Summer's started, and like the past two summers before this one, I should be settling into my hotel, getting ready for a week of reading AP exams along with thousands of other teachers, college professors, and instructors. I'm not, though. Despite having a hotel reservation, a roommate who requested me, numerous confirmation e-mails, and I'm sure a name badge that annoyingly says Miramar High School AND Miami Dade College on it because when I applied to be a reader, I didn't realize the submitted text would be transcribed verbatim and no matter how many times I've tried to change it because it makes me feel like an ass, be assigned to me for the rest of my AP reader life, I'm not there. Instead, I'm sitting at my sticker-covered table writing this blog, losing over $1300, and waiting for a phone call that apparently I'm not going to get tonight from a nurse at a psychiatric hospital saying that I can come get my son.
In what seems to have become a matrilineal tradition now being transferred to the males of what I guess would properly be referred to as the Weinstein line, Keifer, like me, my sister, my mother, and my aunt, was Baker Acted. On Wednesday afternoon, I sat with him in a psychiatrist's office while he talked about his suicidal ideations and his willingness to act on them and then watched while despite his not having a plan, which is supposed to be a factor in being involuntarily committed, an officer frisked him against a police car, sat him in the back, and drove him to the nearest mental institution where he now resides with, among other people, a little boy who hears voices and stupid teenage girls who think cutting themselves is the thing to do. And now I can't seem to bring him home.
As if that's not bad enough, Kei being in a mental institution where he definitely doesn't belong because I promise you, that kid was not about to commit suicide this weekend, he's definitely been misdiagnosed, and instead of being treated for the depression he should be being treated for, he's being forced to pop Adderall two times a day for the ADHD he doesn't have even though Adderall, a drug that's banned in many countries because it's so dangerous, is one of the most addictive drugs around and people with drug issues aren't supposed to take it, and I keep telling his doctor and the doctor's PA and anybody I see in scrubs that Keifer has a drug problem and nobody will listen to me even though right now, right this very second, there's a text on the lock screen of Keifer's phone that says, keifer do you have OC, nobody at this godforsaken hospital will listen to me because Keifer says it isn't true and because he has absolutely no fat cells and a metabolism that enables him to be 5'10" and weigh 117 pounds his drug test came up negative (it's a thing, I promise), and what the fuck kind of psychiatric personnel listens to a fifteen-year-old who's in a fucking mental institution and gives him more drugs to add to his motherfucking potential-addiction list?
The word disaster is so overused that people don't realize the severity of one, but this whole experience has been a disaster in the most severe way. Not only is Keifer practically in prison being turned into a drug addict as we speak, but now he's completely distrustful of the entire mental health process and wants nothing to do with it. Whereas he previously wanted to see a therapist and get help because he was so tired of feeling hopeless, he's now afraid to ever again tell a mental health professional how he really feels, something that for someone with deep depression and anxiety could lead to the worst outcome possible.
At this point, I'm impotent. There's absolutely nothing I could do but wait for these people to let Keifer out of the hospital and complain (and what better way to do that than via this blog?), and I have to tell you, as a mother, it's plaguing me that I can't do more.
In what seems to have become a matrilineal tradition now being transferred to the males of what I guess would properly be referred to as the Weinstein line, Keifer, like me, my sister, my mother, and my aunt, was Baker Acted. On Wednesday afternoon, I sat with him in a psychiatrist's office while he talked about his suicidal ideations and his willingness to act on them and then watched while despite his not having a plan, which is supposed to be a factor in being involuntarily committed, an officer frisked him against a police car, sat him in the back, and drove him to the nearest mental institution where he now resides with, among other people, a little boy who hears voices and stupid teenage girls who think cutting themselves is the thing to do. And now I can't seem to bring him home.
As if that's not bad enough, Kei being in a mental institution where he definitely doesn't belong because I promise you, that kid was not about to commit suicide this weekend, he's definitely been misdiagnosed, and instead of being treated for the depression he should be being treated for, he's being forced to pop Adderall two times a day for the ADHD he doesn't have even though Adderall, a drug that's banned in many countries because it's so dangerous, is one of the most addictive drugs around and people with drug issues aren't supposed to take it, and I keep telling his doctor and the doctor's PA and anybody I see in scrubs that Keifer has a drug problem and nobody will listen to me even though right now, right this very second, there's a text on the lock screen of Keifer's phone that says, keifer do you have OC, nobody at this godforsaken hospital will listen to me because Keifer says it isn't true and because he has absolutely no fat cells and a metabolism that enables him to be 5'10" and weigh 117 pounds his drug test came up negative (it's a thing, I promise), and what the fuck kind of psychiatric personnel listens to a fifteen-year-old who's in a fucking mental institution and gives him more drugs to add to his motherfucking potential-addiction list?
The word disaster is so overused that people don't realize the severity of one, but this whole experience has been a disaster in the most severe way. Not only is Keifer practically in prison being turned into a drug addict as we speak, but now he's completely distrustful of the entire mental health process and wants nothing to do with it. Whereas he previously wanted to see a therapist and get help because he was so tired of feeling hopeless, he's now afraid to ever again tell a mental health professional how he really feels, something that for someone with deep depression and anxiety could lead to the worst outcome possible.
At this point, I'm impotent. There's absolutely nothing I could do but wait for these people to let Keifer out of the hospital and complain (and what better way to do that than via this blog?), and I have to tell you, as a mother, it's plaguing me that I can't do more.
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