Five months after his 18th birthday, my oldest son started talking a mile a minute. He couldn’t sleep. Things he said made no sense. Doctors diagnosed him with psychosis and hospitalized him against his will.
Eight months later, my silly, big-hearted boy experienced a second episode, forcing him to leave college. The meds doctors prescribed made him “feel like a Scooby-Doo zombie.” He quit taking them. Instead, he self-medicated with pot, which ended up making his condition worse.
My life got reduced to keeping things normal-ish for my younger kids and making sure my eldest recovered — or attempting to manage him when he didn’t.
Last summer, my son cycled through three psychiatric hospitals in three months. After signing himself out of the last one, he settled in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, just south of the leafy, liberal town where my husband and I raised him.
In early November, troubling texts and social media posts signaled his continued deterioration. For the first time ever, my son made threats of harm against our family. Two days before Thanksgiving, he drove to Florida, where his dad and I live, claiming we owed him thousands of dollars. We disagreed. He stormed off and checked into a motel a mile away. That night, we learned he’d charged a 9 mm pistol and 100 rounds of ammo to his credit card. He had to wait three days to pick them up.
