VWFringe
Naruto Fan
Daughter's on 5150 Hold in a mental hospital after taking Seroquel and dramamine to attempt suicide. She'd tried once before last July, and I think it's the previous attempt, and all the fresh cuts on her legs and arms.
Still, I get the feeling greed and fear, and how hard it is to get past the political view that people who self-medicate are broken because they self-medicate, and refuse to ackknowledge our species history and reasons for doing it, namely stress, or to be technical, the absense of dopamine, which creates sort of low-level withdrawal symptoms (and all sorts of strange behaviors as we attempt to compensate and bring ourselves into brief contact with our dopamine through drama-lettes and constructed behaviors - pathways often borrowed from popular culture, for what we see is what we model, and what we covet or want. But the real purpose is to effect changes to our brain chemistry, to try to find normal, to try to find the God particle inside our own brains, dopamine in a word.
And I get the sense a criticism I heard the other day is true:
Our medical system in the US has settled into a sort of disease care mode, where they don't want you to die, but they don't exactly want you to get better either.... they just want you to keep coming back, in this fee-for-procedure model of care.
I told the doctor's I wanted to take her home, that we only came for medical intervention in case they could counter any liver toxicity.
They said they had to err on the side of safety. I asked how much good it would do for her to be in that kind of environment when she wanted to go home to hug her parents and pets, we wanted to take care of her and would keep her safe over the weekend. And, she'd been in the exact facility just two weeks prior on a voluntary admission to gain control over her cutting.
And I said, how insane is it really to look at her and not look at us. I said her cutting seems to fit with the pain-relief model, where she's carrying some kind of psychological pain-load, and that her tendency to self-medicate with marijuana, meth and heroin (in the past) seem to indicate a need for dopamine and to get rid of pain. I said it only makes sense that pain is coming from home, that my wife and I had been in negative cycles for years, and that my wife's recently divorced me, that things get bumpy but that my recently increased perspective from my own ADHD diagnosis has allowed me to try to keep things together and mostly calm. That both times she tried to kill herself were in direct response to her and Mom bickering over substance abuse, or as I'd put it, Mom's intolerance of our daughter's drive to self-medicate. And, that it's only natural that everything Mom says winds up meaning a great deal to her because we are around each other more than anybody else.
But I couldn't talk them out of releasing her to our care, and the second-opinion shrink said part of it is what she imagines the home to be like having heard me speak. I swear, it was like three times she reflectively listened and presented my own words as proof of her views while distorting some detail just slightly...I asked her to stop because it sounded like she was using my words against the situation.
I'm thinking, no fucking way am I letting you take my child, for, what? some indeterminate time, more to make money off of her than to truly help her. I mean, it's an institutional setting they want to send her to, not a love-in, those are medical assistants being paid to act as guards and procedure & fee gatherers, not people who can even understand her underlying conditions and how to deftly guide her to self-understanding and a greater experience of life. I even said, "how much good is going to do her if i take a swing at someone and land in jail? There is no way I'm letting you take my daughter. I've seen that place, and don't believe it'll do her mental state any good to send her there, and she obviously feels the same from how loudly she was crying that place would make her go insane." They even said during admission, all of the doctors here are independent contractors who will bill your insurance separately - the Walmart of mental healthcare - maybe the closer you get to the bottom, where people can pay less than the rich, the standard of care starts to look a bit more ritzy - you're asked to trust and have faith in the medical community, which is why some medications work the way they do, because of the trust people have in their systems and procedures. But there's more revenue protection and covering their asses than any meaningful amount of psychological work getting done. And the patient is more in isolation than in getting back into life, which effects people who don't experience their reward system differently than normal people, which may account for the fact that she cut herself almost everyday she was in under self-admission, and another reason I think she should be home, and free to vape.
They said if I tried to take her out, they had to call the police, and then they would come and take her away from us.
My God, how crazy is it for my wife to have created this environment at home where my daughter had a medication she knew to work, had some hidden away, but forced herself to not do that, and ended up doing meth and cutting instead? (That's what they argued about, Mom found a meth pipe, badgered her to admit what it was, then asked what if she herself went ahead and smoked her drugs and ruined her own life, just like our daughter's...and then she drank a whole bottle of wine and puked all over the livingroom carpet, which freaked my daughter out because she said she was talking about dying, and did when they'd argue sometimes, and my wife made it sound like she wanted to give up, or I think she wanted to change her daughter's behavior the same way the schools and police had done it, through slut-shaming.
How insane is it that our country has been asked to see people like her as mentally deficient for self-medicating, when it's a proven fact that when she was vaping she wasn't cutting or doing meth. But when you force people to take drug tests, you force them to do things that are bad for their bodies, just so they can hide it better, since it's out of their system after just a few days or doesn't register at all.
And how the fuck do I get her out of there?
So, sorry for sharing too much, thought it'd help since I'm kind of alone [and like to hear myself talk (too much)].
* Does it seem like I'm imagining everyone else just lives in my manufactured world?*
* Does it seem like I am avoiding responsibility and treating others views disrespectfully?*
Does she belong in the hospital for some reason I'm don't get?
Do I sound crazy, or does this ring-true?
Or, anything else that comes up for you.
