Season 3 Episode 76: Parents Hope in the Face of Mental Health and Addiction

Transcript

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Frustration.

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Isolation.

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Very isolated, very frightened that we were going to lose Patrick.

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He went to outpatient programs.

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He went to inpatient programs.

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He was in every psych hospital in the Denver area, all the way down to Colorado Springs.

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They'd keep him for 30 days.

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When that 30-day mark hit, they would discharge him.

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One time they never even called us and we were his guardians.

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They put him on a bus.

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He ended up somewhere up in Boulder, had everything stolen.

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It's just one thing after another.

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Without telling us after another without telling us.

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Hello everyone, Welcome to Bite your Tongue, the podcast.

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I'm Denise and I'm Kirsten and we hope you will join us as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children.

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Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you Get ready to dive deep and learn, to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when, to bite our tongues.

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So let's get started.

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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Bite your Tongue the podcast, denise, I have to say that I'm a little apprehensive about today's episode and also incredibly impressed with the resiliency of our guests and excited for our listeners to hear their heartbreaking but hopeful story.

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It's a story that we often hear about, not necessarily to this degree.

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You had read about this particular family in our local newspaper and you were very much affected by it, so I think our listeners are going to love what they have to say and also be sort of taken aback at the same time.

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I absolutely agree.

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I'm a little apprehensive too, and I should let listeners know it's going to be a little different type of episode.

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We're not talking to experts who are giving us advice.

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We're talking to a family who has endured a long journey with their adult son.

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We're talking about substance abuse and drug abuse, and every day we're reading new stories about overdoses and young adults dying from this kind of thing.

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I guess the other thing I just want to add is when I read these stories and hear them, I step back for a minute and always say there but for the grace of God, go.

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I and I'm hoping, as listeners listen to this story, they too will have empathy for what this family has gone through.

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Kirsten and I were lucky to meet with them before we did this episode, and they told us stories about their families disowning them, friends moving away, lots of things like that.

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So I encourage all of our listeners to listen with their heart to this amazing story.

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Well, I also think to add to that a little bit is I think sometimes we think that this is the extreme and unfortunately I don't know how extreme it still is anymore.

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To put some statistics to that, a new UCLA research study found that the rate of overdose deaths among US teenagers nearly doubled in 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, and it rose another 20% in the first half of 2021 compared with the 10 years prior to the pandemic.

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This is something that a lot of people, if it hasn't happened directly in your family, everybody knows somebody.

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I think today's episode is going to be valuable for a lot of reasons.

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You're absolutely right, Kirsten.

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I hope all of you who are listening will listen through this entire episode.

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At the end, these guests give the most amazing takeaways.

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Please stay and listen, you won't regret it.

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Let's get started.

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I want to warmly welcome Charles and Diane Holton started.

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I want to warmly welcome Charles and Diane Holton.

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You need to feel so proud that you're sharing Patrick's story, not only so others can learn about your journey, but so that you can help other families and also maybe make some noise that will change some of the systems that are in place that aren't helping the families that really need it.

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Let's start with you telling the listeners a little bit about who Patrick was before he started the addiction.

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Well, as a child, patrick was just very fun, very kind, very sensitive, extremely sensitive, I should say.

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He loved being outdoors.

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He was very athletic, he played soccer, he played hockey, he snowboarded, and then, as he got older, he became interested in parkour, which is also called free running.

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If you've ever watched this show, ninja Warriors, that's the type of exercise Pat liked to do.

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So he started that when he was about 13.

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And he just developed such a love for it and he would come home from school every day, take his dog, take off for four or five hours running, climbing, climbing trees, jumping, and it just became the most important thing in his life.

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It was everything to him.

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As time went on, he went through high school, had a big group of friends that did parkour with, and he did a lot of videoing and editing all the videos that they made.

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And then, a couple months actually about four months after he graduated from high school, he had just a freak accident in a gymnasium where he did a flip off some high bars and he landed where two mats had come apart and he ended up breaking the joint in his left leg and ankle.

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So it's not actually an ankle fracture, it's actually the joint which is called the talus, and he broke it into six pieces.

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Initially they told us that it was not broken, it was just a sprain, and Patrick was so happy and we went home and then the hospital called and told us to get right back there.

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We went back the next morning at six o'clock and they did an MRI and after that we were walking to our car.

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Pat was on crutches and they ran out to our car and got us and said he needs to get back in here right now and go up to the orthopedic floor, which we did.

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When we got up there we found out that he had a very, very severe break in that talus and that he had a very high risk of losing that foot and the blood flow to the foot.

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He ended up having a major surgery that was several hours I want to say eight hours a lot of screws placed in that ankle and in his lower leg.

