Thank you all for your support yesterday.

I feel I have a very short window of opportunity while my mom is receptive to getting some help. A few years ago she was open to the idea but only for a couple of weeks. Once she decides she is fine that’s the end of it. She slips back slowly.

She’s a great person. Kind, funny, intelligent. She’s also bipolar, in my eyes, and has developed heavy duty anxiety over the last couple of years. She has been drinking for over 20 years, but I honestly don’t feel like she is physically addicted to alcohol. She stops for weeks, months at a time with no effort at all…just doesn’t need it. Looks like bipolar 2. Hypo=no alcohol. She has agitated depressions, that she believes aren’t depression because they don’t fit everything she’s heard about it.

She’s so lost in all of this that she can’t recognize it. I don’t think it’s denial. She just is not aware from one cycle to the next that it isn’t the outside influences she thinks are causing the swings. When she’s headed down she picks an event that must have caused it. It all makes perfect sense to her! I know exactly how that feels! Bet you all do.

She’s so happy to be alive right now that she is already forgetting what put her in the hospital. She did have an appt with GP last week. Before the appointment she said she did not want to get an rx for the Ativan the hospital sent her home with because she was afraid she’d use it to off herself. She wouldn’t let me go into GP with her, but we share the same doc so I will call this week. She has another follow up next week. She’s only taken one Ativan since she came home. Not because she hasn’t needed it, but I think she is afraid that taking something for anxiety forces her to admit that she has it.

She is going to T with me. She was very open and honest with the nurses at the hospital and they were great with her, but everyone there treated her overdose as a “mistake” and seemed to refuse to speak to the alcohol. No psych consult. I did speak to the nurses and I know they spoke to the ICU doc, but I think it was just too hectic in there for things to be addressed appropriately. I hope she is open today with my T.

I guess that’s enough background. I should mention that sometimes she says to me that I take meds because it’s convenient not to feel anything. Her mom was institutionalized for a few years after she almost killed my mom as a baby. There’s definitely a fear that a label will turn her into something like that, somehow change her.

It seems that right now, if I can act fast enough and approach her the right way maybe she’ll get the help she needs.

I feel like I am talking to her the right way, but I’ve failed so many times in the past that I don’t know what is right anymore.

Any advice you have would be so greatly appreciated. How were you helped initially? How have you been able to help someone seek treatment?

Heading out to appt now. Thank you again.