Our 11 year old daughter has been previously diagnosed with ADHD and OCD.  There is a long history of conflict with her mother.  Other issues have manifested themselves lately, such as writing all over her bedroom walls.  She has become obsessed with a story about Joseph Stalin killing people by putting them in boxes with insects.  She has had increasing panic attacks, including ones that lead her to freeze up and go mute.  One time, she started swatting herself and said that she thought that there were bugs all over her.

Last week, things came to a big head.  We would not let her go out in a thunderstorm at night.  She became furious and kept trying to change our minds.  Shortly afterwards, I received a text from our cell phone provider that she had called 911.  She said she did it because of "11 years of abuse."  The police came and she told them she wanted to go to a crisis center.  I followed them to the ER and stayed with her for well over 12 hours, except when I left to get special food for her or something from the cafeteria for myself.  The police said she had told them about thinking of running away or hurting herself.  She denies she told them this.  The hospital recommended transferring her to a behavioral health hospital.  Because of COVID, they are only allowing one family member to visit--me.  She does not want to see or talk to her mother anyway.  So I drive 30 to 45 minutes each way for a daily 30 minute visiting session.

The hospital has strict rules about clothing, and our daughter has also rejected some of the clothing we brought her.  My wife looked for other clothes in a very, very disorganized room.  She found some in a bag.and looked through it. She suspected our daughter had packed it in order to run away.  Our daughter became furious.  This was her "apocalypse bag" that she had painstakingly organized in "the Dewey decimal system because she had been convinced that an apocalypse of some type was happening in 6 days.  She attributes this to OCD and says she can't possibly have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The medical staff, however, have prescribed medicine used to treat both conditions.  She refused to take any medication for the first few days--she has always resisted treatment, so we saw this as possible silver lining that she would finally get help.  She recently started taking the "lab rat medicine" and has complained about the side affects.  She thinks Abilify will shut down her central nervous system.

One of the things she told me last night was of her obsessive thoughts (which she attributes to OCD) about parasites in water.  She said she was so afraid that she had been think that it would be better to "end it" rather than dying a slow and painful death as parasites eat her brain.  She then told me something about putting the blankets with holes in them outside of her hospital room at night so that she would not harm herself.  The hospital has very, very tight limits on what the patients can have in order to prevent self harm.

She told me that she can't have schizophrenia because she does not have hallucinations.  She then said that hallucinations meant seeing things.I pointed out the example of bugs eating her. I did not bring this up, but she has previously said that sometimes when she looks at people she sees "all of the cells" in their faces and that the cells have faces.  That sounds like a like a visual hallucination to me.  She also recently wrote a song about a monster in her head that tells her what to do, including "run away."

She was having so many difficulties at school that the district brought up sending her to a therapeutic school next year.  She has been accepted at one for the fall.