“Can’t you just get him to take his medication?” Sylvia pleaded with her new Carson Center therapist. Her son, Antoine, had been receiving services at one of the community based programs of the Carson Center for five years.
These last three years had been the best of his adult life, until this past month, when he suddenly stopped taking his medication and showing up to services.
“Antoine on medication is the person we all know and love. He is how he wants to be. He told me this. His real self. I don’t know what to do with him like this. He’s not hurting himself, I know. Or anybody else. But he’s ruining everything he built. He quit his job after making sure they heard all about his theories. He gets wild about the drones and the government spying on us. And his obsessions. Oh, I thought we’d never see him counting license plates again. He looks for messages in them. When he sees a vanity plate with words on it—forget it. That just reinforces the whole fantasy! He’s already gone to the hospital once, and they let him out and he still won’t go back on the medications. He says he got better!”
“Sylvia, why do you think Antoine feels that way—that he truly got better and would honestly not need his medication and services anymore?”
After a pause, she smiled and shook her head. “…Because it was working. He was feeling free. He told me he could remember the things he had been thinking were real, like the time he thought there was a whole party on top of the roof of the house. He said that on his medication he could recall exactly what he thought was happening when he wasn’t on it, the sounds of the music, the knives and forks clanking together. But he could now see that it wasn’t real. I didn’t know he’d be able to see his own thoughts that way, you know, from the past. He felt like he could see why people reacted to him like that. That he was all mixed up and kind of scary to us.
And he said he felt clear. Like he could just do the things he wanted to do. He fit in. He used to talk about that. What it meant to be in the break room at work. To be the guy who could fix the computer problems everyone has. Watching people grumble and complain about it being Monday and they had to go to work. He said he would never understand people who took their lives so much for granted that they’d complain about having a job to go to on a Monday. He looked forward to it all weekend. Fitting in, being part of a team.
But now. Now he says he’d been brainwashed by the capitalist system to fit into a mold that serves the corporations or something. He says the medications took away his freedom. He looks terrible. He won’t answer his phone today and I’m not sure where he is. Can you find him? Can you make him better?”
“His Carson team will be here for Antoine when he’s ready,” said the therapist. “They’ll be there at the hospital if he needs them, but if Antoine isn’t a danger to himself or others—“
“—I know. You can’t make him do anything. Does this, does it happen a lot?”
“It happens, yes. Antoine is learning what he needs in his recovery, what he can trust, what he’s in charge of, what happens. His team will support Antoine as safely and respectfully as they can through that process. My role can be to be here for you. Let’s see what we can do about supporting you through this.”
By JAC Patrissi
