Will you walk me through the diagnosis process with Nick? Because it sounds like it was pretty complicated to actually get there.
It’s very hard in the best of circumstances to get to a good diagnosis and especially with mental illnesses. Also, once you veer into ones like schizophrenia and bipolar, because schizophrenia is a diagnosis of criteria. It’s not like you do a blood test and OK, this is what he has. So they just check off enough boxes and if he exhibits certain behaviors, then that’s what they call it. And it’s basically that with all the mental illnesses.
The thing that I always say is if you made the list of red flags for serious mental illness and you made the list of normal teenage behavior, you would have virtually the same list. They’re all mercurial and hostile and irrational and ... I would look at him and I would look at his friends and I was like, “OK, they’re all nuts.” You know what I mean? “This too shall pass.”
But then it didn’t pass with Nick. And with us, the wake-up call was when he cut his wrist and at that point, I could not normalize it anymore. So as far as the path to a diagnosis, it was meandering. First we addressed it as drug abuse and sent him to rehab and a therapist. Then it progressed from there to anxiety and then depression, and this is over a period of years from, say, 16 to 20. Then eventually when he was 18 or almost 19, we got bipolar, but even then they told me, “This is probably not the end of it.”
Then eventually when he was about 20, they said, “Schizophrenia.”