DD14 Mental Health Issues and Impact on Family

[Selfishjeans]

Hi, my DD is 14. She was diagnosed with anorexia just over a year ago. She has weight restored but is still gripped by the AN so every day is a still a battle for her. Her consultant suspects that she may also be suffering from EBPD and she has terrifying mood swings. Lately these have become more frequent and violent. The slightest thing not going her way can set off her rage which can last for hours. During these rages she says the most hurtful and terrible things to her dad and I. We can deal with that as we know it is part of her illness but we are living in constant fear of upsetting her. We have just come out of an awful weekend with her where she has screamed the house down more or less constantly. She screams to the neighbours that we are abusing her and several times has called the police to allege that she is being abused by us. It is starting to take it's toll on our mental health and my husband has recently been prescribed anti-depressants. We have another teenage child who is not faring well because of my daughters condition. My daughter is insanely jealous of her sibling and will go to great lengths to provoke him, being a teenager he will inevitably lash out and say something in response to her taunts and she then uses this as evidence that she is being abused. There is no reasoning with her. Her sibling is not dealing well with the situation at home and is getting into trouble with the police for minor offences. We are now in a situation where either she is screaming the house down or we have the police at the door over something my son has done.
I honestly do not know how we can survive as a family as we are on our knees. Even our jobs are impacted as we both work from home, she threatens to scream her way through our work calls and has told me she hopes I lose my job as I deserve that.
I am at a loss and I feel like I have failed both of my children but I do not know how to fix the situation. We have tried so much and so many different techniques to deal with her behaviour but at best her behaviour will stabilise for a couple of weeks and then will revert back.
Has anyone been is a similar situation and come out the other side ?

It sounds really, really tough

What support has your daughter been offered? Is she having any kind of therapy? If she isn't, I would push hard for this. We couldn't afford to pay privately when our child needed help, but if you can it's worth considering. Whether it's EBPD or not, she isn't coping and it's too much for the family to cope with alone. She needs help to understand her anger and strategies to manage it - this is a difficult process and needs a professional approach.

Family therapy might be an option, you can get referred through it via CAMHS - but it's extremely brutal (from experience) and you may struggle to get your other child to attend (ours flatly refused).

Masses of sympathy from me .

My DD is aggressive, possibly has ASD and also overwhelms me, the police have been involved too. Last week I had to leave work early as her head of year had established she had started self harming.

The only chink of light is that we now have a family support worker who is trying to pull together various areas of help from school and CAMHS. Do you have one? I think a good one can fight your corner a bit.

thanks sadpapercourtesan.
She is being seen by CAMHS and separately by a specialist eating disorder service within CAMHS. The eating disorder therapy does seem to be effective and we definitely see slow progress there but the EBPD symptoms are getting worse. We have pressed CAMHS to find out what the treatment plan is but all we are told after 6 months of weekly sessions with her care coordinator is that she is still being assessed, we had hoped that she would be offered DBT treatment but there has been no sign of this happening. We tried private therapy in the beginning but this wasn't effective at all.

thanks megletthesecond, and sending sympathy to you too. My daughter also self harms, usually after a meltdown when she is feeling bad about herself. She has self harmed in school too.

With our child, the self-harming escalated and he became suicidal. I tok him to A&E and insisted they admit him for an emergency assessment. That did seem to bump him up the list for CAMHS treatment, but we still had to push and push for him to actually receive any therapy. He was promised CBT but it never materialised, and we were offered family therapy instead because it was the only therapy they could provide quickly. Mental health services are so, so inadequate

@sadpapercourtesan can I ask, in what way(s) is family therapy brutal?

We're also doing family therapy. I have found it to be ineffective so far. My daughter does not respond well to any perceived criticism of her behaviour so we end up tip toeing around issues in these sessions. If we say anything that she does not agree with it will result in a meltdown that will continue into the night. She is very impulsive and after one of the family therapy sessions she took a paracetamol overdose, she later admitted that she did it in order to make us pay for bringing up her behaviour in the session. That is not the only time she has done something like this. She accuses us of not caring about her and has vowed to starve herself so much that we will be by her hospital bedside begging her to eat.

[quote JanglyBeads]@sadpapercourtesan can I ask, in what way(s) is family therapy brutal?[/quote]
In our experience, the model for family therapy was very much total and unconditional affirmation of everything the troubled young person said. Which is very bruising and painful for parents. Our job was to sit there and weather the onslaught, basically I used to dread the sessions. We stuck with it though, and I do think it did our child some good, if only that we kept going and being there for him, no matter how tough it was. He's at uni now and it's amazing to see him happy and confident in his own skin. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Is your DD on any medication? Currently there is not a huge amount of available support from CAMHS. We saw a private psychiatrist for my DD for a number of issues one of which was possible emerging bi polar disorder characterised by highs and lows that could last for weeks.
My DD could easily perceive criticism and flare up similar to your description but not as severe.
It’s so hard walking on eggshells in case you say the wrong thing. Our psychiatrist allowed us to start Lamotrigine which is a mood stabiliser and a low dose of Fluoxetine.
This has helped enormously. In many cases there is an imbalance in brain chemicals and medication can help hugely.
We now get this through the GP on a shared responsibility as long as the psychiatrist prescribed and reviews regularly.
Yes it’s costly for the initial consultation but it’s worth it. There are still some difficult weeks but mostly it’s ok and she can take a tease and joke and just laugh when In the past it would have caused huge upset.
I hope this is some help.

You have my enormous sympathies. We are experiencing similar. We are not able to afford private medical care and if we were I don't know where it would end/there are no guarantees of success, so are relying on whatever we can get via the NHS/school etc. We support our DD (17) emotionally and practically but she usually won't listen to any help/advice from us so we are largely wasting our time there and resorting to pot plant parenting (just being around, but not intervening directly.) I cannot offer any helpful advice except than to say please prioritise your own wellbeing and health (and relationship with your partner) because you are the most important cogs in their wheel.