Thanks, (send your prayers, or dopamine, we need as much as we can get)
* Observations made by a distant relative concerning something else I wrote that kind of expressed the same narratives.
Still, I get the feeling greed and fear, and how hard it is to get past the political view that people who self-medicate are broken because they self-medicate, and refuse to ackknowledge our species history and reasons for doing it, namely stress, or to be technical, the absense of dopamine, which creates sort of low-level withdrawal symptoms (and all sorts of strange behaviors as we attempt to compensate and bring ourselves into brief contact with our dopamine through drama-lettes and constructed behaviors - pathways often borrowed from popular culture, for what we see is what we model, and what we covet or want. But the real purpose is to effect changes to our brain chemistry, to try to find normal, to try to find the God particle inside our own brains, dopamine in a word.
And I get the sense a criticism I heard the other day is true:
Our medical system in the US has settled into a sort of disease care mode, where they don't want you to die, but they don't exactly want you to get better either.... they just want you to keep coming back, in this fee-for-procedure model of care.
I told the doctor's I wanted to take her home, that we only came for medical intervention in case they could counter any liver toxicity.
They said they had to err on the side of safety. I asked how much good it would do for her to be in that kind of environment when she wanted to go home to hug her parents and pets, we wanted to take care of her and would keep her safe over the weekend. And, she'd been in the exact facility just two weeks prior on a voluntary admission to gain control over her cutting.
And I said, how insane is it really to look at her and not look at us. I said her cutting seems to fit with the pain-relief model, where she's carrying some kind of psychological pain-load, and that her tendency to self-medicate with marijuana, meth and heroin (in the past) seem to indicate a need for dopamine and to get rid of pain. I said it only makes sense that pain is coming from home, that my wife and I had been in negative cycles for years, and that my wife's recently divorced me, that things get bumpy but that my recently increased perspective from my own ADHD diagnosis has allowed me to try to keep things together and mostly calm. That both times she tried to kill herself were in direct response to her and Mom bickering over substance abuse, or as I'd put it, Mom's intolerance of our daughter's drive to self-medicate. And, that it's only natural that everything Mom says winds up meaning a great deal to her because we are around each other more than anybody else.
But I couldn't talk them out of releasing her to our care, and the second-opinion shrink said part of it is what she imagines the home to be like having heard me speak. I swear, it was like three times she reflectively listened and presented my own words as proof of her views while distorting some detail just slightly...I asked her to stop because it sounded like she was using my words against the situation.
I'm thinking, no fucking way am I letting you take my child, for, what? some indeterminate time, more to make money off of her than to truly help her. I mean, it's an institutional setting they want to send her to, not a love-in, those are medical assistants being paid to act as guards and procedure & fee gatherers, not people who can even understand her underlying conditions and how to deftly guide her to self-understanding and a greater experience of life. I even said, "how much good is going to do her if i take a swing at someone and land in jail? There is no way I'm letting you take my daughter. I've seen that place, and don't believe it'll do her mental state any good to send her there, and she obviously feels the same from how loudly she was crying that place would make her go insane." They even said during admission, all of the doctors here are independent contractors who will bill your insurance separately - the Walmart of mental healthcare - maybe the closer you get to the bottom, where people can pay less than the rich, the standard of care starts to look a bit more ritzy - you're asked to trust and have faith in the medical community, which is why some medications work the way they do, because of the trust people have in their systems and procedures. But there's more revenue protection and covering their asses than any meaningful amount of psychological work getting done. And the patient is more in isolation than in getting back into life, which effects people who don't experience their reward system differently than normal people, which may account for the fact that she cut herself almost everyday she was in under self-admission, and another reason I think she should be home, and free to vape.
They said if I tried to take her out, they had to call the police, and then they would come and take her away from us.
My God, how crazy is it for my wife to have created this environment at home where my daughter had a medication she knew to work, had some hidden away, but forced herself to not do that, and ended up doing meth and cutting instead? (That's what they argued about, Mom found a meth pipe, badgered her to admit what it was, then asked what if she herself went ahead and smoked her drugs and ruined her own life, just like our daughter's...and then she drank a whole bottle of wine and puked all over the livingroom carpet, which freaked my daughter out because she said she was talking about dying, and did when they'd argue sometimes, and my wife made it sound like she wanted to give up, or I think she wanted to change her daughter's behavior the same way the schools and police had done it, through slut-shaming.
How insane is it that our country has been asked to see people like her as mentally deficient for self-medicating, when it's a proven fact that when she was vaping she wasn't cutting or doing meth. But when you force people to take drug tests, you force them to do things that are bad for their bodies, just so they can hide it better, since it's out of their system after just a few days or doesn't register at all.
And how the fuck do I get her out of there?
So, sorry for sharing too much, thought it'd help since I'm kind of alone [and like to hear myself talk (too much)].
* Does it seem like I'm imagining everyone else just lives in my manufactured world?*
* Does it seem like I am avoiding responsibility and treating others views disrespectfully?*
Does she belong in the hospital for some reason I'm don't get?
Do I sound crazy, or does this ring-true?
Or, anything else that comes up for you.
Thanks, (send your prayers, or dopamine, we need as much as we can get)
* Observations made by a distant relative concerning something else I wrote that kind of expressed the same narratives.
