Lorna on helping her son have a say
Lorna works in healthcare and is a carer and advocate for her son Ryan who lives with psychosis.
Ryan is 26 and I suppose it started when he started using drugs and he started changing. It just basically got worse until there were all these outbursts happening that were quite extreme.
He would start covering the air vents and locking the door and I couldn’t get into my own house sometimes. It was so bad that I was in my room and Ryan was just talking to himself, to the voices, talking about the Illuminati and about people being tortured. But he didn’t want to admit there was something wrong.
Ryan was sectioned during COVID-19 so for me that was the hardest thing. We had to wave to each other through a window. I remember him saying to one of the nurses on the ward he just wanted to hug his mother. A lot of people are quite traumatised by what they’ve been through, and they felt they were in a prison.
I don’t want my son to be sectioned. I want to keep him well, so an advance statement is what we need.
What will make him unwell would probably be him not taking his medication. I would say get the Home Treatment Team involved first before even thinking of hospital admission.
I do get quite scared that the police don’t know how to deal with mental health patients. They will immediately think he’s a Black man, he’s being aggressive or he’s trying to do something because we’ve been stereotyped.
I’m just hoping for a system where you put my son’s name in and the ideal thing is they’ll know where Ryan lives, that they’ll know to contact me or to contact somebody that will know what the next steps are.
I think I know my son better than the healthcare professionals. I’ve felt through the journey I was never listened to. The big thing would be that reassurance that he would be taken care of in the way he wants to be taken care of even if I’m not there.