Should i institutionalize my child

This time, there was no one else within earshot. I also knew the woman asking had gone through her own trials in life which made it feel safer to share mine.

As the story tumbled out, her eyes filled first with compassion and then with tears. She hugged me and we cried together.

And then a magical thing happened. You see, I had shared that one of the many challenges we are now facing is that this program is super intensive and mandates that both parents attend parent sessions and family therapies and on Wednesdays, the time commitment works out to be 6 hours.

Wednesday also just happens to be the hardest day for us to find child care for the other kids. What a gift. That first admission day when my friend Michelle sat beside me?

She did so much more than that. You are so lucky! She held us both up in that moment. Later, she took notes in the meetings. She took notes and remembered to ask things that had slipped my mind. That same morning, one of our other daughters had woken up throwing up from the stress and my mom had come to our house to care for her.

She also did laundry and changed our sheets. Do you know what a gift it was to crawl into fresh sheets that night after a long and emotional day?! The night before the admission, we had a crisis here at home with our daughter. During that crisis, my neighbour offered to keep the other kids, to shield them from the worst of it, and to drive kids to and from piano and tutoring.

Knowing that my other kids would be safe was also a gift. Other friends took us out for supper the night of the intake. We both just wanted to crawl into that bed with the fresh sheets and sleep for years.

But we had committed and so we went and we ate good food and we were held up by people who loved us and after awhile, we even found ourselves laughing and almost forgetting. I thought they would fix her. I was wrong. Instead, Maisie learned a new way to self-harm. She talked to other kids in the hospital. It was a game the children played: what medication are you on? One night, Maisie grew so desperate to leave the hospital that she escaped from the ward. Maisie had been gone for an hour by the time staff realised she was gone.

When Maisie was eventually released after six months, Sally felt as though her daughter had done time in prison. The family recently agreed to take part in a Channel 4 documentary on teenagers with mental health problems in conjunction with the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust , hoping it would raise awareness about the need for better NHS funding.

But I had no extra support. Over the summer, Maisie started barricading herself in the bathroom so she could self-harm, physically fighting her mother off when Sally tried to stop her. Sally asked for more help at home. That made me very angry. Eventually, in August, Maisie herself asked to go away to an inpatient unit. Sally believes the way Maisie was treated from that point on was disgraceful. He totally dismissed her previous diagnoses. In total, Maisie — who is now 15 — has been given 15 different diagnoses over the past three years, ranging from autism to severe depression.

Call your own therapist, consult with your pastor, get a pedicure. Do whatever makes you more resilient and adds energy or perspective to your life.

Give yourself permission to go out with a friend, laugh, get your hair cut, or shoot pool with a buddy. Go for that long run, have a glass of wine with your bestie, or take a long walk in the woods.

Whatever gives you oxygen. Note that what rejuvenates you may be different than what you normally do to relax. Often what we do to wind down is numb ourselves with entertainment. That is anesthesia, not oxygen. Oxygen is the stuff that makes us stronger and gets our blood pumping again. Whatever makes that happen for you, do it.

Any guilt or worries you have about having your child in the hospital may be compounded by how she reacts to being there. Kids often feel ashamed, confused and scared about being in a mental health facility. Because they are kids, they are likely to take their feelings out on the person they love the most, the person who is safest: you.

So when you receive that tenth venomous phone call, or hear yet another heart-wrenching plea to get her out of there, breathe. And logic is rarely effective at de-fanging emotion, anyway. Do you actually expect me to be happy here? Healthy, even. To get the best care possible, you will have to advocate for your child. As with any other type of hospital visit, you will find it easier to figure out what is going on if you take good notes during each meeting or after every conversation.

Be forewarned that the key determinant of when your child is released is what your insurance company will pay for.

You may or may not agree that your child is ready to come home. Usually the discharge discussion takes place several days or even a week before the actual discharge. Take a bit of time to process that. This, too, merits examination. Make sure you articulate any specific concerns to the doctor, especially if in your private conversations with your child she has indicated that she still wants to kill herself, or you suspect your son is lying in order to get out.

Some parents become upset because the hospital wants a longer stay than feels strictly necessary. Ask why they want this. If your child was suicidal or made an attempt, you will want to ask how much of his new medication constitutes an overdose. Yes… ouch. But this is better to know than not-know. Ask this several days before discharge, because you may need to buy a lockbox or safe in which to store medication. If your child has been suicidal or made an attempt, while your child is still hospitalized, do a clean sweep of your home, and especially his room.

Hopefully the doctors have told you what method of suicide your child was contemplating. This will help you prioritize what to remove or look for. Lock up high-risk items like firearms, all prescriptions including your own and over-the-counter medications like Tylenol and aspirin. Remove poisons including toxic cleaning products , sharp objects like razors and knives and large plastic bags.

You will also need to wrestle with how to make sure that for the next few weeks your child is not left alone for more than very short periods of time at home. If your child was given any kind of psychological or ed-psych testing while on the unit, make sure to get a copy of those results before leaving, too.

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