For the millionth time - “advising ACs”

Sorry, not child care, child based checks

He received very little from the government - loopholes involving gig (aka contractual) work, limitations on part time work (he worked one full time job and one part time on weekends) allowed government to withhold full unemployment benefits. Even the intercedence of an attorney specializing in unemployment did not bring full compensation

Glad at least the government did not waste hard earned taxes (including mine) here

Listen, you know he is using this new career to avoid his adult responsibilities.
You admitted it yourself.

Now, choose to hide your head in the sand and justify your enablement
Or do him a favour and get real - demand him getting a job and participate 1/3 on mortgage and expenses, 50/50 on child expenses or he is evicted.

To be accurate I said that I “question” the motivation of his actions not that I “admit” them to myself. It’s easy to be sure about others’ underlying motives when one isn’t directly and emotionally involved. Again I’d like to solicit more comments from people who’ve actually had this kind of situation and had to deal with it. Impartial perception is helpful but so is direct relevant experience.

Questioning yourself is knowing something is not right

I am in the situation with my sister in law.
I see how she manipulates everybody with the MH card, does not provide for herself and refuses to work.
Her close family members know but choose to enable her more in the "name of helping her"

She also refuses to provide financially for his child and is unsure what to do with her future... so many similarities

You say your DS struggles with depression and yet he is undertaking a social work degree. Has he thought about the pressure he is likely to come under doing a job in any of the social work disciplines. Last think I would be expecting him to feel confident about. Perhaps he just likes studying, finding actually doing a job a tad too real.

Of course those are logical questions. He works with both a psychiatrist and a career counselor so one hopes they’ve explored those questions with him. The thing is - when you’ve hurt so deeply yourself, you develop compassion and empathy for others who are hurting and want to help them and perhaps that’s where the interest in social work comes from. When I’ve addressed the “pressure cooker” environment involved he has said he understands and that the breadth of opportunities - schools, hospitals, agencies
- the degree affords is what he finds attractive as well as viable for him.

I would highly recommend he takes an internship and sees the social work first hand to see how he can handle it

Developing empathy and being able to handle the cons of a job are two different things.

Yes true. I was a teacher, a psychologist, and finally a director of a special education program and, like nursing and any helping profession, pressure to be effective in the context of meeting multiple demands something I know well!

when you’ve hurt so deeply yourself, you develop compassion and empathy for others who are hurting and want to help them

This is a trap so many people fall into, understanding the pain and wanting to remove it can turn into enabling the person to avoid addressing the problem and finding a way out of it because it could be painful.

It is a cliche, but not less true for that, that sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind, and I think that this is such a case. Your son needs to face up to his responsibilities and regain self-confidence, and the best way he can do that is by getting a paid job so he can make a financial contribution to the household, not just sponge off others. He should be prepared to take any job, that does not impose responsibilities, however menial.An uncle of mine in a senior government position left work at 50 becaause of stress. After a few months rest, he took a job on the assembly line of a local shoe factory. It gave him the discipline of getting out to work on time every day and working a full day. At the end of the week he got his wages. the job gave him self respect and he was supporting himself and his wife. He felt no false pride at taking a manual job after his previous senior job, This is what your son needs to do.

I know you are clearly a successful psychatrist, but your training should tell you that when you are as emotionally involved with your 'client' as you are, that can bias one's judgment, and distort one's response. A necessary distance between client and therapist is necessary.

Wanting to help clients and having the necessary qualities to be able to help them are very different things. I can imagine this man getting too emotionally involved with clients and unable to cope with the demands of social work. He undoubtedly has empathy but does he also have resilience and the ability to detach himself from what he will come across? I have my doubts. It looks like another breakdown waiting to happen and I would be doing my very best to make the scales fall from his eyes.

Why volunteering with CASA for a short period of time?
That and having a job that pays will give him a realistic view of his future

Why not... ate the not

There are so many areas in Social Work where the stress levels are less. Working with vulnerable adults, the elderly and adoption side is so much less stressful than the Social Workers working with abused children. Nanamar's son may be considering one of these areas particularly as he appears to be so interested in the Mental Health area he is volunteering for. Whilst I might be encouraging him towards a time limit for unpaid work if the start up couldn't pay him, I would be proud of the efforts he was making in every other way if he were my son.

