Your loved
one lives in a constant state of crisis, or so it seems.
Does unconditional love mean you must live in a constant
state of crisis as well? If you choose not to live in a
constant state of crisis, does that mean you don’t love
your family member? What defines unconditional love?
Several years ago, two of my children had the
opportunity to perform Irish dance on a
cruise ship in the Caribbean. It was an opportunity of a
lifetime. Our trip included
several stops, including Labadee, on the island of
Haiti. Labadee is owned by Royal
Caribbean Cruise Lines, however, the cruise line
abruptly omitted the stop from our
itinerary, due to political unrest in Haiti. We were
forced to skip a fun filled day at the
beach in favor of an extra day at sea.
It was Christmas, 2008. As my husband, children, and
I passed heaping dishes of
delicious food around the table, we laughed and shared
stories as we did every
Christmas. Afterwards, we passed out packages and ooh’d
and ah’d over every gift. I
was enjoying being with my family so much that I almost
forgot that we were sitting
around a conference room table in a mental health
residential center.
In 2007, I started journaling about our son’s
illness. His symptoms were escalating and I
wanted to remember the details of what happened, how I
felt about them, and how they
affected our family. My original intent was to write a
book about what it was like to raise
a boy with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a
host of other alphabet soup
diagnoses.
Adoptive parents make a lot of mistakes in parenting,
just the same as biological parents do. Having a couple
of children in each category gives us room for equal
opportunity mistakes. Relative to adoption, one of the
things we did right was to keep the conversation about
the topic of adoption open and ongoing, which gave our
adoptive kids a comfort level in talking about it.
During a recent conversation with another parent, we
realized that we have done exactly the same thing in our
home with the topic of mental illness without ever
realizing it, and that has been a good thing too.
If you could choose to be a flower or a weed, which
would you choose?
Karl W. Dennis is known as the “Father of Wraparound”
in Illinois. He is retired now, but he was the former
Executive Director of Kaleidoscope, which is a
therapeutic foster care program, in Chicago. He is the
author of “Everything is Normal Until Proven Otherwise,”
a book about wraparound services.
At a recent NAMI support group meeting, attendees
were talking about the emotional toll we experienced when placing a loved one in the
psychiatric hospital or residential treatment center. I shared with the group
our own experience of placing our young son in both types of facilities. We knew it
would be difficult, but we completely unprepared for the sense of grief that
followed. I commented that we may have endured it better if we had anticipated it. Others
in the group let out a chorus of agreement. It was something none of us had shared
before.
Did you ever read an article about someone with a
mental illness and wonder how the writer got it so wrong? The very headline can send you
reeling! Did you respond by getting into a conversation with other bloggers? Did the
comments overrule the original intent of the piece? Can knowledgeable bloggers spin an
article?
Standing at the altar, repeating
vows, couples make forever commitments to each other not knowing what challenges lurk in the future.
Discovering that a spouse has mental illness tests and sometimes breaks the tie
that binds. Spouses of people with mental illness share common types of
loss.
Sometimes we can't find answers in the places that we
expect to find them, while we find answers in places we
never looked for them.
A set of sisters were perplexed as to
how to respond to their elderly father's inappropriate
public behavior as a result of his unstable bipolar
disorder.
"Dear Mom, I hope you have a
nice day. I hope you are busy at work today. I hope God brings
you home safely from work. With love, from your son."
During one of my recent NAMI Family to Family meetings, a
mother, whose son is in his early 20s, was sharing a tip about
how she was able to cope better with some of her son's bipolar
mania symptoms.
Introducing a new column for the NAMI BA
newsletter. This column will be a regular feature that
highlights all of us living and working "in the trench" with
mental illness.
The first article is "Homeostasis"
My husband and I currently have four great kids. Two are
biological children, without mental illness, are grown, and
living on their own. We also have two adoptive kids, who
together have what we affectionately refer to as, the whole
"alphabet soup" of mental illness acronyms. "In the Trench"
highlights our son, Chip, who has been stable for 7 years. In
the near future, we anticipate becoming resource parents for yet
another teen boy.
The Bazelon Center for Mental
Health Law calls it “barbaric.” NAMI calls it “unthinkable.”
We call it the Devil’s Deal. Custody relinquishment for mental
healthcare. That’s the politically correct name. In some
circles, it has become so accepted, it doesn’t even have a
negative connotation. Trading custody rights for mental
healthcare. Even the most desensitized government workers cringe
when hearing it phrased this way. It is easy to discount the
tragedy by failing to look at the consequences.
