My beautiful 19 tear old grand daughter was was suffering from untreated Bipolar illness and trying to treat her anxiety with THC edibles, which sent her into a horrible psychosis. I tried to get help from someone, but no one wanted to offer any help, local hospitals would do nothing because she couldn’t ask for help and had no insurance, so I called the police as a last resort.

I know this happens far too often and sometimes ends tragically but people who are desperate to help their loved ones run out of options. The police came and transported her to a state hospital where they kept her for less than 20 hours and then put her in an UBER, late at night, with a voucher for a nights stay in a shelter house for the homeless.

They had my phone number but did not call me! this was at 10pm in the middle of a a huge city that she didn’t live in. Thank goodness for the Uber driver who realized this was not right! He asked her about family and if she knew my address and drove her to me rather than dropping her off to a strange address in the dark, where she may have just wondered off and disappeared!

We spent 5 weeks in my apt in her psychosis with zero sleep, no medicine, and no help from anyone. We lived within a city block from the local hospital! There are doctors offices on our street. Yet I could get no help from any heath professional. My grand child went from a thin 105 pounds to 85 pounds and could have died from this yet no one seemed to care. I could not get help for her until I caked a free clinic and pretended to be her, in order to make an appointment with a Psychiatric NP, and the appointment was 4 weeks away. not even knowing how I would get her to walk into the appointment and cooperate enough to get some help.

By the appointment date she was so weak and starting to come out of the psychosis enough that it happened and we were able to get some meds to help her. It’s been a very long and extremely hard road to get to some stability for the last five years. It shouldn’t be this hard!

If I take someone to the hospital for a heart attack or an unconscious person who’s injured they aren’t turned away or placed in an uber in the middle of the night. If its an elderly person with dementia they aren’t turned out they are cared for. How is this different? It was very clear that my loved one was not okay yet she was not cared for. Our streets are full of people who have no one left to fight for them, when they are unable to fight for themselves.

Most addicts are self medicating because they need help, and are unable to get it anywhere else, and we can all see where this ends up, we can see the pain and sorrow that society suffers because of this problem, a problem that could be made better if not completely solved if only more people cared enough to do something about it.