Savant got his first pay check and did what workers have done for forever, he rewarded himself by ingesting a "recreational" substance. He is Schizophrenic and this knocks him into a delusional state.
He became convinced that his old girlfriend ( who really did, at 16, begin to sell dildos and body modification jewelry on eBay. We still don't get her.) is well on her way to becoming the next Google, and a mogul, because she has a "server" in her apartment. He said she has websites on the internet that are made to look like they are someone else's, but they are all her, making up alter-egos. Before I realized that he was messed up, he drove to the bookstore and bought her first published book.
No amount of reasoning, or a visit to Barnes & Noble's web site, the authors biography, photo, etc., would convince him that he was just making schizo connections with unrelated things. He said there were just too many hidden clues she had left for him and besides, she had shown him part of the book while she was writing it.
Granted, Myla Goldberg does look like she could be his old girlfriend's sister, except Myla is missing X-gf's White-Girl-Funkadelic-Hair Goth Pierce or Stretch Every Possible Body Part Dominatrix Boot Fetish fashion sense. But, Idiot Like A Savant is convinced that Myla is just a stand in for pictures and the whole biography is made up. I showed him that Ms Goldberg has written other books, lives in New York with her family, and that his x-girlfriend could not be a puppet master that toyed with publishers, etc.. I asked him why she would go to all the trouble to create such a web of subterfuge, when, if she was such a gifted author, she could be getting her due recognition with her own name? He said writers use pseudonyms all the time. I pointed out that women writers of the past, used to use male pseudonyms because women were shut out when it came to getting their work published, and that it is no longer necessary to do that.
It is as real to him as my reality is to me. Reasoning with him when he is like that is futile and can lead him to suffer severe distress, so other than taking the car keys away from him, there was not much we could do but remain calm and be kind to him. Poor guy, he looked so confused that anyone would question his conclusions, because he knows they are fitting into place so perfectly in his mind. It breaks my heart to see him like that.
I hope he is back together when he wakes up today and takes his medicine.
*Nope. Sunday was just as bad. We were up 'till about 3:30 or 4:00 AM with our beloved crazy man, it was ugly. Monday morning, after only a few hours of sleep, I wake up with a raging migraine. His Father scraped him out of bed, made sure he took his medicine and made him go to work. (He's on the day shift now.)
I hope I don't get a call that will require me to go to the jail or the hospital to hear how his day went.
I won't pretend I know what you're going through, I caught a different piece of parental shrapnel (my youngest daughter is autistic and epileptic). Also, my kiddos haven't gotten quite old enough to add the police station to the list of places I might be called to, though I've been to the hospital on Mo's account just last week.
ReplyDeleteMy father's second marriage, brief as it was, was to a woman with a schizophrenic brother. It's been so long I've forgotten the sub-category of schizophrenia he had, but he definitely made some unlikely connections during conversations I had with him. And I'd say in his case, the reality he spun was possibly more real to him than the reality I trust. He had a kind of religious conviction about pizza from a specific pizza place, for instance. I even went and ate there to check it out, and it was pretty ordinary stuff. It wasn't a chain, so it was distinguishable from Pizza Slut, Domino’s, etc.
The other thing I remember him telling me was that his doctor told him to smoke. This wasn't quite true: his doctor didn't tell him to quit, because as awful as cigarettes are for your cardiovascular system, the nicotine seems to help the schizoid symptoms. I don't believe an American doctor would actually encourage someone to start, but I can see a psychiatrist figuring the trade-off between something that provides some benefit, and the stress of quitting that could make him completely lose his rag might be decided in the favor of Philip-Morris.
I wonder if you feel as alone as I sometimes feel when dealing with my own kiddo's problems. Eating things that are not only 'not food' but are, in fact, dangerous; climbing to dangerous places, sneaking out of the house in the night and causing mischief with the neighbor's garden hose; smashing things to see what happens; bolting from the yard and into other people's houses unannounced, uninvited, and faster than me or Frau Lobster can pursue.
Intellectually I know these are problems other parents deal with. And that others have parental extra-credit assignments harder than mine. And that Mo's only eight, so the real obstacles are probably still waiting—perhaps waiting around the corner, heavily armed, and meaning business.
It is Halloween today, 2006, and about a year after you left this comment. I have enjoyed your blog very much and will continue to read it regularly. Mo and Em and you and your ex-Frau were the first cyber family added to my blog neighborhood. It does help allay the feeling of being alone with our kid's problems.
ReplyDeleteI have an older son with problems also, but I'm trying to pull back on divulging what both my sons' issues are. I need support, but I don't want them, or anyone else to get the very wrong idea that, by talking about them, I get some kind of creepy emotional pay off. As you know, any person with very serious family issues benefits from knowing that they aren't alone.
I took my son to his doctor appointment yesterday, and after talking to him, she told me to take him directly to the hospital, where he will be for a while. And I had just written to a friend and one of my sisters, telling them how much better he seemed.
Because of his right to privacy, all the doctor told me is that: his condition is much worse than I think it is.?! How am I supposed to know what to think it is? I will see if she can arrange some family appointments, with my son's consent, because you can't deal with something when you don't know exactly what she is talking about. Today though, I'm glad I don't know. I hate when I spiral into that crummy emotionally raw place.
I was told, in the class I took when he was in the hospital for the first time, that Halloween is the worst holiday for schizophrenics. The slasher movie retrospectives for at least a week, the portrayal of scary homicidal psychos, which can heighten the fear ordinary people have of the mentally ill, the costumes and decorations, etc., can really knock them into a place where they become very frightened.
I don't think that he is suffering because of that, but I would never have thought of it before he became sick.