Category Archives: Mental Health

Articles relating to mental health are in this category. Typically they will fall into one of two categories. Yours, or your child’s. Yes, your mental health is important.

Gran Mal Seizure

Today, we had a staffing for David.  These occur monthly.  Participants include social workers, therapists, and parents. By all accounts, he is doing well.  For the most part he is stable.  Residence staff reported that since the seizure on Friday, David has been rather subdued.  He seems to be nervous or upset about what happened.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about it. Medical reported that David’s seizure wasn’t caused directly by the Wellbutrin.  Wellbutrin simply lowered his threshold so that an underlying condition is more prominent. That said, David will be scheduled for testing to see what level of seizures he has been having. In hindsight, he has exhibited some aspects of seizures.  There are times in the past where teachers have noticed that David has “vacated” or gotten a look in his eye.  Could this have been an ongoing sign of seizure activity?  We don’t know. 

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and then we get a phone call….

that says “your son has had a seizure, and is on the the way to the emergency room via ambulance.” It was nearly two hours before I noticed the message on my cell phone, which tells me a number of things. They didn’t attempt all of the communications methods that we listed in the paperwork for his admission. They didn’t call both home and cell phone for dad.  UPDATE  they did leave a message on our home phone. They didn’t call both work and cell phone for mom. They didn’t call the third party emergency contact. They didn’t email me until after I had sent a message arranging for our Sunday visit.  And by this time, it was more of an “Don’t know if you got my message or not, but David had a seizure today around 1:45…” In the end, preliminary indications are that he had an allergic reaction

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Parent Teacher Conferences – A joy for David

Mom and I went to Parent Teacher Conferences at the PRTF where David lives last night.  To say that we were surprised in what we heard would be an understatement.  By all accounts, David is doing well. Compared to last year, when he couldn’t be kept in the classroom, now, he does the work.  Not without redirects, but hey, this is a kid with severe mental illness, just keeping him in the classroom is a start. He has a difficult time staying on task, but with a teacher that was reminiscent of Bonnie Franklin from One Day at a Time, he is making headway this year.  Even the keyboarding teacher had positive things to say about David, and he is doing very poorly in her class. This is in stark contrast from what we hear in the monthly staffing that we attend where we go over his treatment plan.  All

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