Do You Remember The Day......

......You Got The Diagnosis?

 Was it a relief?  Thank goodness! I knew I was not imagining it!

 Was it a shock? No way! Not my child!


  I remember it like it was yesterday. It was like someone had finally listened to what I was saying, and more importantly, to what my son was saying. He was having a routine physical for school but there was nothing routine about it. The doctor was running several hours behind due to an emergency. I had always schedualed his appointments for a certin time of day when I knew we would not have a long wait because he would start to melt down after a while. You say to yourself, well thats normal for any young child, but he was not a young child. He was about 11 at the time, he should have been able to sit there and entertain himself for a couple of hours, but he couldn't. By the time we finally got to see the doctor she got to see first hand what I had been trying to explain to her for months. He was agitated, he could not sit still, he couldn't concentrate long enough to answer simple questions he was being asked by the doctor, oh and don't forget the paranoia! He had been in a doctors office with sick people for hours so he was convinced he was dying of whatever else all the other kids had! At the time the bird flu was that latest disease on the news so he was FULL  of questions about that he even tried to convince her that he had it!!
 
  Well after his doctor finished the check up we were fixing to leave and I jokingly made a comment about him having ADHD and she looked at me like my head had just popped off my body and I was jumping around like a chicken. She asked us to come back in the office and starting going through his chart frantically. Thats when it happened, she looked at me strangly and said you mean no one has ever told you your son has ADHD?  What? Excuse me? ADHD No, no one has told me this before. She sat down on her little rolly stool and said WOW I just assumed since he has been in therapy for all this time they would have told you his diagnosis.

  What? His DIAGNOSIS?  Yes ma'am your son has ADHD, I assumed thats was why he was in therapy. You see my son had been in therapy for some time by this point because he was having trouble in school, had become violent, was having panic attacks, and horrable mood swings. I just figured it was due to the divorce and the abuse. This was the begining of the revolving door of therapists! (but thats a whole other discussion)

  Looking back there had always been signs "symptoms"  I just didn't realize it. It all made since, EVERYTING MADE SINCE, it was like someone had flipped a switch.

  We went home from that appointment with a new perscription and Alot  of reading to do, but with a new perspective on the whole situation.

  My sons not a brat, hes sick! WOW!

What was your diagnosis experiance? Was at a relief as in my situation?

Please leave a comment and share your experiance.....

Have You Ever.....

Been treated differently or made fun of?

Remember back to when you were in school. For some of you that was not so long ago, for others, its been a while. For me its both. I have been out of high school for 20 years, but I recently started college and all the memories come back with a vengence.

Alot has changed since I was in high school, I have changed alot since high school. 20 years ago I wouldn't dare do anything to draw attention to myself in fear of the being singled out, made fun of, talked about.

 I am who I am. This is what you get. I'm not afraid to stand up for what is right or what I believe in, even if everyone else dose not agree. I'm not afraid to speak my mind even if the someone I am speaking to is a person of "authority".
And yes, for those of you wondering, my hair is pink. I'm not afraid to stand out, to be unique.  I have learned alot about myself in the past 10 years, since my sons diagnosis.  I can be myself and its ok to be different. We should embrace our differences not hide them.

I watched him struggle at school to make friends, to fit in, to be accepted. It breaks a mothers heart to see her child struggle with anything. It broke my heart to watch him and not be able to fix it. When I look at him I see an amazing kid. He loves with all his heart, hes an outstanding musician, hes smart, hes creative, he can not tell a joke to save his life, but he tries! He loves video games and watching the SiFy channel. I have watched my child grow into an amazing young man. A young man still struggling with who he is, and dealing with mental illness.

I wish I had been as strong as he is at 18. I wish I could tell him it would get better but I can't lie to him. Hes smarter than that.


My heart breaks for him, and all the other kids that are growing up being made fun of or teased for being different.

I'll keep fighting for him and the others......for as long as it takes!

Are you fighting the same fight?

If so, don't give up!  Its a fight worth fighting .......Its a fight worth winning!

Please leave me a comment and tell me about your fight, or visit my community and start a post there.

If you have not already taken the short survey it can be found here

Will You Help Me?

