Aaron Alexis: Another Ignored Cry for Mental Illness Help

I am a mom of a 16-year-old who has early onset schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder, severe symptoms and I have tried desperately to get my son into a treatment program for over 18 months, only to be turned away over and over again. I was shocked that there is a law that prevents me as his mother to make any medical decisions or receive medical information without the consent of my son who is not stable enough to even recognize that he has an illness. All parents will be shocked if they ever have to go through this and lawmakers should be held accountable for their outcomes. I believe my son could and would have at least had an opportunity of treatment early on had things been handled differently by the people of authority. But instead we have people who are not experts or do not have a background in mental health making decisions that ultimately will cost lives- lives of the individual with the illness, lives of the people they will harm in the future, an insurmountable economic and social cost to society as a whole. Why should a Sherriff be able to say "no" we don't need to take your son to a hospital for a psych evaluation, when I have a letter in hand from a psychiatrist who has been working with adolescents and psychiatric disorders for 30 years and it says "yes, your son needs to be in a hospital and would benefit from treatment". I could write forever on this but my point is , nobody really can understand the challenges and difficulty that is involved for parents trying to help their young children as severe chronic mental illness starts to progress and become worse. Like most things in society, our solution to this right now is just to wait, until some tragedy happens and then call the police out to make reports about the situation like glorified secretaries with guns. I have many service people in my family and none of them have been able to help either and are just as frustrated because they are forced to abide by laws that are harmful.

I have been treated for bipolar disporder for two years DESPITE my psychiatrist saying there was no sign of it in me i was just an addict ... he had been treating me for alcohol and drug abuse. Often the cry for help is disguised ... when I was in Amsterdam writing a blog or publication (I was a journalist) I was open about misusing sleeping tablets to comatose myself through a crisis and also about smoking a lot of pot in amsterdam. I remember thinking at the time, "surely someone in my family (a doctor, a nurse, a social worker) will query this; it is a cry for help''. They turned their backs on me, embarrassed. Functioning people can also be in danger. PAY ATTENTION, PEOPLE.

Most people want an answer that they can comprehend, and they want it now. The media gives them the simplest answer possible - usually pointing to a mental condition as the culprit. However, these situations are complex. It is really all of the conditions coming together at the right time to create the perfect storm of destruction. This occurs whether mental illness is involved or not. There are many otherwise healthy people committing acts of violence because the stage is set for it to occur. We all need to look at the big picture and think of the role we all play as members of society.