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We had to take him back for that first year several times so they could do Doppler studies to make sure he had good blood flow to his foot, because there was a large chance that he could lose his foot.

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That's where our story kind of begins.

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During that time, he had obviously been prescribed a number of things.

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Do you believe that?

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That's kind of that?

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That was the catalyst?

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Was the injury the catalyst?

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Where do you think things started to really go?

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wrong.

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Actually, you know, he was prescribed a lot of pain medication that he was supposed to because that surgery was very, very, very painful.

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He ended up staying an extra day in the hospital just because his pain control was so bad.

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He took pain medication and then after a while he didn't want to take it anymore and he had me flush it down the toilet.

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So I don't think those medications had anything to do with him starting you said to us when we met that some of it was he realized after this surgery, because every time I've told this story, people say exactly what Kirsten said oh, he got addicted to oxycodone.

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And this isn't Patrick's story.

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What you said to me and I want to make sure I'm right is that when he realized he would never be able to do parkour again, he became very depressed.

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He was looking for something to make him feel better, and all of us have heard of oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl.

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But why don't you tell us what he found?

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Because I was shocked at what he started with.

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And I also want to clarify, before you answer that question, that you're a nurse.

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You both are in the medical profession.

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They're both nurses, yeah, right, and so you have some insight as well.

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You're not newbies to all of these drugs and all of the things that possibly you're seeing, and I think it's important for our listeners to understand that.

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Yeah, absolutely, and he went through a period where we tried sports medicine doctors with the massage therapy, acupuncture pain, specialized pain clinics that didn't use narcotics and that because he really didn't want to take those, because he was like this ultra athlete who you know, none of his friends, this young group of guys and girls, they didn't take drugs.

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They were highly trained athletes.

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I think as time went on and he realized that you know it wasn't going to really get better, where he could participate or at a certain level, you know he needed to do something else.

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I think that's where he started doing searches on the internet and ends up experimenting with dextromethorphan, robitussin.

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People always say, wow, I never heard of that.

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It's not a new problem.

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It's been around for a long time.

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Back in the 60s and 70s.

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I mean football teams would do a robo-tripping party and that, but we don't talk about it, we don't know about it.

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And Robitussin, dextromethorphan, it's actually classified as a disassociative drug.

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What kid who had their life crushed wouldn't want to disassociate from that because he was not getting any relief any other way through all the other therapies?

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It has a psychoactive effects, disassociative effects, and it has.

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It has like different levels of effects with the dose increasing in that from euphoria to extreme euphoria.

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Things like that where they don't even feel.

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They feel like they're floating in space and that, or in the air or crawling through a wormhole, things like that it can be very hallucinogenic.

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It's a disassociative, which I think that's what Patrick liked, because it just took everything away for him.

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Any young person can walk into Walgreens and buy this.

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Is that right?

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Yes, they walk into Walgreens, they take the bottle, they stuff it in their shirt, they go to the bathroom inside of Walgreens and they chug it, and then they're set.

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I would like to expand just a little bit more on the Robitessin.

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So prior to us discovering that Patrick was using Robitessin, we noticed that he quit eating and he became very isolated from our family.

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He wouldn't come to dinner and have dinner with us, he quit talking with us and he always had sunglasses on.

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I suspected that he was doing something, but he never left the house.

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All of his friends had gone off to college so at that point he really didn't have any friends.

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He didn't have any money.

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He wouldn't even come in the same room with us or have anything to do with us, which was very unusual because he was such an outgoing, friendly person and we thought it was probably because he was depressed.

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Once we discovered he was doing Robitussin and we searched the house for it, we found it down inside the couch, underneath the couch, we found it buried all over the backyard.

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We found it in window wells.

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We found it in the tank of our toilets.

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We found it in the rafters in our basement.

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Even years after he was gone, we were still finding bottles of that.

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So when Patrick used Robitessin I think the normal dose is one to two teaspoons Patrick drank three full bottles at a time Now the ingredient is dextromethorathan, that is, it's DXM.

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That's the ingredient that causes the hallucinations and the euphoric feeling.

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But some of those medications also contain Tylenol, which is very important, I think, for parents to know, because if they drank two or three bottles of Robitussin with Tylenol in it they would go into liver failure and most likely die.

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Patrick was very careful about picking the ones that he used.

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He would look for the ingredients in it, but I think there are children out there that don't know about the Tylenol in it.

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I also wanted to say Robitussin.

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In all the studies they've done it causes encapsulated lesions in the brain of rats.

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Now they haven't done that with humans yet, but in all the reading that I've done, robitussin can.

