My Support Forums - View Single Post - Schizophrenic mother refuses to take medication

Nousername101 · Feb 25, 2019 at 05:13 PM

My mother was first diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 29 when she had a psychotic break due to my father. He physically and mentally abused her for years. Although, she has told me that she has felt "different" since she was a teenager. Well, being the youngest child I had not truly realized what was going on with her nor had anyone told me. That was until I walked in on her, I was about 9 at the time,

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and she was slicing down her legs. Her arms had cuts as well and there was blood everywhere.

As soon as she saw me standing there watching her, she burst into tears. She apoligized and said that she would never do it again. My second-to-oldest sister then argued with her for hours. Skip ahead almost a year, I am at the bowling alley with my league. I was going to hang out with my friends afterward but something strange happened. My grandparents had come to pick me up and said that we needed to leave immediately. They informed me that they would be taking care of us children for a while because "mom got really sick and had to go to the hospital". Around the age of 18, they finally told me that that specific hospital visit was because my mother was seeing people pacing back and forth outside of our home

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telling her that she was worthless and needed to kill herself. She had created a bottle of "posion" and was going to dose herself with it that night.

Luckily, they caught her before she did it. Jump forward three years (present day), and my mother has been off of her medication for almost a year now. She was managing but her sickness was always visible. Certain stressors make it much more apparent, so some days she seems like she's managing and other days she seems like she is not okay. She will lie to me and assure me that she is taking her medicine, which I no longer take her word for and usually mark it as a tell-tale sign that she is pretty sick. She has lots of tell-tale signs such as compulsive paranoid thoughts about family members talking to eachother/plotting against her, severe depression, insomnia, and refusal to eat food. My mother is now becoming unmanageable though. Super depressive to the point where I think she is suicidal, mania where she won't sleep for days and barely eats, and paranoid thoughts about family members "conspiring" against her. I do not know what to do. I was able to convince her to take her medication but that only lasted two days. A few days later she told me that she does not think that she is sick and that she does not actually need medication. What should I do?