Paranoid Schizophrenia (My Son)

I happen to know quite a lot about this and I decided that it may not only help others reading this but me also writing it.

This Illness is not only caused by a chemical imbalance, but also a drug induced state. If this is the cause then the cure is also not guaranteed. My son developed this illness at only 20 years old.

I often ask myself why?

Disappointment perhaps having to leave the forces after a serious injury a nervous breakdown, or was it mixing with the wrong crowd and dabbling into different kinds of drugs?

I of course had no idea that this may have been going on, the first notion that it may be drugs was the change in behaviour, depression, mood swings, this was what I first became aware of.

Over a period of two years the loving Son I once new became a stranger, he became delusional, would be convinced he was able to fly or levitate, he would hear voices in the television and they would tell him he was a super hero sent to save the world. Eventually he became violent but not as himself, the person he had now become. Finally he was sectioned and from this moment on his life was in the care of the doctors and nurses in the Hospital

Treatment

Valium was given which dulled his senses, he now was a young man who did not recognise me, or his family, would not speak only a constant stare at nothing.

Thorazine was also given and Risperdal.

Over the years many different doses and drugs were tried, during this time I was a constant visitor each day hoping I would have a glimpse of the Son I once knew and although a gradual improvement took place He was never to return to the young man he once was.

His brain had been damaged and today he is lucid and able to converse but is distracted very quickly and his mentality is child like. The ability to feel emotion for others is limited and concentration also limited.

Doctors will tell you that the success rate of a complete cure is very low and those who appear to be normal will lapse and end back in their charge, as my son did. On the occasions I have visited and I try and make conversation I feel only after a short time he is ready for me to leave his interest no longer there.

He is no longer delusional not does he hear voices, this is controlled by the medication,

Any one who slips back into taking drugs again will end up relapsing and back into Hospital as he did.

I do not know if he will ever be free of the hospital right now he is back in a secure ward, The nurses and Doctors have tried so hard to make him well,

 He has almost been well enough to be discharged,

 but he slips back once he is home again with no supervision and only himself to remind him of what’s right and what’s wrong, drugs put him in the Hospital and its drugs that always takes him back.

I no longer see my son as I once did, he is now 37   he no longer seems to need me, I am always there and I let him know that I always will be, but this is the life he chose and the life he continues to live. Will he ever be free of the hospital? I do not think so.