When Your World Turns Up Side Down

This is difficult to write and I don't know how to go about doing so. I am afraid this is going to be a bit stream of consciousness.

Almost three weeks ago my youngest son reached out to me for help. He was experiencing a deep depression and was thinking about commuting suicide. I live forty-five minutes away from him and I was very afraid of what he might do before I got to him. Fortunently, I managed to convince him to him to the hospital and ask for help.

I met him in the emergency room and we sat for four hours, waiting for a nurse or doctor to bring him back into an examination. The whole time he sat, staring at the floor, alternating between crying quietly and just gazing off into space with this lost expression on his face. Nothing I could say made any impact. He nodded or mumbled something in response to my questions, but that was about it. When they finally got him into a room, it was another hour wait before a man with a clipboard came in. They talked for about thirty minutes and then he cut my son loose. He was given a pamphlets on depression, a number to call on Monday and told "Good luck" then sent home. I was horrified, angry and scared.

My youngest son wanted to die. He fantasized about cutting his own throat and hanging himself, just to make this horrible pain he felt stop. I don't know any parent who could here this and not feel their heart freeze in their chest and then break. And the people who are supposed to help him, sent him away, dismissed, with a phome number and a placating wish for "good luck." I took him back to his place, dropped him off like he asked and went home, terrified that he was going to take his own life.

The next week was a constant struggle. I was afraid to call him too much and smother him, make him feel intruded upon or like I thought he couldn't handle things without dad or mom. I was afraid to call him too little and have him think I didn't care what happened to him or didn't love him. Somehow, we made it to Thursday.

Thursday evening, I was inbthe road with my business partner, picking up a truck, when my wife gets a call. In the middle of a fight with his girlfriend, my son cracked. He started drinking, pouring beer down his throat as fast as he could, only stopping long enough to scream angrily at his girlfriend and get another bottle. Finally, she said he just stopped and started balling, choking out little moans of "I want to die, I want to die." Finally, he picked himself up and called the police and begged them to take him somewhere that would help him or he was going to kill himself.

I met up with my wife and we desperately called around to local hospitals and police precincts trying to find our son. No one knew where he was. We were desperate, panicking, terrified. Finally, we called his older brother and found him. Our youngest was being turned loose again. With another pamphlet and another parting wish of "Good luck." He had called his brother to come get him, because his girlfriend decided, while he was waiting to be seen, that she wanted to break up with him and that he was no longer allowed in the apartment. My son, who already wanted to die, was now homeless.

Our youngest son stayed with his older brother and grandmother for a few days before I got a text message from him. He was the only one awake in the house and had been for hours. He was sitting, alone, thinking about all the things he had done wrong, all the people he had let down. He couldn't stop thinking about what a shitty boyfriend he had been to his now ex girlfriend. He kept going over the list of all the jobs he had lost and kept asking himself, "Why am I so useless? Why can't I keep a job? Why am I so broken and useless?" I could see his mental state eroding with every message. I called and woke up his brothers girlfriend and asked her to go check on him and make sure he was ok. Then I texted him and asked himnifbhe wanted me to find a hospital that had an open bed so he could get some help. His response? "Why bother Dad? No one wants to help me and I am pretty sure I am too broken to be helped anyway." My heart broke. What could I Do? He is a grown man, legally an adult. I can't really force him to do anything. I called and told him that I love him and I would do anything to help him if he wanted it. He told me loved me and that he knew I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do, no one would give him a bed and the help he needed. Then he hung up.

The next two days were horrible. Every time I sent him a message, I expected there to be no response. Every time the phone rang, I expected it to be a polite, neutral and professional voice telling me that my wife and I needed to come down and identify our sons body.

When the phone rang and I heard my son's voice on the other end, crying, I braced for another round of suicidal depression. What I got was so much worse.

"Dad, she said I should just shoot myself."

"What? Who said that?" I was shocked, horrified, but it was what came next that took my legs out from under me.

"Grams. Grams said that if I can't get my life together, I might as well just go out on the front lawn and shoot myself." I was floored. This woman, my mother in law, a woman who claimed to love her grandchildren, who proudly proclaims that they are the center of her world, had told her suicidally depressed grandson to kill himself.

I begged my son not to do anything stupid. I promised him we were on the way. I grabbed my business partner, shoved the keys to the car at him and we went to get my son.

It is what happened next that makes me believe in miracles.

I called a counselor who works with the charity that we help do fund raisi g for and begged him to start making calls and find my son a bed in a hospital where he could get help. He promised to try. Not even ten minutes later he called me back with an address and told me to meet him there with my son.

We had a bed for my son, in an excellent hospital! We drove across the state to get him there, but the intake team was waiting when we walked through the door! They had already been informed of everything we had gone through up until then and I was assumed, my son would be entered into their in patient program!

It was like a gift from Heaven! I would spend the next week living on the sofa in the meeting room of ASP. Every day I went and visited my boy. He seemed more and more stable with every visit. There was some back and forth, to be sure, but he was stabilizing. Finally, his last day rolled around and the information He was dreading and craving. Prognosis.

My son has manic, paranoid, schizophrenia.

What this means isn't easy to explain. It isn't easy to understand. Basically, he has manic depression which exacerbates his schizophrenia, which in turn, makes his depression worse.

For now he is stable. The truth of the matter is, though, that this processes of having to be taken in for in patient treatment, will happen again. There is no way to know when it will happen, just that it will. Likely several times, before he admits he needs the help and then likely several more times as his meds are adjusted, his out patient treatment is refined and he learns coping skills tailored to his unique condition.

I have no idea where this leaves me .or my business or my farm. The reality is that my life is going to be chaotic until his is no longer as unstable.

My relationship with my mother in law has to change. I have always known that she is an emotionally abusive and controlling woman, but now she poses a direct threat to my son's life. I'm not sure how to handle this exactly, but I know they can't be alone togwther.

I am really not sure what else to say. Thank you for reading this far.