Question:
I am trying to find a support group for family members of people who have
schizophrenia. My mother has had this illness for many years and I would
like some group support?
Answer:
NAMI in Van Nuys, or in Beverly Hills. They probably meet once a month with a
group of 20-40. But most of them are parents of MI adult children, a large
portion of whom live in prison & are not allowed to move back in with the
parents when they get out. The NAMI groups stress that parents should not allow
their children to be under the parents' roof unless the MI adults are under
heavy medication and in Day Treatment. So it is basically about teaching parents
to kick their kids to the curb for good. MI adults are not welcome at these
groups, because there are other groups for them to be counseled at if they are
not in prison. A parent who is MI,...the tables are turned! They will probably help you find a
board & care place for her, but it might be a nightmare under a roof with that.
I haven't been to these groups since the early 90's, so the medications they
talk about will be quite different than a decade ago. I seem to remember there
was a hospital a block north of Victory & Sepulveda Blvd., and the group was
somewhere in that group of buildings a block to the east of Sepulveda Blvd.. In
Beverly Hills, I think it is in the Cedar-Sinai building in some larger
conference room. Maybe the web has a search available for when those meetings
take place.
There was also a group for consumers of medications that took place in the large
Salvation Army building off Van Nuys Blvd. in Van Nuys, but funding was cut in
mid-1992 by Sacramento, so the group disbanded. They learned a lot about the
medications there and had lots of printed materials on the ones that interested
each client. The head shop around the corner didn't count as prescription
medicine back then though. They had some pot-laced granola bars, yum.
www.schizophrenia.com has message boards for family members. No, that's a crow. What does a hawk say anyway? Nobody would know who you were or IF you were there.
The same thing the leasing agent who got me into my current apartment 5 years
ago said to me (referring to herself as the one nobody would know) as she
watched people trespass through the driveway past her. She was ready to call the
police on every shortcut taker and I had to beg her to cool-off because the area
is a well-known short-cut and enforcing trespassing rules would be impossible.
She used to be a repo-woman in Buffalo. She was stealing cars in the middle of
the night in the big city. Her last name was "Hawker", by marriage. I never saw
her again after the month I signed the lease. Pretty woman to help sign the
lease, horrible maintenance men once you get in there.
