In a court of law before a judge, we are asked to raise our right hand and solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.
The whole truth?
The whole truth is humans don't know how to be truthful when they think their butts are on the line. It's our carnal nature to save ourselves at all cost. Throw in mental illness and well, the whole cause-and-effect, morally-ethical, conscience-driven attitude doesn't exist. It's broken. Caput. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Never existed, don't expect it to appear out of thin air. The diseased brain is quite simply, chemically incapable of doing anything other than preserving self.
Consider it the system default of survival mode.
The truth is, when you spell it that way, can you really blame a person for hunkering down, locking jaws, sinking in their teeth and defending the carnage of their erroneous thought processes if said individual is instinctually tripping the fight-or-flight switch when faced with any and every situation in which their appears to be a threat of survival, no matter how small?
Can you?
I don't see how I can be angry with that.
No. Anger at the chemically diseased brain and the individual in which it resides accomplishes nothing. In fact, it can be argued that said anger only makes the healthy individual in the relationship angrier. Because the truth is...
Mental Illness is NEVER a curable disorder.
Cancer attacks at the cellular level and destroys tissues, organs and organ systems. Viruses lurk and pervert healthy cells with their terrorist DNA. Bacteria eat and eat and eat and destroy, destroy, destroy. All can be treated. Some with successful outcomes, others with the inevitable preternatural demise.
But mental illness?
It is the proverbial Boogey Man that stealthily and silently attacks when the victim is unaware. It is the vicious bull dog chained up in the junk yard and never fed. It is the conniving temptress on the street corner making promises of pleasure at a cost. It is the Grim Reaper, stealer of souls. It is the slithering snake that glides under the front porch to wait for you to let out Mr. Jingles for his morning game of cat and mouse. It lies, how it lies. Lies upon lies upon mountains of lies until the truth is so far gone that it becomes the lie.
The mystery of Sissy's "capped out" status is solved. The current agency that is working with her case cannot write the PRTF because then medicaid will consider them as incapable of providing adequate services to their clients. In other words, medicaid will say to themselves, "hey, this is the third time this patient has been referred by this agency for residential treatment. Clearly this agency doesn't know what they are doing."
The new game becomes not how to therapeutically manage my daughter's illness with medications and DBTs while she lives her days at home being pleasant for teachers and screaming shit at me but how to seamlessly switch core providers without interrupting the dosing of her psychiatric medications or letting on that my whole M.O. in switching providers isn't to provide better services for her but to get another agency to write the PRTF.
OR...
I could play the "call 911 or the crisis mobile team and go to the emergency room and hope to get a bed on the temporary pediatric psych floor while she is assessed by the on call team so they can determine if she needs a 1013 or a RTC placement"
Which, as history and experience will tell me, is crock load of crap.
Because the truth is, everyone that works in the mental illness field is being convinced by insurance companies that mental illness IS curable, manageable, treatable. You see? Lie becomes truth, truth becomes the lie.
I've had just about all I can swallow of mental illness, the stigmas, the idiocy of bureaucracy and the insanity of insurance. Today my daughter was all over the universe with her mood swings, tantruming, erratic behaviors and mania. And that was just today. From 4-8pm.
Oh, I'll raise my right hand and solemnly swear all right. How offended are you when you hear a steady stream of expletives?
6 comments:
This doesn't make any sense. When Jess' leukemia recurred for the second time, and she needed a third hospitalization, nobody said the hospital didn't know what they were doing. They just said, wow, this kid is really sick. I understand what they're trying to do with this rule, but you just can't make hard and fast rules for medical issues.
Oh how I hear you. As things continue to escalate for us, and the the therapist says "We are just spinning our wheels, what should we do now?" I begin to wonder if this is job security and $ for their pockets.
Very well said. I am sorry it is so very hard!
Thoughts of you with love, my dear, lots of love. Only God is capable of truth. Only Him. We are not even able to bear SEEING it, much less grasping it.
Prayers. I should have checked earlier. You've been on my mind for days. I'm sorry I didn't check in, but God hasn't forgotten. He wakes the rest of us up and reminds us to pray. Not because He needs our prayers to do His work but so that you know you're not alone and He remembers.
YAY, you're back!
Sorry to hear things are going... well, the way they are, though. Are you on FB? The Jani Foundation has a private support group for parents of MI kids. And by now Jani's parents are very experienced with helping get kids the hospitalization they need.
(Hopefully my Google profile is good enough for this to get posted... but eh, then again, as long as you read this it's all good.)
We were told that our son could only receive RTC services after we had exhausted all community resources. There were resources that were a waste of time and we knew it (and they should have too) - but we did them. There were resources that were an intrusion into our home and disruptive to our other children - but we did them. After 8 mos. of therapy with "the best" intensive, home-based worker available, our son apparently "plateaued" (read: they ran out of ideas and patience) in his progress (of which we saw NONE) and they tried to discharge him from those services. Well then, fine, what next then? Hadn't we exhausted the height of community resources at that point? I agreed to the discharge, provided they refer him to the promised RTC placement. They agreed. I signed the discharge form. They never made the referral. The claimed that the RTC's used isolation as punishment (as in - go to your room to cool off) and that the state funding they received would be pulled if they supported any facility that used that. Hmmmm....sounds fishy. Why had we been promised RTC if we jumped thru the hoops only to have that rug pulled out from under us a year later? Lies, lies lies.... It is no wonder we lose hope (and in my brain, hope springs eternal) and trust in these mental health professionals. There was no guarantee that RTC would have helped my son, but with the safety issues and the emotional abuse all of the family endured because no one really cared enough to help - they could conceivably end up providing services to many more individuals (parents, siblings, class mates) due to the abusive behavior of the one mentally ill child. It is so beyond frustrating.
Fast forward 4 years. Mentally ill child turns the magical age of 18. Walks out the door on the morning of his 18th birthday. Manages to get to the homeless shelter in the next town (big city) so he can have that freedom he craves and has been denied - wants to just "live his life". Everyone rallies around him, leaves us out of the loop since this individual is legally an adult and wants nothing to do with us being his family any longer (even though we have been his family since he was 9 mos old). A few months later we get a call from one of his new workers asking us to write the state a letter stating how he needs SSI and what he was like growing up. Ahhh...the irony. We begged for help for him, for our entire family - they smiled and shrugged and couldn't/didn't help. Now they want us to help them - help him? They refuse to let us know how he's doing or where he is (two things I inadvertently learned during our conversation anyway) because they don't have his permission to disclose that information, but they want us to tell them personal information about him? Incredible! We found out that people still feel so sorry for him, are still making allowances for his behaviors and bending the rules for him. The rules that were set in stone when we needed help. They do not care whatsoever that we are his family, that we want to have him living here, helping him. Nope, they just want to give him a monthly income (from the government) so he can blow it all and remain homeless. He has ZERO money management skills. He has lost every dollar he ever got from the tooth fairy (just an example) and they want to hand him a check for $700/mo in SSI plus give him other benefits like a bridge card, free cell phone, etc. (which they have already given him and he has proven he cannot manage).
Sorry for the rant. I hate to say it, but your revelation here is just the beginning. Your best bet would be to talk to someone in your immediate community with your same insurance who has received the services you want for Sissy and then do exactly what they did to get them. Honesty doesn't seem to be getting our kids what they need.
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