the stop sign, which in itself is not possible to really do. So we are just focused on tackling one layer at a time until we reach a proper diagnosis. The anxiety is the best place to start for now.
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Yes, forgiveness has been hard to find internally. My husband says I am uselessly beating myself up but I just need to have others acknowledge, him in particular, that we were wrong in how we treated her and we are never going to do that again. I am not certain he is on the same page with me and that worries me a lot. His temper is just as much of the problem as mine and he is dismissing things as us not knowing any better which to me is no excuse. I should have put the wellbeing of my child first and I didn’t. That’s frustrating to me because I never would have thought myself capable of doing such a thing.
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My brother has GAD and takes two meds for it. His issues started in grade school. His wife finally got him on meds, as long as he stays on them, things go really well for him.
I am glad Libby is feeling better.
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Libby is home and has already had her first hallucination and delusion. She believes she called me on the phone and I answered in a panic. She has been home all day with me. We checked her phone and all her contacts are gone.
Dear God, what do I do now? I am keeping a daily journal and log of symptoms. I was hoping for a few days at least.
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Teach her to use this $179
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Practice patience and self awareness… find something to occupy her time…
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I do remember hearing from a Mom in NAMI that her daughter accused someone of something and she went to bat for her in grade school only later to find it never happened. It was the earliest memory that things weren’t right.
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She has a Kindle fire and a smart phone.
Yes, we’ve had some instances of that where she’s accused her stepbrother of things he didn’t do, or neighborhood children. It’s taken several years to understand this, that’s for sure. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s happened to.
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Okay, Libby is fresh from the hospital and tonight says, “Hey Mom, why does everything look different?” So I asked the logical question, “Different how?” and she says, “Colors look different. Brighter. Clearer.” She then pointed out several things in the kitchen that looked different to her. In particular, one item had always looked white before but now she could see it was silver and black.
Does this make sense to anyone?
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Yes. Early in his illness, while it was developing, my son went through a period of time where he used to see “dots” in the sky. He couldn’t believe I didn’t see them as well.
My guess is this would be an example of visual hallucination.
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Their hearing also is more sensitive. I remember during high school my son claimed he could hear people down the hall talking about him. He said he had super sonic hearing.
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I can relate to this but you still cannot beat yourself up about it. As her parent she n eds you to set safe limits. My son still needs this and pushes us especially when he gets out of the hospital. It makes no sense but he thinks because he had to stay there against his will, we owe him something. No, we owe him a safe home and unconditional love. He can be extremely manipulative. I would imagine all of our children are because they are smart. In my opinion, the hardest difficulty is keeping my son busy when he starts coming back. Crafts, gym and anything that gets them moving would be good.
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I have been afraid to describe her as manipulative because I have a hard time knowing what’s real with her at this stage. I like the idea of keeping her busy. We are going to be cooking all day today and running errands.
Thank you all for your feedback, it helps to know I am not losing my mind as we try to adjust to this new ‘normal’.
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Yes, I was particularly referring to his delusions which would get our son in trouble pretty quickly. I try hard not to judge anything he sees, hears or says. Have a great day.
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One role as parents is, if our children live with us, to try to keep a calm, low stress environment and support in other ways that we can i.e. make doctor appointments and drive there, etc. Some things are beyond us, like medical diagnosis. The ways we can connect with our family members are the most important things to figure out.
All of this, I realize, is beyond what is possible during very symptomatic times of the illness (and when our loved family members leave or become fearful of us). However, good relationships that have nothing to do with the illness are helpful for the whole family, and, in my opinion, basically the reason we are on earth, to love each other and be together in the best ways possible.
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Good news, we have had several days of peace in our household. She is having some very mild symptoms but compared to where she was, it’s down to almost nothing. The hospital ended up keeping her diagnosis the same and kept the Risperdal after all. She takes .25 mg in the morning and .50mg at night. She takes Lexapro in the morning. The unfortunate part of this is that medication treats both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder so there’s nothing definitive from that other than it’s working so it’s definitely one of them. Could be both for all we know.
So far we have been able to keep the environment low stress/low anxiety. We took her out to a restaurant yesterday morning for Christmas and her anxiety spiked slightly but we hadn’t given her meds yet. With the meds she was fine. She felt like everyone was staring at her until the meds kicked in.
She is very happy to be home and has said that the hospital really helped her. We are trying to teach her to have positive associations with the hospital so that she hopefully doesn’t fight against it in the future. So far every time she has wanted help and it has helped so we are 3 for 3 with positive results.
I find myself very hypersensitive to her right now and I am hoping that fades. The waiting is so hard and keeps me on edge even though I am telling myself to be present in these happy, sane moments. I am dreading going back to work tomorrow - her anxiety really spikes when I am not around right now. And her going back to school scares me. I feel like I am walking a tightrope everywhere in life right now.
I will be visiting the school at her return to get something set up to address her diagnosis officially.
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