Neen you’re touching a sore spot tonight.
We have a family member who has a severe mental illness and he calls me often as I am his support person. This evening he’s having a paranoid psychotic episode that requires emergency intervention from the Mental Health Crisis Team.
There simply is no-one else to deal with him, but me. When I die other family members will keep on trying, but he needs the sort of specialist help that I’ve learned on the job, as it were. I genuinely care about him; before he became ill in his teens he was the loveliest, gentle boy and he did not contribute to his illness in any way. (Many previous generations of his birth family needed psychiatric care.)
It’s Saturday night, I’ve done a full week’s work and I really wanted, and planned, to spend the evening relaxing. Now I’m full of adrenalin and wondering what’s been happening as a result of the calls I had to make earlier.
I do try to protect myself and tonight I flatly refused to take responsibility for making the necessary referrals myself, but there is no option in a crisis not to help.