Skunk turned my perfect girl into paranoid raving wreck
. . . this is why they must stop drug show right NOW
I’D always thought I had the perfect daughter, the sort of girl who would get up early on Mother’s Day, bake me a chocolate cake and put a bunch of flowers from the garden on the dining table. Isabel was sweet natured, thoughtful and bright. But all that changed the day after she turned 16.
‘I can do what I like now,’ she told me, and began to stay out late, ignoring texts and calls. She got herself a boyfriend, started smoking cigarettes, bleached her beautiful long hair, and hung out with a group of so-called ‘cool’ friends.
‘That’s teenagers for you,’ a close friend said, when I confided I was sick with worry. ‘You’ll lose her for a while, but she’ll come back to you.’
The first warnings came in the form of emails from her college tutor complaining that Isabel looked washed-out, that she couldn’t find her way to lessons, or that she was missing from class altogether. She had been a grade-A student when she left secondary school; now she was getting Ds and Es.
‘It’s fine,’ is all Isabel would say when I questioned her.
Then I found the messages. One evening she logged into Facebook on my iPhone, and forgot to log out. Scrolling through her photos, I saw a picture of her smoking what looked suspiciously like a joint, and another of her perching precariously over a bridge late at night, looking totally ‘out of it’.
I challenged her, and she admitted she was regularly smoking skunk with friends.
‘Everyone’s doing it. And it chills you out,’ she said, with a smirk. ‘You should try it!’
As my anxiety mounted, I began to see less of her as she preferred to spend her weekends at ‘sleepovers’.
Isabel was losing weight and neglecting her appearance, showing interest in nothing but her friends.
Today, I know that she had been dabbling with numerous illegal drugs, all readily available: cocaine, LSD and ecstasy.
And, most disastrously of all, she had been smoking super-strength cannabis, or skunk, for about 18 months.
Addiction runs in both sides of my family, paternal and maternal, with drugs and alcohol, and I had always drummed the dangers into her. Yet she was surrounded by illegal substances, immersed in a ‘party’ culture. Drugs were on offer from other students at college, at parties and casual sleepovers. They featured on Facebook, with friends commenting on what they did or didn’t smoke or snort. To them it was the norm.
Then, in March this year, everything came crashing down. I hadn’t seen Isabel for a few days as she’d stayed at a friend’s house. She arrived home looking glazed and dishevelled.
When I asked her what she wanted for dinner, her responses to my question seemed slow, as if she couldn’t formulate words. ‘What have you taken?’ I asked.
My daughter suddenly seemed very fragile. She wrapped her arms around me, and we sat together on the sofa, with her head leaning on my shoulder as I stroked her hair.
‘I’m really upset,’ she said later that evening. ‘My friends are talking about me, and I can’t join in.’ I asked what she meant. She said she could hear them telepathically.
‘You know that makes no sense,’ I said, my stomach twisting into knots.
My worst fears were confirmed the following morning when I heard a loud bang. The cat raced upstairs and darted under the bed, and I found Isabel outside in the garden, saying calmly: ‘I’ve smashed my phone.’
I looked at the patio and saw bits of her new Samsung scattered everywhere. ‘People are tracking me,’ she whispered.
She then ran inside and grabbed a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, and held it in front of me, threatening to kill herself.
‘I’m a bad person,’ she screamed, before I wrestled the knife off her.
Afterwards, she was on the floor in the foetal position, mumbling repeatedly, ‘I want to be a baby’ as she put her thumb in her mouth.
I called an ambulance and they took us to Accident and Emergency, where Isabel continued rambling.
She was assessed by two psychiatrists and a mental health social worker, who felt that she had drug-induced psychosis, and should be detained under the Mental Health Act, or ‘sectioned’, for her own safety.
No one knows why some people are more susceptible than others to cannabis, but the fact is that research has linked it to a quarter of all new psychosis cases.
Cannabis contains chemical compounds called CBD and THC. CBD reduces anxiety and is anti-psychotic, but THC is the chemical that gets you stoned, and creates anxiety.
When the plant is speed-grown under intense lights – which is how skunk is predominantly grown in the UK – the CBD levels are reduced, leaving you with higher levels of THC. And that puts the smoker at risk of mental health problems. Regular smoking can create an insidious effect that users might not notice for a while, starting with a lack of concentration, motivation and confused thinking. All those aspects are the initial symptoms of psychosis, which can occur long before the delusions and paranoia.
Isabel was kept in hospital for three nights until staff could find her a bed in a specialist unit for adolescents with mental health problems. I was relieved that, finally, she would be in a safe place.
For ten days Isabel was put under observation without any medication, to see if whatever was in her system would clear and she would return to her usual self. But that didn’t happen. She actually appeared to get worse.
Every time I saw her, she would beg me to take her home, saying there were dead people in the walls and under the floorboards, and that the Government was trying to control her mind.
The worst moment was when she questioned whether I was actually her mother.
‘Where are my real parents?’ she would shout, as she paced the room assigned for visits. ‘Tell me the truth about my birth!’
When a nurse put a glass of water down on the table for me, she’d shout: ‘No, don’t drink it! She’s put something in there.’
Staring psychosis in the face is terrifying. Paranoid delusions cannot be reasoned with or challenged.
I was scared she might never come back to me. That this would be it. My daughter forever trapped in this world of madness.
I read articles about psychosis until my head hurt, but the information overload didn’t help.
The hospital psychiatrist couldn’t advise much either. ‘Potentially she could become fully schizophrenic,’ he warned. ‘She might have to stay on medication for a long time.’
The only thing I could do was wait; pray that she’d return back to the sweet-natured girl I knew was still there, buried under the chaos – and we were lucky.
After three-and-a-half months, Isabel was discharged, fully well. And we were finally able to discuss why she was so drawn to drugs.
We agreed she would start again, close down her old Facebook account and set up a new one, and that I would monitor her phone periodically. It was just as well. The number of dealers popping up on her text messages was crazy. And, most importantly, Isabel has understood that for some, the so-called benefits of smoking weed are not worth losing your sanity over.
S.D. Mayes’s first historical suspense novel, Letters To The Pianist (BHC Press/Gelan), is out now, in hardback, paperback and eBook.