Parents of mentally ill adult children have few options. [View all]

[Drahthaardogs]

My daughter has sever bipolar is also borderline personality disorder. She is sick with a horrible disease. She almost sent an innocent boy to prison claiming he raped her at knifepoint, but it later turned out, that it never happened. She lies. She screams and hits. She is often times dangerous. Three of the four other people in the house have had to get stitches because of her.

Her grasp on reality is tenuous as best. When she was younger, we had her hospitalized. They released her two years later at age 18, not because she was better, but because she was no an adult and they could not hold her against her will. She does no like to take her medication. She likes the high of bipolar and hates the lows. So, she manipulates the meds taking the antidepressants but avoiding the mood stabilizers.

To be blunt, she is a pretty hard person to be around. Only her family can handle her for any length of time. However, the counselors and psychiatrists are loathe to hospitalize her. Even if they do, they cannot hold her very long.

As parents, there is nothing we can do. We need some laws out there that make it easier for parents of severely mentally ill kids to get control of them. I am not talking money, I am talking the right to have a sick kid taken to the hospital and kept there until they are stable. The right to force them to take their medication, the right to force them into counseling.

You have never felt so helpless as the parent of a mentally ill adult child. I guarantee it.