Who am I?

Among other identities, I am the mother of a beautiful daughter. A beautiful, 19 year old daughter who from the time she could talk talked about death, drew crayon pictures of dead animals, wrote death threats to us on the exterior of our house in her own blood, wrote notes to us she slips under our bedroom door showing us as stick figures she has killed, and has been known to throw tantrums in young adulthood that medical professionals characterize as psychotic. Does she get any help? I laugh. We scrape the bottom of our budget just to pay for her medication, which costs hundreds of dollars even with our insurance. It's taken until now just to get her semi-officially into a program at least in name, on paper. She has yet to actually receive any form of service though. There is nothing to help her, nothing to help us. No matter what we say to anyone in any agency, organization, you name it the answer is the same: if we have hundreds of thousands of dollars free, we can patch together a form of supervision for her; barring that there's nothing we can do but wait and watch and cry.

Of course, I'm also the mother of 5 other children, several of them having their own "special" needs, as if every child in the world didn't have "special" needs of his own.  But these children have all grown up knowing their older sister is different, that she is going to react differently from others, behave differently.  They've each lost time and attention to this and grown up worrying for her (by age 3, the youngest would comment matter-of-factly, "T is crying again.").

So she is 19.  We've done everything we could ever think of and found everything we could possibly find.  And she's 19, and she's still mentally ill, and she still receives no services beyond the psychiatrist and medications we pay for with some help (but not enough) from insurance coverage.  She has an IQ of something like 140, so smart she was able to stay in advanced math and science and writing classes all through high school even though she almost always failed them, since she wouldn't hand in any work (the teachers always agreed that she was learning everything they were presenting, so they had no objection to her staying in the class, despite the fact that normally a student who had such failing grades would have been put in remedial courses); but she isn't in college or any training program, and she works about 6 hours a week at a children's party place.  She has no plans, or at least no realistic ones; won't cooperate with any real job search or higher education possibilities; and has no social life at all beyond occasionally hanging out with a couple of friends much younger than she is going to the mall or a movie (maybe twice a year).

This is a child who grew up in suburban America, to caring parents with college degrees, who are fluent in English and good at navigating modern life.  This is the best it gets for her right now.

Until access to mental health care and full support for the mentally ill is considered an inherent right, this is life.