On 2005-04-09 23:28:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Cherish Wisdom,
Thank you so much for your advice, warnings, & the links. I am so lost, I don't know what to do.
I am a stay at home mom, so I am with my daughter a lot.
Her uncle (my brother) committed suicide almost 2 years ago & she has sunk farther & farther into a black abyss. She is on medication & sees a therapist at least once a week (sometimes more), we do family counseling & have tried so hard to help her. She won't accept our help. She was hospitalized several months ago for suicidal ideation ( she stayed 2 weeks), she got out & with in 6 days was worse than before. She tried to jump out of a moving car on the express way. She was hospitalized again for 3 weeks.
She is a cutter & her cutting has been increasing in the past month, her school work is down the toilet (she was a good student before), her friends are as suicidal as she is, some are homicidal, she has a suicide pact with some boy she met in the hospital, etc, etc....
We don't know what to do. I had heard Utah was the "Gold Standard" for depressed kids. I am so glad you told me about your experience. I can't have my daughter traumatized anymore than she already has been.
I just don't know how to keep her safe & alive anymore.
Thanks again"
Hi, I'm Julie---Timoclea here, and BlueWillow on CABF.
I have bipolar disorder (used to be called manic depression--has a 20% lifetime risk of death by suicide if untreated) and have 9 year old daughter with bipolar disorder.
Look up the treatment facility section on Children and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF) community center message boards online.
Most of these parents have had children hospitalized seven or eight times before they decided they had no choice but to use an RTC, so they're not your standard "Program Parent" zombies sending their kid off for being sexually active, getting a few bad grades, and smoking a couple of joints (not to say that behavior is at all okay, just that normal responsible parenting is the answer for it---even if it doesn't completely stop it).
*Your* child is an imminent danger to self, needs hospitalization, and the short conventional hospitalizations aren't working. That's a different ball of wax. Even if she was thirty, if she was like this you could go to a judge and get an involuntary commitment order. It sounds like your child really does need residential treatment---she just needs *good* residential treatment. I commend you for making sure you're thoroughly checking out any institution you consider instead of believing their marketing literature and their parent testimonials.
What I would recommend is that you go read the parent testimonials on CABF (not solicited by any of the schools) and then cross-reference the schools with any survivor report information on ISAC or here.
Stay away from anyplace run by or in any way associated with WWASPS (World Wide Association of Specialty Schools).
What *I* would look for if I was somehow my parent of me as a teenager and was having to hospitalize *me*---I'd look for a facility that was recommended by CABF parents but the Fornits survivors had never heard of, that had been in business a long time, that was licensed by the state it was in. And I'd verify the licensing by calling the state agency responsible for licensing---because programs that defraud parents lie a lot.
I'd avoid Utah, Idaho, or Montana. And if it was a program with religious overtones, I'd avoid Missouri. Actually, for a suicidal kid I'd stay completely away from the religious programs no matter how religious you are. People too inclined to substitute faith for therapy are not who you want caring for a child with a serious brain disorder.
What's probably happened with your daughter is she has a genetic predisposition to this illness (even if it doesn't show up in other family, the vagaries of genetics are such that she could have gotten a double dose of some recessives) and the death of her uncle triggered it.
The bad news is that once triggered, it's usually triggered for life. The good news is that it's highly treatable and it usually just takes a lot of trial and error for the doctors to find the right medication, or medication combination, or dosage out of many, many available. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) also has a good track record of helping a lot of people long term. People's reactions to medications are highly individual, and trial and error is unfortunately the only way the psychiatrists have right now of finding which one or ones work best for a particular patient.
Pay close attention to ISAC's list of warning signs of an abusive treatment facility. In particular, do not choose any facility that tries to limit your contact with your daughter or implies that you shouldn't phone your daughter every day if you want to, or that won't make a phone available for her to call you. If they try to suggest she has to "earn" a phone call home, or that she has to "complete" certain parts of the program before "being ready" for a phone call home, avoid that facility like the plague.
Reputable treatment facilities for mentally ill children will not try to limit your phone contact with your daughter. Neither will they stop your daughter's mail to or from other people unless those letters contain suicidal talk, suicide pacts, psychotic delusions, or other things directly injurious to your daughter's mental health. They'll also probably be willing to keep any stopped mail in a file for you to pick up or examine, or forward it to you periodically---they won't set themselves up to throw letters in or out away, they'll just intercept them if they're directly harmful to your daughter's mental health---not her "progress in the program."
Check the credentials of their treatment professionals. Their psychiatrist should be easy enough to check as pdocs are MDs. Check how often their psychiatrist is actually present at the facility. Obviously, more is better on that.
Don't put your daughter anyplace that accepts juvenile delinquents who aren't mentally ill. If you have to, get a friend to call and pose as a parent of same looking for a facility and see how they react. The National Institutes for Mental Health (NIMH) has specifically warned that RTC's that place mentally ill children alongside juvenile delinquents do more harm than good.
One of the reasons to watch out so hard to avoid the one-size-fits-all behavior modification programs that take juvenile delinquents is that many of those take a "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" approach to "troubled teens" and shrug off the teens who suicide after getting home as the eggs you have to break to make the omelette. Which is appalling anyway, but *especially* horrific if you're looking for help for a mentally ill child to get her stable because suicide is exactly what you're afraid of.
So anyway, that's my best advice.
If you want to talk to me more privately, you can send me a Private Message on here.
Timoclea
Homeschool is self regulating. The school board is not going to have illiterate useless people living in their homes forever if they don't have a working education policy.
--Sisterbluerose
