It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Well, I guess I should say it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I feel like I’ve written a lot, just never finished anything or gotten around to hitting the publish button. I think the last thing I posted was about my friend losing her shit mentally. But I quickly deleted it because she was in the middle of a mental health crisis and I didn’t want her to read it and lose her shit even more. Not that I”m sure she could have. My friend had a complete psychotic episode. Or maybe psychotic is too strong a word, but she was living in psychosis for quite a while. My best guess would be over a month with delusions going back at least 2 years. But I’m no doctor so I could be wrong. I went to Florida to see her. She doesn’t live there. She was just there. After having run away from home. She was staying in hotels and wandering the streets fully believing that she was talking to God and that she was best friends with Jesus. Or maybe she was Jesus. I’m not really sure. But her words and her actions were not in agreement with each other as she was behaving in a way that Jesus would be shaking his head about. Or at least I imagine he would.
But I went with the hopes that seeing a familiar face may bring her back to some sort of clarity. In my head, I thought maybe I could talk her into sleeping since she had not slept in weeks. I thought that maybe with a night or two of sleep she might wake up and say “what the fuck am I doing? I left my husband. I left my kids. I’m in Florida waiting for the world to end. What the fuck?”
My trip didn’t go like that at all. Instead, I listened to her talk about a demonic experience. She proclaimed herself a prophet and refused to get any sleep at all. When I told her that I thought she needed rest, she accused me of abusing her like her husband did. Which actually clarified a lot of things for me if telling her to sleep was what constituted abuse in her book. So I dropped it about sleeping and we went to the beach. She talked a lot about God and whenever I tried to change the subject back to her kids and the fact that she had been gone from home for 3 weeks, she immediately changed the subject. I’ve never really dealt with someone in delusion. It was not pretty or comfortable. Eventually, I realized I was upsetting her more than I was helping her and when she asked me to leave, I did. Plus, I wasn’t sure if she would try to hurt me because the girl I was with was not the one I’ve known for 25 years. And it was all very sad. I had a friend die a year or so ago and driving away from this friend felt a lot like that loss.
When I got home, I called around to see if there was anything I could do and, unfortunately when it comes to mental health, options are limited. I called a mental health facility. They told me there was nothing they could do unless I could get her to the emergency room. By then I was 500 miles away again. So I called the police to do a well check on her and told them where I last saw her. To make a long story short, she ended up in the emergency room and I was able to call mental health services and they did an evaluation and decided to keep her. They ended up going to court to get a court order to extend her stay and she will be there for 30 days.
She knows it was me who called. And I’m sure she is angry that I had her “locked away” even though I did it with the best of intentions, she is still being held against her will in a facility getting help that I don’t think is even helping just yet.
And I’ve lost a friend. At least for now. I hope that in the future she will see I did what I did out of love and concern. And I would hope that I have at least one friend in this world who will do the same for me if I ever go off the deep end. But for now, there is no happy ending to this story. It is just a sad, sad story with no ending.
RouletteWeekend 