Tag Archives: pharmaceutical drugs

The Unraveling, Part 3: Temporary Mental Instability vs Bipolar I

(Read Part 1 and Part 2.  Permission required for reprinting) After Ryan’s death, I remembered reading many years ago in a magazine  about Margaret Trudeau, then wife of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She was in her 20s, partied with socialites, and also suffered psychotic breaks.  Each time she referenced her use of marijuana as the trigger for those episodes.  I’ve since read current articles, and she continues to share. For her, marijuana led her into “madness.”  It was much later that she was diagnosed with  bipolar disorder.  It’s hard for me to accept her son, Justin Trudeau, wanting to have the same position his father held.  He’s a proponent of pot, despite knowing his mother’s mental health was so affected by marijuana. It speaks volumes on how great the opposition to promoting the truth about this drug!

Ryan was not helped to understand why his brain lost touch with reality under the influence of THC–this is the “elephant in the room.” The fact that hospitals don’t consider marijuana a factor in the picture of mental health is a tragedy. We need every researcher, past and present, across the globe, who understands the truth about what pot does to young brains to stand up in solidarity.

The experience of Great Britain was that it decriminalized marijuana, saw a spike in mental illness as a result of loosening the law, and then tightened their laws again. Canada has website on the cannabis-psychosis-schizophrenia link. The US, on the other hand, is not noticing its problem, or influenced by the marijuana financiers, is refusing to see that so many young people who are addicted to it are also  having psychiatric problems. I believe the psychiatry community has failed to connect the dots, ignoring the facts of today’s cannabis – so much stronger than when they were in school, or even 10 years ago.

The Lancet Journal of Psychiatry’s recent article points to a sevenfold risk of suicide for teens who use marijuana.

The second break happened 18 months after the first one, but this time I pre-arranged for Ryan to receive drug rehabilitation at a different hospital. The hospital in Pasadena gave the ‘green light’ for rehab. We paid $12,500 up front and Ryan’s PPO would insure the rest. His uncle and grandfather came, too, for support. Less than 24 hours after admittance, the staff coerced Ryan to their locked unit, where he was warehoused for 13 days with anti-psychotics exceeding the FDA limits.

The staff asked us several times: “Could Ryan have dropped acid? He doesn’t seem like our bipolar patients.” Once again his toxicology report came up positive (+) for THC. Again, in 2011, just like 2009, no one believed marijuana could cause this effect.
By now, we realized that our son’s drug problem was with weed and that he had relapsed with weed, but he never got a shot at the drug rehab for which we had already paid.

Ryan was “dumped” from their unit on the 13th day. The insurance refused to pay for it, perhaps after reading the notes of how much worse Ryan had become inside the hospital unit.  Why are insurance companies allowed to have so much influence on a patient’s treatment when they don’t have expertise?  He was drugged mercilessly into just a state of stupor. It was an endless nightmare for our son and for his family.

Ryan was taken off the last anti-psychotic at the first follow-up visit with the same psychiatrist because he appeared normal, compared to his state during hospitalization. However, he was still actively psychotic at that one week follow up. (I had stopped Haldol when he came home, as I was horrified my son had been receiving Haldol round-the-clock. Of course, at 6’4”, Ryan was intimidating. He had never become violent, but he tried to escape several times, realizing he had been tricked from the open unit into the locked unit.)

Coming Home Again

Ryan was hit with a personal betrayal at the same time–which just leveled him. Yet, with love and support of our family, he emerged once again from psychosis 10 weeks later. It came within the same time frame as the first episode, probably not a coincidence. This time it happened without medications, and I am suspicious that the medicines didn’t really affect his state of mind coming off psychosis after the first episode.

Ryan stayed with the Ivy League psychiatrist after coming out of psychosis for several visits. He drove all the way to his office in Pasadena, then had to wait up to 1 1/2 hours, as he piled in patients for the 15-minute check-in. I always hoped Ryan would invite me to go with him, but he didn’t. On the last visit, Ryan came home and announced “Mom, I’m not going back to see him because he never takes his head out of the computer, and doesn’t even look at me.”

After my son died, I subpoenaed his records only to find many days of nursing notes documenting: “Please call my mom she’ll know how to help me.” “I can’t stay in here like the last time, you don’t know what happened to me there.” But no one called me or told me despite my calling twice a day and visits every night.

During the 2nd hospitalization, I believe the massive anti-psychotics administered threw him into full-blown psychosis, as compared to the mild state of psychosis at the time he entered to get drug rehab. Drugging a young person into such a state of stupor, and then stopping medication upon discharge, surely that plays havoc on the young brain – already under siege from the effects of THC.

There are families whose kids died from drug overdoses, but began their drug usage with pot. There are those who have children hopelessly addicted to marijuana and there are those of us whose children die from the consequences of marijuana usage. All of us are stymied by a cover-up of the marijuana-mental illness link, and the fact that mental health treatment doesn’t adequately connect with substance abuse and addiction treatment.  Follow our posts by email to receive part 4 and part 5, to be published in December.

