Jed_8Casual Contributor
Am I making things worse?
Hi everyone,
I'm new here. Realising my son is experiencing distorted thinking and possibly psychosis is also new. He's early 20s and lives in another city. He's engaged with a psychiatrist and social worker team. The initial contact with mental health in his state was because I contacted the service back in October before I went to his city hoping he would see me. He had recently renewed contact with me after 18 months of estrangement and it took a few phone calls to realise something was seriously not right. I was in his city a week but he refused to see me. The mental health service saw him, with the aid of police, but told me he did not present in a serious enough condition to schedule him. However, they flagged him with the police in case there was an incident. The psychiatrist called me 2 weeks ago to say he was seeing them that day and asked if I had anything else I could add. But they wouldn't tell me anything because he has not provided consent. My son rang me about an hour after that, for the first time since I was in his city in October. He told me he is a schizophrenic and says he's on anti-psychotics but I can't know if this is true. He is also using a range of illicit drugs to 'heal himself'. We talked on the phone a few times, and his thinking is very complex, delusional, paranoid, a little grandiose. I took notes and got back to the social worker.
During that initial phone call, my son asked me to visit, and repeated it in a subsequent phone call. So I booked a flight and accommodation for today. This morning, I was on my way to the airport and he texts me not to come. He was mean. Totally different from his phone calls. I was at my airport gate, having a coffee, and thought about going through with it and just being in his city if he changed his mind. But then I realised that me coming to see him was too much for him. I don't want to make it worse, so I came back home.
Did I do the wrong thing, thinking I could see him? How should I approach the future, I mean, if he asks me to visit again, should I trust he means it, or will he do the same thing again?
I miss him so much but I have no-one to give me advice. I don't want to make it worse for him. But maybe by coming home, I've failed some kind of test and he will think I don't love him for not going through with it. I have no idea what I'm doing.