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If you use it in the amount that it makes you hallucinate, it can actually send you into a permanent psychosis and you can end up with chronic schizophrenia from it.

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So I really believe that this drug is very dangerous and I think now they have put it behind the counter Some of it not all of it but that was my mission was to get it behind the counter.

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So I did a lot of petitions over the years to have it put behind the counter and wrote the drug companies but I really never heard back from anyone.

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Patrick had over 30 admissions from Robitussin use into hospital admissions and then coupled with his mental health admissions he had probably over 70 hospital admissions.

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But I really coupled with his mental health admissions he had probably over 70 hospital admissions.

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But I really believe the Robitussin was the biggest thing that caused all of his problems and led to where he is now.

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I remember when I talked to you I'd love you to tell the story and I don't know which one of you it was went around to all the Walgreens in the neighborhoods with signs and telling every Walgreens pharmacist watch for kids stealing this.

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Put this behind.

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And everyone sort of looked at you like you were they did but I just did about a 10 mile radius.

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in our home I took a picture of Patrick and I wrote that he was stealing Robitussin from all the stores in our neighborhood.

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I just left that with all the pharmacies.

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I actually had the manager at Safeway called me back and they did have him on camera stealing it.

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They did and they actually caught him once and they tackled him in the parking lot, which we were not aware of until I found a ticket that he had received from the police.

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But yeah, he would just get an empty grocery bag and just fill it with Robitussin and walk right out the door.

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I have mentioned this again to so many people since I met you.

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Not one person has heard of it.

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When you go online, you can read so much about robotripping To believe that your young adult child can walk into a Walgreens and have a drug that took him down this path.

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So let's go down this path.

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Now, when do you realize that he's not himself?

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Patrick's birthday is December 27th and my birthday is New Year's Day.

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So on December 27th we were celebrating his 21st birthday and I just noticed something wrong with him.

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We were upstairs and I looked at him and his pupils were about the size of the colored part of his eye.

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That's how we always knew he was on Robitussin is.

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He got a completely different look to him.

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He almost looked I hate to say it, but almost demonized, because his eyes just looked pure black.

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I looked at him and I said why are your eyes so dilated?

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I called Charles to come upstairs and look at his eyes with me.

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He didn't say anything.

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But so then, three days later that was on my birthday, new Year's Day he overdosed that morning and he had taken 80 triple C capsules.

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What he was throwing up and overdosing on is a guifenicin.

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The coating on the capsule that's what they overdose on.

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The DXM or the dextromethorathin makes you hallucinate and stuff and it's extremely addictive.

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That was the very first time he overdosed was on New Year's Day in 2012.

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Just turned 21.

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I always describe it as when you looked at him and his eyes were so blown and dilated, it's like the lights are on but nobody's home, because he just wasn't there.

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What was your next step?

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So when he overdosed, did you take him to the hospital?

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Immediately, charles threw him in the car and took off with him, and I was getting my clothes on and I followed behind him in the car, because at that point we didn't know anything about DXM or what it did.

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We got him to the hospital and his heart rate was very, very high.

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His blood pressure was high.

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All they did was monitor him throughout the day and then they discharged him with instructions about substance abuse.

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After that he overdosed almost weekly, almost weekly after that.

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Well, in part of the hospital visit, they do test for drugs, right, they do a tox screen, but it doesn't show up as dextromethorphan, it shows up as PCP or an opiate and that.

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So then you're sent down a different pathway, thinking, well, we have to get a different problem.

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It's really a false positive, is what it is, but that's what you're left with.

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Do you feel like the hospitals don't even know what they're doing when these kids come in?

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And I guess I should say your journey is so long, it's 15 years.

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These are emergency room doctors, they're emergency room nurses and that, and they can't.

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They don't even have a clue about it, they don't even know it was.

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And when it comes back as PCP or whatever an opiate well, that's the path they go down, but it's really not the true thing.

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At this point you had hope.

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Okay, he's addicted to something right now, but we're going to take care of it.

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We're going to get him the best help.

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15 years later, I want to let the listeners know Patrick is alive.

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You'll hear a little bit more about what's happened, but when we met with Diane and Charles Diane, I've never seen anything like this.

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The most dedicated, loving parent had probably a 15-page document of every doctor, every session, every drug prescribed and continuing to try to trust people.

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I know we can't go through all 15 pages, but I'd love you to just talk about a few of the highlights when you would go to someone and they tell you to do this and then that would happen.

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Just give us things.

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People will learn from some of the ropes and hoops you jump through that you think people need to know Immediately right after Patrick's injury he had talked about jumping off a building downtown and what he said to me is he said Mom, he said I found a sport and something that I love so much.

