Joseph Meyer on Nostr: Today my wife and I are parents and caregivers for a 26-year old transgender daughter ...
Today my wife and I are parents and caregivers for a 26-year old transgender daughter with schizophrenia. She lives in her own apartment and does pretty well for now—she cooks, cleans, and has good personal hygiene. But she relies heavily on us for logistical support: Shopping for groceries, transportation to doctor’s appointments, managing money, and entertainment. She has been severely ill from a young age. We learned from a former teacher, several years ago, that she even reported hearing whispers and bells in pre-school. We first noticed that she was having visual and auditory hallucinations when she was about 6 years old. She has even experienced tactile hallucinations where she mistakenly believes someone or something is touching her.
For now we are proud of her level of independence and have no desire to move her into a more restrictive living environment. She walks to nearby stores and communicates a little with other residents of the apartment complex, which is partially subsidized by local charities and has other residents without a lot of money. Some of them also have disabilities. But our daughter is continuously and profoundly psychotic. She often talks with us on the phone for 1-3 hours, often about delusions that she thinks are real. Arguing with her is pointless and only causes conflict. She believes that she travels around the country to visit friends who live in other cities—she even has a list of her non-existent imaginary friends by first and last name, occupation, and city. She thinks that she makes highly polished music videos that are published on YouTube, claiming credit for them, sometimes pointing to performers in videos and saying they are her.
If there comes a time when our daughter needs help to keep her out of trouble, or if she gets into trouble with the law, our ability to help her will be far more limited than how we were able to respond to my father’s Alzheimer’s disease. There will be publicly funded judges and disability rights attorneys involved, some arguing for her civil liberty to reject treatment or placement in a more restricted living situation. They might echo the words of advocates for neurodivergent persons that it is her civil right to live homeless or choose prison over medical intervention, if that is what she prefers. We would have to hire an attorney to represent our wishes as parents. And, based on my knowledge of actual cases in our liberal city, we would probably lose the case. The law in our home county says that we cannot place our adult daughter in a psychiatric hospital involuntarily without a judge’s commitment order, even if we have legal guardianship, which would create additional burdens for us and merely give us control over the meager financial assets she receives from us and Social Security. An over-representation of persons with serious mental illnesses among the homeless and imprisoned, as well as among those shot and killed in interactions with the police rather than healthcare providers, is evidence that civil liberties of those with serious mental illnesses are emphasized more respected than the civil liberties of Alzheimer’s patients. The rights of persons with serious mental illnesses to own guns, to sleep and freeze to death on frozen sidewalks in shabby clothing, to be imprisoned for the behavioral symptoms of their illnesses are well established here in the United States. Visitors from other countries are often appalled by what they see on our streets.
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For now we are proud of her level of independence and have no desire to move her into a more restrictive living environment. She walks to nearby stores and communicates a little with other residents of the apartment complex, which is partially subsidized by local charities and has other residents without a lot of money. Some of them also have disabilities. But our daughter is continuously and profoundly psychotic. She often talks with us on the phone for 1-3 hours, often about delusions that she thinks are real. Arguing with her is pointless and only causes conflict. She believes that she travels around the country to visit friends who live in other cities—she even has a list of her non-existent imaginary friends by first and last name, occupation, and city. She thinks that she makes highly polished music videos that are published on YouTube, claiming credit for them, sometimes pointing to performers in videos and saying they are her.
If there comes a time when our daughter needs help to keep her out of trouble, or if she gets into trouble with the law, our ability to help her will be far more limited than how we were able to respond to my father’s Alzheimer’s disease. There will be publicly funded judges and disability rights attorneys involved, some arguing for her civil liberty to reject treatment or placement in a more restricted living situation. They might echo the words of advocates for neurodivergent persons that it is her civil right to live homeless or choose prison over medical intervention, if that is what she prefers. We would have to hire an attorney to represent our wishes as parents. And, based on my knowledge of actual cases in our liberal city, we would probably lose the case. The law in our home county says that we cannot place our adult daughter in a psychiatric hospital involuntarily without a judge’s commitment order, even if we have legal guardianship, which would create additional burdens for us and merely give us control over the meager financial assets she receives from us and Social Security. An over-representation of persons with serious mental illnesses among the homeless and imprisoned, as well as among those shot and killed in interactions with the police rather than healthcare providers, is evidence that civil liberties of those with serious mental illnesses are emphasized more respected than the civil liberties of Alzheimer’s patients. The rights of persons with serious mental illnesses to own guns, to sleep and freeze to death on frozen sidewalks in shabby clothing, to be imprisoned for the behavioral symptoms of their illnesses are well established here in the United States. Visitors from other countries are often appalled by what they see on our streets.
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