The Laws Designed to Protect My Son Could Very Well Kill Him

Opinion|The Laws Designed to Protect My Son Could Very Well Kill Him

My husband and I adopted our son, Abraham, as a toddler, believing we could provide him with a good life. Abi, as we called him, was a bright, curious kid who blossomed into a kind and popular teenager, a star student who won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. In his last year of high school, though, he began acting in ways we could not understand.

Abi tore family photographs from the walls and burned them in what he called a “death ritual.” He announced that he was a prophet of God. He stole our cars. Two of our other children were living at home, and all of us woke up every day terrified to find out what had happened in our home overnight. Abi was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but as is often the case, he was unable to perceive that he was ill. Nothing — not psychiatric care, not even police intervention — could convince him he needed help. Then he turned 18. He became an adult in the eyes of the state, and that was the end of our influence.

Now, three years later, Abi drifts from parking garages to homeless shelters, panhandling on sidewalks for a few coins. He won’t come home; he won’t even stop by for food or medicine.

Every few months, he acts out more than usual and he is hospitalized. Doctors administer enough medication to briefly calm him, then label him “stable” and “not a harm to self or others” and discharge him back to the streets, where he is exposed to harsh winter nights without any support — sometimes even without shoes or a jacket.

This is not anonymous urban homelessness. It is local and relational, playing out in full view of his childhood friends, former teachers and soccer coaches. They don’t know how to help him any more than we do.

At one especially dark moment of despair, I found myself wishing he had cancer instead.

I know that sounds crazy, and of course it is. As a psychotherapist, I sit with families every day whose children face illness, pain and death. I lost my beautiful 7-year-old niece to a brain-stem tumor. I understand the weight of a cancer diagnosis and I wouldn’t actually wish it on anyone, certainly not my own child. But I have seen how people respond to cancer: with urgency, empathy and effort. When someone has cancer, there are people to turn to, people who really try to help. When the daughter of a woman I know finished treatment, the hospital staff gathered to watch as she rang a bell they keep on hand for such occasions, and everyone erupted into applause.