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I am so blessed to have found that there's people in this world that never find that and if I can't do that, I don't want to be here anymore.

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I don't want to be here anymore if I can't do what I love.

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He truly meant it.

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From that day on he just has gone downhill.

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Immediately I was thinking he was suicidal.

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I took him right away to a specialist at University Hospital that he I'm so sorry he diagnosed him with a major depressive disorder and sent us to another doctor because that doctor was out of network.

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So we went to another one in network.

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Basically, denise, what happened is every psychiatrist we had which we saw, everyone in network with Sidna they ended up firing Patrick.

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They would take him on as a patient and then Patrick would be non-compliant and he would be using Robitussin in conjunction with psych meds, and so the psychiatrist would say he's a liability to me, don't, don't bring him back.

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I actually had one doctor that I took Patrick to see.

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He had seen him several times and we went to our visit and he opened his door and he said your son has called me I don't know how many times this weekend.

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And I was at work all weekend because I did 12 hour shifts and Charles, I think, was at work but we didn't know Patrick had called him but he'd been calling him.

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So when I took him to his appointment he actually threw the prescription in my face and he said do not ever bring your son back here.

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He has called my office over and over this weekend.

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And I said can you refer me to somebody else?

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And he said your son is going to die.

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And he slammed the door in my face.

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That's one incident.

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And then in one of the brain injury homes he had been there for a year and he had a very serious injury to his leg again a second time in the brain injury home.

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He ended up using Robitussin and alcohol.

00:21:20.922 --> 00:21:28.682
In that brain injury home the owner of that home called me and said that they were kicking him out.

00:21:28.682 --> 00:21:35.244
She said we're going to take him to a shelter over off of Colfax, which they did.

00:21:35.244 --> 00:21:40.713
But she said my advice to you is let him go and let nature take its course.

00:21:40.713 --> 00:21:43.086
And that's coming from a health professional.

00:21:43.086 --> 00:21:43.628
Let nature take its course.

00:21:43.628 --> 00:21:44.692
And that's coming from a health professional.

00:21:44.692 --> 00:21:45.675
Let NAKESTRE take its course.

00:21:45.675 --> 00:21:49.792
So they dropped him off, down or over on Colfax at 830 at night.

00:21:49.792 --> 00:21:51.397
No shelters are open.

00:21:51.397 --> 00:21:54.124
They did not put a referral in for him or anything.

00:21:54.124 --> 00:22:00.643
So here he is brain injury, mental illness, down on Colfax at 830, no place to go.

00:22:00.643 --> 00:22:03.769
And then those are just a couple of examples.

00:22:04.750 --> 00:22:06.653
What were you feeling at this point?

00:22:06.653 --> 00:22:10.811
I mean, you were feeling shut out by the people that were supposed to help you the most right.

00:22:11.640 --> 00:22:13.262
Yes, frustration.

00:22:14.183 --> 00:22:14.925
Isolation.

00:22:15.385 --> 00:22:20.375
Very isolated very frightened that we were going to lose Patrick.

00:22:20.375 --> 00:22:23.546
He went to outpatient programs.

00:22:23.546 --> 00:22:25.308
He went to inpatient programs.

00:22:25.308 --> 00:22:33.221
He was in every psych hospital in the Denver area all the way down to Colorado Springs, where they'd keep him for 30 days.

00:22:33.221 --> 00:22:37.451
When that 30-day mark hit, they would discharge him One time.

00:22:37.451 --> 00:22:37.852
They just.

00:22:37.852 --> 00:22:40.047
They never even called us and we were his guardians.

00:22:40.047 --> 00:22:41.090
They put him on a bus.

00:22:41.090 --> 00:22:44.825
He ended up somewhere up in Boulder, had everything stolen.

00:22:44.825 --> 00:22:48.505
It's just one thing after another.

00:22:48.625 --> 00:22:49.547
Without telling us.

00:22:50.368 --> 00:23:02.071
That's the other thing I really want you to talk about, because when I hear these situations and I'm talking to friends and say, well, get guardianship, then at least they can't just dismiss them or they have to call you.

00:23:02.071 --> 00:23:04.748
You're in charge of their medical world.

00:23:04.748 --> 00:23:08.911
Tell us about hiring the lawyer, getting guardianship and how that worked.

00:23:09.854 --> 00:23:10.797
It's almost a joke.

00:23:10.797 --> 00:23:13.385
We went through that with Arapahoe County.

00:23:13.385 --> 00:23:14.630
We had the piece of paper.

00:23:14.630 --> 00:23:18.403
It's a one sheet piece of paper a couple of paragraphs on it.

00:23:18.403 --> 00:23:23.481
It explains our rights, what we can do for Patrick and what we can't do for Patrick.

