What to do for a person spiralling (mental health)

In My Humble Opinion
1

As I may have mentioned before, my daughter spent some time in a residential facility in another state. She’s doing ok-ish - is not always good with keeping up with dishes, regular food etc. - but she has a friend (fellow alumna) who is NOT doing nearly as well.

Off her meds, self-medicating using weed, has lost job, has lost home due to crazy behavior around roommates, and is posting some bizarro stuff online. There has, supposedly, been a recent hospitalization but Moon Unit does not know the details - my suspicion is that it was a “72 hour psych hold” or similar, NOT one where they actively tried to straighten out meds.

Daughter knows she can’t “save” friend - even she said she couldn’t provide a home for the friend due to a) she doesn’t have room, and b) she can’t deal with the situation either. But, she cares about the friend, and is looking for ideas on how to steer the friend to help, or to steer help to the friend.

The only real suggestions I had were to contact the facility for any info they could provide regarding agencies etc., and to contact her state’s department of mental health.

The friend’s family is not useful. Lots of history there; I know relatively little but what I do know is pretty bad.

Any other ideas?

2

Best thing she can do for her friend is to offer peer support — she’s been in the situation herself, won’t position herself as a certified expert, but can advise.

The problem, when your mind is off on a tangent or in a mode that other people don’t corroborate, is that you’re deprived of any form of the everyday validation that the rest of us get from each other. So even if you have a mind that can parse sense from nonsense, it’s really easy to get off on a shaky footing and then build way too much on it, invest too much in it (and then you’re wary of questioning it much for exactly that reason). It’s also a situation that makes you distrustful of officials who Know What’s Best For You. The sanity that they represent doesn’t acknowledge your tangent, or the possibility of being on one that isn’t pathological if it departs from the normative, you know? So a peer — another one of us — who is available for conversation means a lot.

3

Thanks - I’ll pass this on to my daughter.