There’s a close family member who has frustrated and worried the extended family because of an obstinate refusal to properly follow-up treatment for medical ailments: high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholestoral. Recently this person has had angioplasty to unblock two arteries and was given insulin and adjusted medications. To my knowledge, this has not been followed. I also doubt this person following their pill schedule or is avoiding unhealthy foods or eating habits.
Instead this person insists on a hodgepodge of homeopathic herbal prescription plans to deal with ailments. To put it politely, I trust neither this person’s estimation of their aptitude using successful homoepathic remedies nor this person’s likely peer group of charalatans and quacks.
I’m wondering if there is an intervention/counseling approach where the family can confront this person in a frim, assertive and loving manner? How’s it work? How d we get an intermediary or guide, to with the family. Do interventions work for non-adictive drug behavior?
Zoe. Painful, stressfully, annoying. This person has frankly had a long history of hiding from family and friends the precise nature of various medical ailments and what treatments were prescribed to deal with them. This person’s most admirable and frustrating personality trait is that nobody could ever get this person to do a goddamn thing this person didn’t want to do – so this isn’t about control, so much as as it is about maybe losing whatever influence we used to have.
I don’t believe that I have done all I can to personally convey how wrongheaded I think their current course is. With a family intervention, I can at least say, “Well, we’ve done all we can to let this person know how we feel,” and I can be more at peace with the idea of leaving this person alone should they decide to ignore the advice of professionals and spurn the support of family AGAIN.
Of course, that’s assuming a family intervention is an even remotely appropiate response to this kind of behavior. This is what I was hoping Dopers could answer. If the factual consensus is that intervention isn’t appropriate, there’s no need to explore this further, is there?
There isn’t really going to be a factual consensus here. No such thing, in fact.
Your 2nd paragraph above and the OP tells me you should go ahead and do it. A family meeting is pretty much the only option you have. Let him (assuming he for brevity) know that everyone there cares about him, and they don’t want him to die. Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes are all treatable conditions.
Like you say, the end result may be failure. He might not change his behavior. But, like you say, it may give everyone else involved a sense of peace because “you’ve done all you can do.” Once you’ve done all you can do for him, the only thing else you can do is take care of yourself, mentally, with regards to their situation.
I don’t know exactly who you’d call for professional advice/intervention organization. Try a local hospital. Got a local school with a psych department? Counselors ‘r’ us?
P.S. Good luck with your move in your 3100-lb load capacity Uhaul.
I can’t tell you how embarassed I am about that U-Haul business, Jake4.
Since there wasn’t a pile-on of advice against an intervention I was planning on talking to some health care professionals before I move on the 14th. I’m leaning towards calling substance abuse centers to talk to a counselor and going from there. Unless someone has a better suggestion.
Road trip, family interventions… yeah, should be an interesting summer.
A couple of additional possible resources: since this person has been recently hospitalized, there may be a hospital social worker in a good position to help or advise on this.
Also, if anyone involved is employed with a fairly large employer, they may have what is called an employee assistance program, or EAP. These are administered confidentially by a 3rd party organization (that is, the actual employer will never know you used the service). They offer help and referrals for any type of personal issue that can be distracting from workplace productivity, and generally cover the whole family, not just the employee. Concerns about the health of a family member is a fairly common use for this type of program. Often they offer a limited number (say, 6 to 8) free counseling sessions to address a specific issue.
I really hope this works out for you and your family. Your approach seems right on–make sure you did all you can, while recognizing the outcome may not be what you want.
While your concern does you credit, I have a couple of comments / concerns:
-If you want to have any chance of getting your misguided family member to change his / her behaviour, please get one or two family members who this family member has seemed to have some respect for or closeness to, to bring the topic up , rather than having a family meeting where this person may end up feeling ganged up on. The emphasis should obviously be on “we care and are worried about you” , not “how can you make such stupid decisions where your health is concerned”.
-Please remember that no matter how misguided your family member may be, unless he or she is truly incompetent to make his or her own health decisions (think advanced Alzheimer’s patient or severe mental disability), all you can do is discuss things; you cannot force him or her to comply with treatment that you think is right as opposed to whatever course of action he or she has decided upon.
For professional assistance in the intervention, I like Harriet the Spry’s idea of the EAP. We used my husband’s EAP to help us prepare how to approach his mother about some issues we had with her behaviour towards him. Your family member’s pastor might be another option.
An intervention is typically confrontational, with the people eho are gathered explaining how the subject’s behaviors has negatively affected them, asking the subject to seek help imemdiately, and offering consequences if he/she refuses.
Based on what you’ve described, I don’t think that’s what’s needed, nor do I think it would be particularly helpful.
If a person has health problems and wants to decline treatment and/or continue an unhealthy liefstyle, that’s their choice. It certainly may not be the choice that people around them would prefer, but it’s a choice that people make every day. I think that if anything is going to work to change the person’s mind, it’s a more concilliatroy approach. Point out that ther are people around him/her who are going to be sad when this person dies, and that they believe that’s what’s going to happen soon without proper treatment.
The big difference when we talk about intervening with addicts is that their behavior (whether it’s drug use, gambling, or whatever) drags down the people around them. This person has just led an unhealthy life and doesn’t think he/she is about to suffer the consequences. I’d wager there are a million people in that same boat right now.