00:23:23.481 --> 00:23:34.885
We can't admit him to the hospital but we can take him there and that it's very limited because of the lack of knowledge of administrators of hospital staff.

00:23:34.885 --> 00:23:37.471
We had a nursing supervisor.

00:23:37.471 --> 00:23:39.820
They had discharged our son to well.

00:23:39.820 --> 00:23:47.654
It ended up to be a detox center and we said we need to know where he's at so we can contact him and be advocates for him.

00:23:47.654 --> 00:23:53.807
And she says I'm not reading that paper, I don't care about that paper, it means absolutely nothing.

00:23:54.299 --> 00:23:59.049
It's like oh, my God, she actually threw that paper back at me.

00:23:59.049 --> 00:24:19.309
She honestly did, because we got guardianship pretty much immediately when all of this started and actually the guardianship came out of a lawsuit that Patrick was in a mental health facility here in the Denver area and it ended up being a class action lawsuit.

00:24:19.309 --> 00:24:23.892
There were 30 kids in the lawsuit that had all been abused in this place.

00:24:23.892 --> 00:24:28.566
A lawsuit came out of that, so each child was awarded some.

00:24:28.566 --> 00:24:33.103
It's a small chunk of money not very much, because there were so many families in the lawsuit.

00:24:33.103 --> 00:24:37.413
Our lawyer said you need to become Patrick's guardian and conservator.

00:24:37.413 --> 00:24:42.211
We became his guardians and we had the most amazing lawyer.

00:24:42.211 --> 00:24:43.313
He's still our lawyer.

00:24:43.313 --> 00:24:52.117
I'm not sure if he would want me to say his name, but if I just could plug him I don't think I would be here without him.

00:24:52.117 --> 00:24:57.869
I could call him day or night Without that law firm, him and his secretary.

00:24:57.869 --> 00:24:59.472
They were amazing.

00:24:59.472 --> 00:25:03.102
They got us through a lot of really bad times.

00:25:03.102 --> 00:25:05.267
They're almost like family to us now.

00:25:05.595 --> 00:25:08.555
If you find out, if you can mention them, we're happy to put it in the episode notes.

00:25:08.555 --> 00:25:10.519
Okay, I will do that.

00:25:10.819 --> 00:25:14.667
So, after the guardianship problems, a lot of people don't acknowledge it.

00:25:14.667 --> 00:25:22.618
You say we're his legal guardians and they say he's a 25 year old man, he does not need a guardian, even the police.

00:25:22.618 --> 00:25:25.510
The police would not even look at the form I had.

00:25:25.510 --> 00:25:32.749
So I got to the point where my lawyer said Diane, if that happens, here's my cell number, call me immediately.

00:25:32.749 --> 00:25:38.877
I will talk to them and tell them what that paperwork means, because it's actually like Patrick is a five-year-old.

00:25:38.877 --> 00:25:44.558
That's basically what those papers say and that we are allowed to have any information.

00:25:44.558 --> 00:25:50.546
He'd be there in a hospital, we'd go back to see him and he was gone, and then they wouldn't tell us where they sent him.

00:25:50.546 --> 00:25:57.121
We'd bring out our papers, and that's the one time that the house supervisor threw my papers right in my face.

00:25:57.280 --> 00:25:59.386
That is one of the stories In California.

00:25:59.386 --> 00:26:02.897
That's when he injured himself and got a head injury.

00:26:02.897 --> 00:26:06.741
We faxed the papers to him and that and they wouldn't tell us anything.

00:26:06.741 --> 00:26:08.544
Here's my son in an ICU.

00:26:08.544 --> 00:26:18.095
With a brain injury, with a brain injury, you know, sodium depleted, all that and nobody will tell us if he's alive, dead or where he's going.

00:26:18.095 --> 00:26:25.108
It's like, okay, I have the documentation, but you just have to find a different way.

00:26:25.955 --> 00:26:29.454
Diane, at that point you then called the social worker at the hospital right.

00:26:29.634 --> 00:26:32.521
I did call the social worker when he was out in California.

00:26:32.521 --> 00:26:36.156
I waited days and days and days for her to call me back.

00:26:36.156 --> 00:26:40.455
And she called me back at work and I told her where I was and where my son was.

00:26:40.455 --> 00:26:43.943
All she said to me was once a mother, always a mother.

00:26:43.943 --> 00:26:45.247
And then she hung up on me.

00:26:45.247 --> 00:26:47.877
All she said to me was once a mother, always a mother.

00:26:47.877 --> 00:26:50.965
And then she hung up on me, and that was after waiting days and days to find out what was going on with him.

