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.