One insurmountable block: loved one’s own resistance to treatment

I spent all morning last Sunday thinking about the article by Dugan Arnett and John Hilliard on the tragic life of Adam Howe and feel compelled to note two things that I feel were unaddressed (“Tragedy foretold: Adam Howe’s descent into illness, addiction, and final acts of violence”).

We, too, are parents of a loved one struggling with mental illness and have discovered that there are two major impediments to their getting effective treatment. The first and most tragic is the loved one’s own resistance to treatment. Our beloved child had a late onset of their disease, and they frequently deny they are mentally ill at all. Even if our child does talk about being mentally ill, they believe neither medication nor therapy will help. There is nothing we or anyone else can say that will change our child’s mind. Thus our child will not get help.

The second impediment to effective treatment was alluded to in the article. Loved ones who seek emergency treatment can leave, essentially, whenever they want. So before any medication or therapy has a chance of having any effect, the loved one can merely walk out of the facility and, absent a showing that they are a present danger to themselves or others (which, we have discovered, is a very high bar), they cannot be held.

Sometimes the system fails because the loved one never gives it a chance or, as the article notes, gives up. Then what do we do? I really wish I knew.

ANONYMOUS Watertown

Editor’s note: This letter has been verified. We are publishing it anonymously at the writer’s request.