00:26:50.965 --> 00:26:52.028
I just you know what.

00:26:52.028 --> 00:26:52.797
And I was at work.

00:26:52.797 --> 00:26:58.016
I just sat in a chair and I started to cry and I think all my friends thought Patrick had died.

00:26:58.016 --> 00:27:02.943
But I was so upset because I thought this woman just hung up on me.

00:27:02.943 --> 00:27:07.938
I had been waiting a week to hear from somebody and then she hung up on me.

00:27:09.840 --> 00:27:20.682
I am blown away with the many, many failures of this system from beginning to end the hospitals, the mental health facilities, the court system and every other possible resource.

00:27:20.682 --> 00:27:26.742
And then you've got this added piece of the competency restoration treatment system.

00:27:26.742 --> 00:27:32.473
Can you explain a little bit of that to our listeners, because that was something I actually did not know anything about?

00:27:32.473 --> 00:27:42.349
But the article talks a lot about the delays and the challenges of actually providing a timely inpatient competency restoration treatment.

00:27:42.349 --> 00:27:47.487
How did those delays and failures affect his well-being?

00:27:48.454 --> 00:27:51.300
The first time that Patrick was arrested.

00:27:51.300 --> 00:28:03.337
He ended up being in the Arapahoe County Jail for two years and we tried and tried to get to him during that time and even as guardians we could not.

00:28:03.337 --> 00:28:07.127
I mean, once they're in jail it's like your hands are tied.

00:28:07.127 --> 00:28:16.170
You don't have any way except going through a public defender which is very hard to get a hold of, a public defender or the district attorney.

00:28:16.170 --> 00:28:31.750
Pretty much spent most of my days and nights on the computer playing with email addresses to find the right email addresses to get to the top of the person of Arapahoe County.

00:28:32.432 --> 00:28:39.407
And then I actually was connected with a lieutenant at one point and I said I'm very, very worried about my son.

00:28:39.407 --> 00:28:40.897
I haven't heard from him.

00:28:40.897 --> 00:28:42.362
He calls us all the time.

00:28:42.362 --> 00:28:44.027
I haven't heard from him in months.

00:28:44.027 --> 00:28:45.566
And then he called me back and he said Patrick is just fine, he's us all the time.

00:28:45.566 --> 00:28:45.775
I haven't heard from him in months.

00:28:45.775 --> 00:28:51.050
And then he called me back and he said Patrick is just fine, he's out in the general population walking around.

00:28:51.050 --> 00:28:51.655
He was fine.

00:28:51.655 --> 00:29:03.169
He was happy when come to find out he had been locked up in isolation for eight months and he was in isolation at that point, so that Wait, locked up in the jail in isolation.

00:29:04.435 --> 00:29:06.654
Let me ask you something, because maybe this I don't understand.

00:29:06.654 --> 00:29:11.586
I watch TV and it seems like you can go into the jail and do visitation.

00:29:11.586 --> 00:29:14.978
What's the difference in his situation and that COVID?

00:29:15.038 --> 00:29:16.261
did a lot, oh, okay.

00:29:16.694 --> 00:29:23.288
It had not happened at that point yet, actually, because that was back in 2014, 15, 16.

00:29:23.288 --> 00:29:31.695
So he was always in suicide pods or something like that, so he was not allowed visitors.

00:29:31.695 --> 00:29:37.107
He could call us, but that's when we got worried, because the phone calls just quit.

00:29:37.107 --> 00:29:41.684
They just quit one day and then we knew that he was in trouble.

00:29:41.684 --> 00:29:44.919
Eight months later they transferred him down to the state hospital.

00:29:44.919 --> 00:29:48.404
It took us almost a year to have a conversation with him.

00:29:48.404 --> 00:30:03.661
He was completely checked out mentally, I think, from being isolated for eight months, but it took so long to get him back and bombarded with psychiatric meds which we could never figure out what they had put him on or whatever.

00:30:03.701 --> 00:30:12.959
They figured out that he had actually seizures from these drugs where he would just start spitting and doing like tardive dyskinesia, kind of things like that.

00:30:12.959 --> 00:30:21.123
And then finally he got to another unit where a nurse practitioner took him off of basically almost everything, and that's when he improved.

00:30:21.123 --> 00:30:29.542
And that's when he improved and that's when we finally got a chance to go down to Pueblo and visit him face to face.

00:30:29.542 --> 00:30:32.509
But it was a year of nothing.

00:30:33.496 --> 00:30:39.859
I want to talk about these drugs because there was another time when I was looking at your document, you'd been to all these.

00:30:39.859 --> 00:30:42.086
Everyone was changing take this, take this, take this.

