Minor Threat

Posted by fxckfeelings on May 31, 2012

The helplessness of trying to help troubled kids often brings out the fighting spirit in those who care the most. Unfortunately, without a clear enemy from which you can rescue your child, you often fight for goals that can’t happen, target other would-be helpers, and make a bad thing worse. Regardless of how helpless you feel, your goal isn’t to save troubled children from a monster or a mental illness; it’s to find out if there’s something you can do that will actually help while avoiding direct emotional conflict. Not fighting won’t relieve your helplessness, but it will let you work towards something better.
-http://www.fxckfeelings.com/ask-for-help/

My ex-wife, who is a therapist, is spooking me out about our son, whom she says she’s treating for a variety of serious problems. He’s now 10, and he’ll tell me one day, when I’ve got visitation, that he’s having suicidal thoughts, using grown-up phrases that make me think he’s just repeating something he got out of a book or from TV. Then she’ll keep him home from school and stop visitation for a couple weeks while she does “therapy” with him, at the end of which time she’ll declare that the problem is solved. A few weeks later, he won’t show up and she tells me she’s keeping him home for treatment because he’s having “panic attacks.” My kid needs help and I can’t believe her treatment is doing any good. Meanwhile, he’s not getting help from anyone else, especially not the staff of his school, who are eager to help but never see him enough (they’re already bending over backwards to keep him from repeating this year and are trying to avoid reporting him for truancy, given the number of school days he’s missed). My goal is to get my son the help he needs.

It’s hard not to unleash your wrath when your ex-wife’s insistence on playing doctor blocks the real doctor from getting through. Your own child is in trouble, your ex’s behavior is troubling, and you’re this close to tearing her a new one.

Remember, however, that nuclear wars between protective caregivers are costly and often harm the one you most want to rescue; by fighting against your ex-wife’s treatment, you’d just be increasing her blast range.

The first thing to do then is to consider the alternatives while taking comfort in the fact that there’s a great deal you can learn about your child’s problems, and a great deal you can do to help. But it’ll only work if you take things one at a time instead of taking your wife down.

Begin by encouraging the teachers to invoke truancy laws without directly blaming your ex-wife or disparaging her intentions or even her treatment. Yes, it’s a general rule that shrinks don’t treat their own children, but you’re not required to bring that up and shouldn’t if you want to promote negotiations. All you want to allege is that truancy is bad and that you and the teachers don’t have the professional, official input you need to decide whether this treatment, and the attendant absences, are really necessary.

Similarly, teachers (or you) may threaten to report neglect if a parent fails to get appropriate help for a medical or psychiatric problem. Again, you’re not disparaging your ex’s treatment or maternal love, just insisting that a non-parent do an evaluation because you believe that’s what the rules require.

I assume you’ve tried to explain your reasoning to your ex and that her response is to control more and consult less, and that’s why the time for explaining is past. Let her know that you (and hopefully the teachers) have to do what you have to do and it’s pointless to discuss why.

Assure her that you’ll be happy to discuss ways of avoiding court intervention and control, which all require an independent evaluation and no school absences without authorization by an independent professional. If not, it’s out of your hands, the conversation is over, and the war won’t have to begin.

STATEMENT:
“It scares me to think that the person who is most probably making my son crazy is also shrinking his head, keeping him out of school, and controlling his care, but there are better ways to protect his boundaries than by fighting with his mother. His teachers and I have good strategic options for stopping her while remaining polite and respectful. In the end, we’ll find out what my son needs and make sure he gets it.”

My 16-year-old son has been suicidal for several years and no one seems able to give him the help he needs. His psychiatrist has doped him up with medications that haven’t worked. He’s been hospitalized 3 times and spent several months in residential treatment and it did nothing but give him some new friends who use drugs. My wife and I spent most of our savings on fancy schools that cater to kids like him, and he still finds a way to get kicked out. It should be obvious to his teachers, his therapists, and anyone with a brain that whatever is wrong hasn’t gotten better, but they haven’t come up with anything new. My goal is to get my son what he needs.

We all assume, if we don’t think about it, that a kid in trouble is obviously a kid in need. It follows that, if he isn’t getting better, then someone must be doing something wrong and something necessary hasn’t been supplied. This flash assumption then triggers the inner crusader (see above), who tries to rescue the child from the inadequacies of his current caregivers and, in doing so, probably makes him worse.

The alternative to this assumption, sadly, is to recognize that we don’t know how to rescue certain kids; our treatments are just not that powerful. That’s not to say that kids don’t get better anyway, since they change as they grow, and some treatments that don’t help now will be more effective later. Meanwhile, however, you either learn to accept the helplessness of having nothing new to offer (for the time being) or you flail around, disrupting and demoralizing your current care team while looking for a cure that doesn’t exist.

Of course, you should assure yourself that all treatments have been tried and done properly by educating yourself and getting independent consultations. Discipline yourself, however, to look for evidence of a treatment’s effectiveness, rather than reacting to emotional testimonials from advocates, victims, and would be saviors. No, you shouldn’t accept authority, but rather become an authority who can use the scientific method to protect himself and his son from false hopes.

Given the limitations in our knowledge, it’s not hard to learn enough about your son’s condition and treatment to understand all the available options and the reasons professionals choose one over the other. Learning the material isn’t hard; accepting the fact that we know so little and that treatments are so often ineffective is much harder.

Once you’re well informed about risks and benefits, you’re ready to lead the treatment team instead of fighting it. Instead of demoralizing your son and his helpers by declaring treatment a total failure, give credit for good efforts and acknowledge what has been learned. Unless you really think your current team is incompetent, you’ll help your son by giving them encouragement, sharing observations about his responses to treatment, and encouraging them to keep trying and keep looking for something better. It’s not the system that’s failed you, just the universe.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t stand to see my son become a druggie juvie, but I’ve learned a lot about the mental health system in the last several years and I can tell whether or not he’s getting good care. If he is, I will try to help his therapists remember that their work is worthwhile, so that they won’t get down on themselves and quit trying to help him.”