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It's at least 1/3. I might even say it's a little higher. I'm going through the same thing. My youngest son won't take his meds. He's been in jail because we were told to call the police and they would get him into a hospital, but twice they sent him to jail instead. Now he has tons of fines because we were doing what our mental health care officials told us to do! He was on probation for 2 years and he took his meds then so he wouldn't go back to jail, or pretended to take them. He does take a shot monthly which I don't think helps at all. He's supposed to be taking 2 other meds but he doesn't.
It's getting too hard living with him, and the mental resident homes around here look terrible. He's been in mental hospitals several times, but, they let them go after a certain amount of time. The last time we made him go to a homeless shelter. He was 21. He met some junkie there who gave him some meth and it really hurt him. Now he hears voices and stays up all night talking very loudly and making huge messes in the kitchen. We hate to call the police again. We should have sued them the last time, but we didn't. They tasered him while he was wet, busted his head open with their sticks, and their dog tore his leg open and he was in the ICU for weeks. All because he has a mental problem. He was about 16 when this started happening and he's 23 now.
We may just have to put him in a residential home that we're not happy with, but, I'm afraid he'll run away. They can leave anytime they want. I've looked on the internet for homes, but it seems as if all of the good ones are a long ways off (We're in Oklahoma) and very expensive. My son smokes constantly and has different compulsions that he spends his money on, then he wants us to buy his tobacco, and I've pretty much stopped. It does calm him down, but he's a chain smoker, so thats very expensive. He talks constantly. It seems like every time something in our state has their funding cut, it's always the mental health . Why they keep doing that while they go out and kill people. I'm always exhausted because his loud mouth keeps me up all night and when I do fall asleep (around 7 AM) he starts knocking on my door and I get up and he goes to sleep, but I usually can't because by that time I'm doing something.
I feel for you and everyone with this problem. I hate to wake up to tell you the truth. He's getting harder and harder to deal with. I hope you have success with someone like NAMI. I didnt because ours has been cut so much. It's just a bare bones operation.
This story is very sad.
It is not only the parents of troubled children who are having these problems; a friend of mine who is close to 70 has similar problems as the sole caretaker for her mother, who has Alzheimer's and is violent. She lives in N. Mexico, and the closest facility she could find that could take care of her mother and is still affordable is in Texas, an 800 mile round trip from her home.
Her mom is very far gone now, but my friend is still her loving daughter, so she makes that drive once a month and is still looking for a place that's closer. Just as parents don't give up on their kids, so it is with the kids who take care of their parents. It is a hard burden to bear, no matter who it is.
Largely to save money, insurance companies are most responsible for decimating the mental health care system in America by demanding such low payment scales that social workers and nurses have been trying to do the heroic work of trying to act like psychiatrists, while psychologists have been agitating for the right to prescribe medications so they can make more money and while internal medicine physicians and family physicians have too often tried to treat complex mental illnesses with medications alone, ignoring the fact that psychological factors fuel those illnesses and must be addressed.
Families with out-of-control, suicidal or aggressive children have no central place to turn to for help, and no coordinated action plan for learning about and accessing services that could provide desperately needed support.
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