Hey Dan, Bongmaster checking in here. So you smashed his bong, huh? Well, that probably didn’t go over too well with him I imagine. I’ve been in that situation before. No job, no school, no life, just smoking whatever pot I could afford. Its a bad plan. That said I don’t know how much you can do to motivate your son, it has to come from him. Some people find it helps to talk to a psychologist but taking that first step is very, very tough for some people. The single best thing he could do for himself is (as you might imagine) find an activity aside from smoking pot that he can do and take satisfaction in. Something physical is the best. Save the pot smoking for the end of the day after he has accomplished something. I can tell you from personaly experience that if you start the day with a bong you won’t accomplish much beyond flicking the lighter.
I’ve put on my reference librarian hat once again and searched Medline, PubMed, and Academic Search Premier for studies drug use in depressive adolescents, and everything I’ve read points to DanBlather’s being 100% in the right here. IANAD and the amount literature isn’t as enormous as you might expect, but the studies I found definitely point to illegal drugs playing havoc with depressive episodes, as well as with other psychological problems.
Not only that, but according to the literature, Dan is doing the right thing by keeping his son close and showing that he cares about the problem. Depression is like any other psychological disorder; you’re not going to cure it by kicking the patient out to fend for himself in the big bad world. This, I would imagine, is especially true of depression, because depressed people–especially adolescents–just don’t have the energy to get themselves started. Depressed kids don’t hang out in their rooms smoking pot because they’re lazy. They do it because they’re depressed. If you kick them out of the house, they’re going to be depressed and homeless, and if there’s a quicker recipe for being street wreckage, I don’t know what it is.
The peer reviewed literature is supporting Dan’s take on the situation. Once again, I’m not a doctor, and I would say that both Dan and his son need a sitdown with the counsellor to figure out where to go from here, but I’d say he’s off to a good start.
How do you know this person doesn’t have a friend that grows the stuff and gives it to him for free? Even if not, weed is pretty cheap and the mental energy needed to call up a friend and get some marijuana is on a different level than the stress of finding a job/doing an interview/keeping the job.
Yep, I agree, let us not stress the child out by expecting him to act like a responsible adult.
I’m sorry. What a bad scene for everyone involved. The upside is at least one thing is clear- if there is one thing that isn’t working, it’s what is going on now. Something needs to change. Anything at all has a better chance of working than what is happening now.
Now time for me to delve in to my personal experience…
Give him a warning that in exactly three months you are renting a moving van for him. Offer to pay the deposit on his new apartment. Thats what my mom said to me nearly one year ago when I was living in a dead-end town working a dead-end job. And I’ll tell you now it was the best thing anyone has ever done for me. Ask yourself- if there was a war and everyone had to march to refugee camps on the Canadian border, could your son do this? Chances are he could. If he could do that, he can take care of himself now. We all know you won’t let him go homeless. But short of genuine saving-people-from-the-street, there are ways to be there emotionally without being there financially.
Humans are very conservative creatures. If something is working- even working just barely enough- they won’t change. Every single one of my friends who had inheritances has managed to not get a job (and not do anything else useful) until the day that inheritance runs out. Then these depressed, unmotivated, passive people spent one month in utter despair, and then got jobs and went on with their lives. Your son will most likely not find a career while he is under your roof.
I’ve been depressed. It sucks. But I’ve never had the option of laying idle. And while those times have been agonizingly hard, you aren’t going to be any less depressed at home than at work, and any kind of work builds a platform for putting your life back together. Any kind of work gives you a foothold on life. At the very least it gives you potential for finding something to live for. You arn’t going to find that staring at the walls of your room.
I know my experience isn’t universal or even common, but what I needed wasn’t medication. What I needed wasn’t therapy (though it could have helped). What I needed was to reinvest in my future, to trust myself, and to finally accept the burden and the adventure of living. It was a long, horrible, painful process to give up all of the depressive ideas I had built my life around. I literally had to tear down my psyche and rebuild it with something new and terrifying- a future. But I did it, and I stand here proud to say I’m here, I have a life and a future, and I’ve been to hell and clawed my way out.
If medication isn’t working, there is a chance that your son is like me. And what I needed was someone who believed in me. Someone who believed in me enough to trust in a very public and uncontrolled way, that I would find a way to make it. Someone that could lead the way to me beginning to believe in myself again.
These are nice sentiments, sven, and I’m happy for your positive experience, but you’re making clinical depression out to be nothing more than a hissy fit here. It’s just a little more complicated than that. Tearing down your psyche and rebuilding it? That sure as hell doesn’t sound like a mere growth step to me. Not everyone is up to the task.
Take a good look at the streets and homeless shelters in any city you happen to be in. They are filled with mentally ill people with drug habits who were kicked out of whatever home they had because they couldn’t cope. Who’s to say that kicking the son out of the nest will have positive results? Who’s to say that he’s up for life on his own? We might know that his parents would try to not him go homeless, but will he know? What’s to stop him from just taking to the streets on a whim?
Maybe what you suggest would work for Dan’s son, and maybe it wouldn’t. My point is that none of us know the situation well enough to say. You won’t catch me saying that healthy kids need to be coddled and shielded from the outside world, but when the kid in question has both a psychological disorder and a drug problem? I think I’ll just wait for the shrink’s verdict on this one.