My name is Denise and my son is mentally ill. I have spent the biggest part of my adult life and most of his life fighting for him. Fighting to get him the treatment he needs, fighting to get him the help at school he needs, fighting to find doctors and therapists who CARE about him and his well being and don't see him as just another patient, or even worse a paycheck. I have found that they are few and far between. My son in the past 8 years has had one great therapist before her there was a long list of therapists that just didn't make the cut.

As my children have grown up and started to move on I wondered what I would do with my life. I had always wanted to go to college but never knew what I wanted to study. I prayed about it for months and realized God had been preparing me for my career for many years. He has blessed me with my son and the ability to love, care and fight for not only my son but other children as well.

This fall I enrolled at the University Of Arkansas Fort Smith and  I am officially a full time student as a Psychology major. This is where the help comes in. I am working on a research paper about Mental Illness and Alternative Treatments . If you yourself suffer from a mental illness, or have a child with mental illness would you please consider taking the short survey? No names will be asked for, you will remain compleatly annonamous in every way. If you have any questions regarding who I am or the paper I am writing please email me or leave me a comment and I'll give you the contact information for my teacher and my school.

Please feel free to leave comments, if  you don't want them posted let me know and I won't publish them.


Adult Survey

Child Survey

Raising a Child With A mental Illness...

   Raising children is not easy in the best of curcumstances is never easy but add into the mix a diagnosis as ugly as mental illness and all bets are off. The stakes were just raised and your job just got alot harder. I know, I'm raising a child who is mentally ill.

  I knew from the begining I was going to have my hands full with this child. Although he wasn't diagnosed until much later, I knew from the time he was very young that he was going to be special.

  He was diagnosed when he was ten, and by this time it was almost a relief. ADHD*. I put off having him diagnossed until things got so bad I didn't have a choice. At that time everyone had ADD/ADHD*, that seemed to be the catch all "diagnossis" for kids that had behavior problems, or were doing poorly in school. I did not want my child, my baby, labled as a "problem child". As it turns out that was the least of my worries.

* ADD/ADHD Attention deficit desorder/ Attention Deficit Hypreactivity Disorder

* ADHD Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

  After the ADHD diagnosis I decided putting him on meds was the easy way out. We tried behavior modification at home and at school with very minimal results. When he was about 13 things really started getting out of control. On top of his usual hyperness and not sleeping he became increasingly agitated and violent. Starting arguments with me and fights with his brother that I would have to break up daily. I did not think much about the fights with his brother, boys will be boys right? Wrong. He became increasingly violent at school and at home to the point he was even swinging at me. Something had to be done and soon.He started seeing a therapist. The first in a long string of them, I think there were four or five before we found one that he "clicked with".

   He was started on Focalin (extended release) and WOW! It was like I had my baby back. The sweet, loving, caring little boy I remembered from years ago. He was able to watch a tv show without talking through the whole thing, play a game without throwing something, and the biggest shock was watching him sit in the floor of a busy emergency room reading a book. I have not been able to get this kid to sit still for more than a few minites in his whole life. Now he was sitting here reading a book.

  After a few months of being on the Focalin and continuing with his therapist I started to notice some of his old behavior starting to creap back up, so his Focalin was increased. This started the medication roller coaster. As most of you know once the ride has started you can not get off. Since this time hes been on many different meds, dealing with the many different side effects the meds bring on. Headachs, nausea, shaky hands, sweating, sleeplessness.

 Several years later he finally found a mecication that worked for him. In fact it was working so well at controlling his ADHD other symptoms started to show up. I didn't know it at the time, thinking it was his usual ADHD symptoms I schedualed an appointment with his psyciatrist thinking his meds we no longer working, boy was I wrong. Thats when the other diagnosis started. Anxioty was the first, he was started on an anti-depressant and we had another WOW moment. The difference was night and day, the mood swings that had been so prevalent were now less, his paranoia was less, but slowly more and more things were being noticed. The depression, the manic episodes, the obsessions had also started by this time as well.

  By the time he was fifteen or sixteen his official diagnosis was ADHD with OCD* tendencies, an anxioty disorder, sleep disorder, and the one every parent loves to hear Bi-Polar.

 I feel like I have spent most of my life fighting for my son. I have spent all of his life fighting for him. In the process of fighting to help him I realized that I could make a difference not only in his life but in the lives of so many others suffering with mental illness.