00:30:42.086 --> 00:30:43.718
No, he has this, no, he has that.

00:30:43.718 --> 00:30:46.343
First I want to talk about how do you know who to believe?

00:30:46.343 --> 00:30:59.807
And second, wasn't there a time that a doctor said to you he needs to be off everything and you took like a month off work because he had to go through withdrawal of each of these drugs because I think they wanted to take a brain scan, right?

00:31:07.476 --> 00:31:10.967
Well, yes, he was on very, very many medications and, if I can say, there's a book.

00:31:10.967 --> 00:31:28.222
It's called DALS, which is spelled S-T-A-H-A-L-S Essential, s-t-a-h-l-s Okay, essential Psychopharmacology, but it's a prescriber's manual and it has every single psych med in here At one point right now I don't have any tabs.

00:31:28.222 --> 00:31:44.624
One point this entire book was tabs everywhere because every time they put them on a med I'd read about it, I'd read about the side effects just to make sure it could go with the other medications, because I worried so much and these medications are not benign.

00:31:44.624 --> 00:31:48.657
The side effects are terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.

00:31:48.657 --> 00:31:49.760
That's all I can say.

00:31:49.760 --> 00:31:51.686
I know people do need them.

00:31:51.686 --> 00:31:54.038
But the amount of medication.

00:31:54.118 --> 00:32:00.258
At one point I did take a month off work because they wanted to do a brain study on Patrick.

00:32:00.258 --> 00:32:01.700
Which they?

00:32:01.700 --> 00:32:02.842
This is what they told us.

00:32:02.842 --> 00:32:05.586
I think the brain study was $7,000.

00:32:05.586 --> 00:32:06.628
Which they?

00:32:06.628 --> 00:32:08.151
This is what they told us.

00:32:08.151 --> 00:32:09.753
I think the brain study was $7,000.

00:32:09.753 --> 00:32:15.057
What they said what we'll do is get him off every medication.

00:32:15.057 --> 00:32:15.799
There's no meds in his system.

00:32:15.799 --> 00:32:21.617
We'll hook him up to this machine and it will watch his brain waves and then help us fine tune the correct medication to help him.

00:32:21.617 --> 00:32:24.182
It was a neuro place.

00:32:24.182 --> 00:32:26.066
That that's what their specialty was.

00:32:26.066 --> 00:32:29.979
But so they said he just had depression.

00:32:29.979 --> 00:32:33.907
That's all they said is the brain scan looked like he had depression.

00:32:33.907 --> 00:32:39.372
After that we started him on an outpatient program which he was fired from that.

00:32:39.372 --> 00:32:50.461
He didn't last long there, just because he just he has no motivation whatsoever and I feel like back when he told me he didn't want to live anymore, he couldn't run.

00:32:50.461 --> 00:32:52.547
He's been like this ever since.

00:32:52.547 --> 00:32:54.900
There's not anything that motivates him.

00:32:54.960 --> 00:33:00.438
Well, some of it comes from the dextromethorphan side effects of that.

00:33:00.438 --> 00:33:06.249
That can even lead to schizophrenia and bipolar disorders and other brain things.

00:33:06.249 --> 00:33:08.662
There's a term anosognosia.

00:33:08.662 --> 00:33:17.203
It just basically means they have no insight into their own disease and they don't realize that quote unquote they're sick or something's wrong.

00:33:17.203 --> 00:33:18.125
They don't need help.

00:33:18.125 --> 00:33:23.287
It's a symptom of all these disorders and the traumatic brain injuries too.

00:33:23.287 --> 00:33:25.152
I mean it's a brain thing, right, it's a symptom, it's not denial.

00:33:25.152 --> 00:33:25.490
And people don brain injuries too.

00:33:25.490 --> 00:33:27.840
I mean it's a brain thing, right, it's a symptom, it's not denial.

00:33:27.840 --> 00:33:36.900
And people don't recognize that A lot of times that part of the brain injury and the damage that the drugs do to the brain it just gets missed.

00:33:36.900 --> 00:33:42.364
And then they say, well, they're not motivated, well, it's part of the symptom of the diseases.

00:33:43.494 --> 00:33:49.482
Every time you went to a new doctor and they gave you a new thought, or, like when you did the brain scan, they said he's depressed.

00:33:49.482 --> 00:33:50.498
Did you have hopes?

00:33:50.498 --> 00:33:51.181
This is it.

00:33:51.181 --> 00:33:51.843
This is it.

00:33:52.997 --> 00:33:58.117
Every time, especially the place that he was abused at, because-.

00:33:58.660 --> 00:33:59.523
It was our last straw.

00:33:59.523 --> 00:34:00.901
It was our last straw.