Junior has taken the path of least resistance because you’ve provided a safety net for him. Where is he getting the money to buy pot if he doesn’t work? If he has disposable income, he should be paying you rent and food money before anything else. If my child were laying in her room smoking pot, she would most certainly be kicked out on her ass. Of course, we don’t smoke dope ourselves. If the OPer does, then he has to take a certain degree of responsibility for his son’s addiction. Dopers end up producing dopers. (Ha!)
Mental illness is not an excuse for being a free loader. Being a parent means that you have to be willing to discipline your child, whether it’s easy or not. Do not give your son a crutch; he will most certainly use it.
Just chiming in to add to what others have said already. If you haven’t experienced depression, it’s difficult to understand how debilitating it can be. There would have been a time when I too would have said, “Throw the bum out!”. But I know now that doing that would probably make things worse.
Get him to a doctor, get him on an SSRI or some kind of med. They take a couple of weeks to work, but when they do, it makes a world of difference.
Then throw the bum out. 
Best of luck to you and your son.
Once again, I’m not saying the son should be mollycoddled or allowed to smoke pot on his dad’s dime. I’m just saying that the correct answer probably lies somewhere between “Throw the bum out” and “Let him hang out at the house all day getting stoned.”
The kid needs an intervention and he needs to get to therapy. From what Dan’s told us, the first one has already happened, and he’s working on the second one. You’ve gotta turn into the skid, ya’ know?
After my second son was born (7-04) I delved deep into PPD. DEEP. Like wanting to run my car into a wall or off of a freeway onramp. Didn’t want to hurt the kids, I only wanted MY pain to go away. Have you seen those “depression hurts” commercials? They are sooooo true. True depression hurts everyone around you in one way or another. For me, it was in the lack of interest in bonding with my son. I was so disturbed that upon returning to work after my leave I quit immediately. Big mistake.
I called up Kaiser and said, finally, that yes I was feeling suicidal. They got me in to see someone PRONTO, like within two hours when it typically took several weeks to get a psych appt. I was put on Zoloft at my request (I liked the little depressed bouncy balls, they represented me perfectly) and took a step towards getting my old job back. Thank God for my ability to kiss some ass.
Anyhoo, with going back to work and my med regimen I found that my depression was pretty much gone. I notice clearly a difference if I forget my meds for even two days though.
I was laid off a/o 12/31/05 and feared that the depression would return. So far it hasn’t. TG again.
I also smoke pot. Have for years. I don’t think it had any bearing on the depression, though it does hinder motivation at times. Perhaps a change of meds, which has been mentioned, might help. I abhor people who think that you can just “shake off” true depression. It don’t work that way.
I hope that your son will find what he needs to make himself feel better about himself. Life IS worth being around for, and it’s so short. I’m just glad that my baby won’t remember the few weeks when Mommy just wasn’t there as she shoulda been for him.
I agree that you can’t just “make depression get better”, but in order to get better you absolutely do have to decide you want to get better- all the meds in the world aren’t going to help someone who’s world view is warped that they don’t believe getting better is a worthy goal. Meds are a literal lifesaver for countless people. But there really are times when they just don’t work. And while depression does come from nowhere and bite you in the ass, sometimes there are things you can do in your life that will help the recovery process along- and sitting in your room alone smoking pot for days on end isn’t one of those things.
FWIW, I’m a little dubious of the depression diagnosis here. I challenge any one of you to walk in to, say, a student health clinic, say a few sentences, and not walk out with meds in less than a half-hour. My own doctor told me “we like to prescribe first, it can’t hurt. If it doesn’t work we’ll try and figure out what’s wrong.” That doesn’t mean all depression diagnosis’s are wrong (god it’s so hard to talk about this stuff without riling people’s defenses), but it does mean that getting a bottle of meds doesn’t necessarily shed much light on a situation.
Right now it seems like we don’t have a “control” for this kid. It’s not like he was a happy successful lawyer with a great family who suddenly started getting depressed. And pot is widely known to make some people very unmotivated- I know plenty of perfectly happy potheads that can barely be bothered to wake up in the morning and who shape right up when pot isn’t available (or when they have to earn money to buy pot). There are ways that unhealthy mentalities can screw a person up outside of clinical depression, and there are ways that unhealthy behavoirs can make that situation worse. My personal WAG is that there is a good chance that this is what we are seeing here.
Are you a qualified therapist, sven? Do you know this family personally? Are you friends with this kid? I just want to know where you get off doubting this kid’s condition. What exactly did you read in this thread that gave you the knowledge everyone else seemed to miss?
No kidding. We already know that. So does DanBlather. That’s why he smashed his kid’s bong and is trying to take him to therapy now. What more do you think he should do? I’ll say it again: You don’t know enough about the situation to advise kicking this kid out of the house.
Dick he needs that
Says the pot smoker with the 7 year delayed reaction…
Heeeey, man, no need for rushing.
I can’t call this thread a Zombie.
(not without playing some Grateful Dead anyway…)
Bewildering resurrection aside, I am curious how the Tale of the Pothead Son turned out.
It’s been almost 2 1/2 years since DanBlather has posted, so I bet you won’t get an answer.
StG
… he needs dick?
I think us damn southerners ran him off.