Hi DNA. I'm not surprised to hear that your sister does not have enough of a work history to qualify for SSSI. Most likely, she never will have. She is exactly the sort of person that SSI was set up for. Unless your mother has oodles of money, it should not be totally on your mother to provide for all of your sister's material needs. I'm assuming she is over the age of 18. But to get SSI, she would first have to be found by the SSA to be incapable of working, due to mental disability. It sounds to me like that is the case.

Your mom is in danger of becoming her own worse enemy by not calling police when it is appropriate to do so, under the misguided notion that she shouldn't do that to her daughter. Another agency she might appeal to is "Adult Protection Services." Every locality has such an agency.

Now I'm not going to tell you that it's easy to get the authorities to do what should be done. It isn't. You have to push. You may have to be very persistant. You might help your mom by keeping a journal in which you make detailed notes describing every episode of disturbing behavior that your sister engages in. (Include dates, times, winesses.) Your mom and you may have to call the police repeatedly. Squeaky wheels get the grease.

"The System's" default response is apt to be: "If your family member is difficult to have around, then simply tell her she can't live there any more. Get a restraining order, if you need to - to keep her away. Then let the chips fall where they may.

That puts you and your mother in an awful position. You don't want to turn a young woman into the street where God knows what might happen to her. You feel that, as a mentally disturbed person, she can't just be thrown onto her own resources like that. Unfortunately, there is no ideal way to proceed.

I would stop trying to tell your sister that she is "mentally ill." Leave the diagnosing to the physicians. What you are legitimately able to discern is that she cannot cope properly with her life and that she cannot behave in such a way as to have it make sense for her to be living with your mother. I think you are clinging very desperately - and somewhat misguidedly - to the notion that, if your sister can just be kept medicated, she will be manageable living with your mother. Lay people tend to believe that modern medicine has come up with drugs that basically "control" psychiatric disorders. The common belief is that it's because of disturbed people being "off their medication" that they get into trouble. No such wonder drugs have ever been formulated, despite the popular hype about these miracle agents correcting people's chemical imbalances and rendering them fine to live normally in the community. I've worked with psych patients in jails, prisons, psych hospitals, nursing homes and in community med-dispensing venues. There are no magic bullets in the form of pills or shots. Those things can help. But, when a person is prone to actual psychosis, even getting their meds hand-fed to them everyday, and even when they get scheduled long-acting "depot shots" of I/M antipsychotic medication administered, they still decompensate.

In the case of a person like your sister who displays frightening hostility, there is probably no way that her care can be adequately managed under your mother's roof. Their relationship, itself, is dysfunctional. And that probably won't change.

I, myself, have no first hand familiarity with group homes. They are what, nowadays, replaces the old state hospital system - I guess. Clients of psych services, like your sister, (now called "consumers") are also assisted by The System to reside independently in apartments with support from case managers and "support workers" who come round to do lots of things, like even house cleaning.

Getting access to that level of support takes a lot of pushing. It actually would come about more easily, if your sister were ending up in jail frequently for anti-social behavior. I believe you're hoping to arrange some viable care set-up for your sister, without her having to go through a lot of hell first, like homelessness, jail, and, possibly, her being abused and exploited on the street.

It's sad that a person who is mentally ill with psychotic features and disruptive behavior kind of has to get abandoned by their family and left to get themselves in desperate straights before The System intervenes in a meaningful way . . . but that's kind of how it is.

Try and convince your mother to not tolerate hostile behavior from your sister, but to call cops immediately when that starts. Your sister has to become a problem to someone other than you and your mother, before there is any incentive for anyone else to arrange any intervention.

Also, you may not be able to dissuade your mother from continuing to enable a bad situation. This is way worse than just somebody needs to make your sister take her meds.