I'm shocked, but not surprised, at the numbers of you who are suggesting that (to paraphrase) the OP has to be "cruel to be kind" There are many instances of young men taking their own lives because they suffered a mental illness.

Over 20 years ago the son of friends had a mental breakdown and ended up in the Maudesley. After a long treatment trained as a mental health nurse and now does regular voluntary work. A few years ago he was asked to lecture at one of the universities in London on Mental Health. He still has his down days and he still takes his meds but he is getting on with his life in a career that he enjoys.

Dinahmo it depends on the circumstances. i think in this case, as it has been presented to us, it would do this man no harm at all to take on a, possibly, part time and undemanding job that enables him to contribute to the upkeep of his family. Supposing his mother hadn't been able to provide for his family what then?

In the family example I quoted up thread my uncle suffered depression all his life and after leaving a stressful, but well paid job, took a local job as a factory operative. His depression got really bad after he retired and did not have the stimulus or interest that his job had supplied. It was then he got so ill that he needed to be sectioned and hospitalised several times.

I am slightly puzzled by this thread. The original posts looks as though it is asking for advice as to whether she should encourage her son into paid employment, especially for the sake of his ex-partner, who wishes that he should do this.

But all the posts suggesting that she should tell him to do just that seem to be rejected. So OP appears to have her own plan in place.

I am assuming that this is coming from the US, where the situation might be very different in social work from the UK. But the challenges here of SW are not to do with the clients, but relate to the bureaucracy that surrounds the role - the fact that your professional skills are not valued, but your role as a financial gatekeeper for the local authority is paramount. Your integrity is compromised at every step.

I am not clear what advice the OP is seeking - is it simply an endorsement of her already made decision to prop him up as long as he wishes; or is she seeking some genuine alternative thoughts about the best way forward?

If he has mental health issues, is Social Work a good path for him to take? From what I hear many are underpaid and stressed out. With heavy workloads and poor job satisfaction it seems to be a most unsuitable career.

Luckygirl13 - As the OP on this thread, to summarize : I was seeking opinions on whether or not I should tell my DS that he has to get any full time job after he has 1) failed to be hired multiple times, 2) is dealing with this rejection as a depressed individual, 3) is doing only hourly but paid employment, 4) is working voluntarily with a non profit about which he’s passionate, 5) is under a therapist’s care and works with a career coach, and 6) is pursuing an additional degree. As a mum of an AC, I should have no business as to what he does but my stake in the situation is higher due to the fact that I’m shouldering most of the mortgage for the home we and his ex and DS share. The majority of responses advocate “tough love” and say 1) I’m enabling him, 2) opine that he’s lazy and/or unrealistic and/or taking advantage of me and that 3) I should tell him to man up for his own good. I don’t have a “plan” for which I was seeking support, I’m trying to devise one, however, apparently very few posters have had or have shared experiences of times when they have had to direct an AC who has a mental illness which is finally we’ll-managed in such a way that will clearly add pressure and deliver the message that he is, once again, inadequate in some way. Posters can consider me an ostrich, misguided, and weak - all of which I may deserve - but giving ACs unsolicited advice is dicey under the best of circumstances, as we all know! So I’m trying to not so much develop the “if” but more the “how.”

" 1) failed to be hired multiple times, 2) is dealing with this rejection as a depressed individual,"

That happens to everybody
It helps is find our gaps and make us better candidates

Helps us

The difficulty is that every case is subtly different and given two people with very similar problems, the best advice may be entirely different for each.

However, I would always think that having an hourly paid menial job is a start and shows future employers that he is not work shy and has kept himself work savvy. sometimes jobs like that can lead to promotion and a new career within that organisation.

For my depressed uncle,leaving a senior high profile job at 50, he found working on the assembly line at a shoe factory a new world, with people from a group he had had little to do with before. He got on really well with fellow workers and the management christened him Red Ray because he used his knowledge of employment law to help fellow workers when they ever had a dispute with the management.

Good for him!