The Unraveling, Part 2: Denial, Denial, Even as Dog has Seizure

(Part 2 of 4, an anonymous testimony submitted by a reader.  Part 1)   For a person who had never shown the slightest mental instability and then goes into an altered reality—literally overnight–disregarding a drug classified as “hallucinogenic” as a trigger is outrageous. Mental health treatments fail when the root cause(s) are ignored. The culprit was the mind-altering chemical in marijuana, THC, which today’s pot has been genetically modified to produce in outrageously high amounts.

Psychiatry has morphed over the last 30 years, placing medical management (prescribing pharmaceutical drugs), ahead of getting to the bottom of things. The best way to minimize an encounter with the psychiatric system is to never use mind-altering substances including marijuana, and all its derivatives, as well as brain stimulants like Adderall, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics.

When I kept questioning the rush to diagnosis my son and the failure to recognize the THC connection, even my work colleagues (pharmacists, physicians, and nurses) would say: “This is about the right age when they break.” Or “Just accept what your son has — a mental illness.”

The out-patient psychiatrist was even worse.  He charged $250/session and took no insurance. At the only family session after Ryan was released, I questioned why would they diagnose him with bipolar depression since it has a high familial link? This doctor refused to answer me but eventually mumbled in response, “environmental,” which may mean he knew that THC can alter young brains.  (Bipolar 1 is the term used today, distinguished from Bipolar 2, if the mania is longer or more severe and/or the person has a manic episode before having depression.)

Nothing made any sense to me, and the nightmare continued. My daughter-in-law’s family was immersed in the belief of mental illness. “My whole family has bipolar problems,” her mother stated. No big deal, his wife said, though Ryan came back to normal after 10 weeks. My husband and I went to several psychiatric doctors trying to find a more reasonable physician who would look at the whole picture, but all followed the same philosophy. I even challenged them with the American Psychiatric Association’s classification system which qualified a bipolar I diagnosis as inaccurate when illicit substances are in evidence. (At the time, the DSM IV manual was the classification guide for psychiatry.) Mothers like me read everything and know when a diagnosis doesn’t hold. Denial was going on, but I don’t think the “experts” understood who was in denial.

No one ever suggested Ryan had addiction or dependence on pot or any drugs. I asked several times, as my thinking was that anyone who had basically had a brain break should go for rehab/counseling. These ‘experts’ reassured us,” Ryan is just a recreational user.” I kept researching and showed my son and his wife the volumes of research about the marijuana-psychosis link. I told them, “If Ryan ever goes near any mind-altering substance again, it could trigger schizophrenia.” At the time, I was unfamiliar with the “skunk” strains of pot, and didn’t know most of their friends were using it.

In mental health programs, if there is presence of THC or other drugs in the toxicology report, please give the patient the education to help them understand addiction and how the brain works. The attending physician should be certified for Addictions Treatment.  I’ve read there should be at least a six-month wait to fully evaluate a person’s mental health function after stopping the substance, but it didn’t happen for Ryan.

Back to Normal? How Long?

My son’s wife dutifully gave Ryan his medicine — not that I believe any of them helped him come out of psychosis faster). Ryan gained 55 lbs. in 5 months, leaving stretch marks all over his statuesque physique. Our son had gained so much weight, complained of “brain fog” and once out of psychosis weaned himself off the meds. In total, he spent five months on the anti-psychotics.

I never believed my own kid would ever go near another mind-altering substance again. Neither my husband nor I had ever touched an illicit substance in our lives. Sadly, parents who think they raised their kids sensibly, spent quality time with them and modeled a healthy lifestyle, can be woefully unaware of “today’s culture.” The drug is everywhere; one in six teens who use marijuana become addicted to it.

We found out later that some close friends were using pot so Ryan was persuaded to start using “recreationally” at age 19.  About that time, he began dating the girl he married, also a user, but not someone I’d expect to be into pot.

Sad for me, when I met individually with Ryan’s five close friends, each called him “best friend,” because he gave everything of himself to his friends. Some “fessed up” to using marijuana with Ryan. One said, “But he never did the really bad drugs like I’ve done.”

Ryan’s dog had seizures about a month before our son’s second “episode” of psychosis.  Long story short–I helped my daughter-in-law get their dog to the family vet. She told the veterinarian their dog had eaten snail bait, but he disagreed. I had no knowledge my son had returned to pot, and his wife didn’t share that fact. Indeed, now I realize that their dog had found their bag of pot. The vet told us it was not epilepsy, as I thought. He was unsure if he would be able to save this dog. Following an expensive intravenous (IV) hydration, the dog survived.

After Ryan experienced his next breakdown, he confessed, “Jodie had eaten pot before his seizures began.” Later, the vet assured me “Pot doesn’t cause seizure, but makes dogs lethargic, sleepy.” Several months ago, a Colorado veterinarian wrote an article in the LA Times about the escalating number of dogs having seizures from contact with pot edibles. I marched the article to our vet, grabbed his arm and implored him to educate himself and spread this information to his colleagues.

If our family vet had recognized the symptoms of today’s pot which causes seizures, and if I had been sharp enough to have asked the vet to do a drug screen, we could have made a difference.  But, we didn’t realize that Ryan had gone back to using pot, thinking he had beaten the addiction.  (Parts 3 and Parts 4 will follow.  Part 5, to be published in December, will explain how the author has helped others with her knowledge.)