00:34:01.015 --> 00:34:08.905
But if you read about their program on the website, which was pages of nothing but how wonderful this place was.

00:34:08.905 --> 00:34:24.547
It was a hard program, but if you and your family because we all had to go to that program if you stuck with it, your child would be well, that was the worst, devastating program in our lives.

00:34:24.547 --> 00:34:26.282
Misleading deceptive.

00:34:27.106 --> 00:34:31.079
The number of kids that killed themselves that were in that program.

00:34:31.079 --> 00:34:42.802
When they came out they took Patrick he was 20, but I think they usually took kids up to 18, but they went ahead and they took Patrick into that program, which I wish they wouldn't have at this time, if what I know now.

00:34:42.802 --> 00:34:48.378
But yeah, there were 30 kids in that lawsuit and several of them had killed themselves.

00:34:48.378 --> 00:34:52.927
Just from it was all physical abuse, some sexual abuse to the girls.

00:34:53.735 --> 00:34:55.298
Medication mismanagement.

00:34:55.298 --> 00:35:02.043
Because the doctor didn't have a license to administer medications, he had to defer it to a nurse practitioner.

00:35:02.686 --> 00:35:03.650
I had forgotten.

00:35:03.650 --> 00:35:10.925
Until last night I was looking at some of my notes and I remembered Patrick needed all of his medications refilled when we took him there.

00:35:10.925 --> 00:35:14.762
So when I called I said I'm going to stop and get his meds refilled.

00:35:14.762 --> 00:35:18.336
He said no, you don't need to do that, we'll fill them as soon as he gets here.

00:35:18.336 --> 00:35:19.938
I said, okay, that's great.

00:35:19.938 --> 00:35:28.246
So they never filled his meds and he had been on them for well over a year, went through withdrawal from all those meds.

00:35:28.246 --> 00:35:30.668
There were kids in there having seizures.

00:35:30.668 --> 00:35:33.550
Patrick would see kids having seizures on the floor.

00:35:37.637 --> 00:35:38.882
They withheld insulin from kids.

00:35:38.882 --> 00:35:39.925
Insulin, oh my gosh.

00:35:42.255 --> 00:35:46.275
There's a lot of bad places out there, but you don't know, and you're grasping for a miracle as a parent.

00:35:46.956 --> 00:35:49.224
That was after we had been through so much.

00:35:49.224 --> 00:35:51.903
He went to a wilderness program in Utah.

00:35:51.903 --> 00:35:55.882
He was only supposed to be there two months, I think he ended up being there three or four.

00:35:55.882 --> 00:36:06.083
He went to a residential program in California and he went to another inpatient facility there that he walked away from, and that's when he off a building.

00:36:06.083 --> 00:36:07.737
So it's like, oh my God.

00:36:08.500 --> 00:36:12.146
I'm curious what your support systems have looked like.

00:36:12.146 --> 00:36:21.485
I know that you had to move from one neighborhood to another I don't by choice or for whatever reason and I also know that there's been some family isolation.

00:36:21.485 --> 00:36:33.480
One of the things I don't know if our listeners are aware of is that in the mental health space, families are more isolated than they are for any other disease, whether it's cancer or anything else.

00:36:33.480 --> 00:36:41.900
So could you speak a little bit to that from your own experience, from my perspective it was the most lonely, isolating time of our life.

00:36:41.920 --> 00:36:44.141
Because the most lonely isolating time of our life?

00:36:44.141 --> 00:36:46.463
Because you know, we had this.

00:36:46.463 --> 00:36:53.710
I thought we had this perfect family that imploded before our eyes and our family.

00:36:53.710 --> 00:37:04.608
I'm sorry to say I have one brother in Louisiana that I didn't talk to a lot, but that was because I was so busy with Patrick.

00:37:04.608 --> 00:37:14.190
But the family we have here in Colorado basically left us Now Charles' family he has a brother that checked on Patrick and stuff like that.

00:37:14.255 --> 00:37:25.867
But as far as my family, first of all, they beat up on me a lot in the beginning and said I was doing everything wrong and they wanted to make sure that Charles and I were doing what was best for Patrick.

00:37:25.867 --> 00:37:30.505
Well, we're his parents, so and of course we would do what's best for Patrick.

00:37:30.505 --> 00:37:44.889
And then after a while they just they quit talking to us and basically this stoned us and since then my father has passed on, which is sad because I never was able to fix things with him.

00:37:44.889 --> 00:37:49.280
I have a sister and a niece and a nephew that Charles and I raised.

00:37:49.280 --> 00:37:53.393

Season 3 Episode 76: Parents Hope in the Face of Mental Health and Addiction

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