Harriet the Spry. The hospital option might be problematic because this person went to two different hospitals for the angioplasty in two different cities. But I promise to check it out. The EAP is a good idea. But I kind of doubt this person’s employer has one. If they do, can a family member initiate EAP services on behalf of the employee or will we have to encourage this person to contact them? 'Cuz I have a feeling that unless a family member can initate it, it won’t be a resource used at all.
serious lark. The close talk with two or three other family members might be a good alternative to a full-fledged family intervention. It might not be enough, but… it’s not been tried, to my knowledge. Again: this isn’t about forcing someone to do anything, it is about doing our level best to influence assertively a change in the behavior.
anson2995. Actually the lifestyle has improved somewhat – it’s irresponsible behavior in other areas of their lives, including not following medical treatment. I don’t think an exclusively confrontational approach would be helpful either, because simply confronting this person almost always guarantees a knee-jerk obstinate response. But it seems to be any intervention is at least initially confrontational anyway – anytime you have family and friends trying to talk to you about a percieved problem on your part, you’re likely to be defensive and angry. What’s needed is a script to follow and a counselor of some kind to guide us and mediate family members to a more assertive and supportive dialogue in the meeting. There are extenuating and possibly mitigating circumstances here I haven’t shared. Even though it’s not been gambling or illegal drug addictive behavior, this person’s actions has dragged down the family emotionally and financially for the last, oh, ten years or so. Easily.
Explain to me the difference, 'cause I’m not getting it.
It looks like you want to convince a fully legal adult that there is only one course of action, which he has decided isn’t for him. He has seen doctors, listened to their options, and chosen not to take them.
His body, his decision. Trust me, anyone who is trying alternative therapies has heard all the arguments against them. Repeatedly and loudly, until there’s little option BUT to tune people out. There’s always the “My body, my decision” to fall back on. So, if I was in your position, I’d drop the medical argument. Unless, of course, you think he’s truly mentally incompetant, in which case you need to convince a judge of the same and she will order involuntary treatment. To do that, contact a hospital (any hospital) and ask to speak to a social worker. They can help you navigate that morass.
What are the likely consequences if this person dies, and what would be the responsible course of action to deal with those? Are there children or a spouse that will be left behind? Then he needs to address custody issues and get a will made up. Are there funeral expenses that would be hard for the family to bear? He needs to either get an insurance policy or put some money aside in an interest bearing account, or arrange to have his body donated so as not to burden the family with burial costs. All other debts, I believe based on other threads, die with the person. (But perhaps he should do something like take his wife’s name off of their joint credit cards or something. I don’t know. I am not a lawyer or estate planner. One of the things he should do is meet with one of each)
There is no script. Be blunt, and don’t let him wiggle out of the discussion. “I fear you are going to die soon, and there are things you need to take care of before you do that. It’s irresponsible to burden your family with these things while you still have time to take care of them. Here’s a list of the things you need to take care of:” and have a list ready for him. I fyou really want to help, have phone numbers on the list. (Bank, funeral home, lawyer, etc.)
And, I might add, take care of the same things for yourself. Show him that you’re not singling him out, but that these are important issues for all of us to face. Cause, um, we’re all dying.
I hear you, and I understand why you don’t want to share those circumstances. But the family continuing to emotionally and financially support (or enable?) this person is an individual choice of each and every family member. It can stop, and it can stop today. Or it can stop upon his death. But it’s your choice. For help in making that choice, a family counselor might be in order.
You cannot control his actions, you can only control your reactions.
We’ve got two people in our family who are like this. They’re shut-ins, and we’ve finally resolved ourselves to the fact that they will die unnecessarily young. It’s maddening.
To me, force is hiring two burly guys to drag this person off to a treatment facility somewhere to some kind of program. Force is using financial leverage like withholding an expected inheritance. Influence is using everything from love and support to maybe even a little emotional blackmail. To doing this assertively rather than aggressively is to avoid finger-pointing and screaming.
I don’t object to deciding on pursuing medical alternatives. I object to not following traditional remedies consistently. I object to not even researching alternative treatments fully before deciding on them. I object to facillitating quackery. I object to mixing herbal remedies with regular medicines. I object to injesting herbal substances on the say-so of people you just met. I object to ending up in the hospital every few months still with the same unchanging heart problems and diabetic ailments. And now I need to stop this paragraph before this thread ends up in the Pit.
I’ve suspected mental incompetence. I will not comment to what degree or what kinds.
This person’s life is not organized enough to have credit cards, life insurance or pre-planned funeral arrangements, which is part of the problem. The financial burden will fall on the shoulders of this person’s adult children and quite probably this person’s surviving octagenarian parent.
There must be some sort of script – or “map” or “guideline” if you prefer – that spells out what should and shouldn’t be said in an intervention, and what must be said, what boundaries should be set.
Your point about taking care of the same things for myself is a good one – I am not singling this person out. I agree, these are important issues for us all to face.
The family enabling this person is something I’ve suspected for quite a long time. We’ve always had the type of family where it was okay to “come on back home” for the holidays, for special events, if you ran into financial difficulties. This has been a tremendous blessing in some ways but not in others.
Well, actually, if I had enough money and few ethical qualms about it, I probably could control this person’s actions. Remember what they did to Dabney Coleman in “9 to 5?” Remember “Misery?” It’s sort of fun to fantasize about as payback for all the HELL this person puts us through worrying about them but at the end of the day I’d much rather this person get themselves together either with my help or despite my worry or concerns. Truthfully keeping me in the loop with medical conditions would be a plus, too.
