By Emalee Gillis, NAMI Spokane Blog Editor.
At NAMI Spokane, we have highlighted stories of people who have learned to live well with their mental health conditions in our Recovery is Possible series. However, all stories do not end so well. Some end in tragedy. This is one of those stories.
Roxann McNaughton of Spokane continues to grieve for her bipolar son, Nick, whom she lost by suicide, almost three years ago when he was 31.
Roxann has many positive memories of Nick as a youngster. For example, when he started fourth grade and his teacher asked Roxann what the teacher should know about Nick, Nick jumped in and said, “Tell her I’m a genius.”
But in the throes of his illness, Roxann lost her positive and upbeat son who turned into an impatient and unreasonable man with violent outbursts of anger. She saw the first signs of this new personality when her son turned eighteen. He called her with a voice buried in his throat and said only, “You didn’t keep your promise.”
Shortly thereafter, he showed up on her doorstep wanting to live with her again. She let him move in. He didn’t have a car, so he demanded that Roxann drive him to apply to different jobs even though she worked full-time, sometimes seven days a week. Once, he went into a rage when she wouldn’t wait two hours for him to get a haircut when he hadn’t even made an appointment.
In addition to the personality change, Roxann observed a dramatic change of sleeping patterns. Nick would stay awake 24 hours a day for days on end while he worked at math problems on the kitchen table. Then, he would sleep for days on end.
Roxann tried to get Nick mental health care. She drove him to Frontier Behavioral Health. Within a few minutes, he was back in the car saying that people in there are crazy.
Roxann was able to get a mental health care professional to come to the house, but her son refused to come home while the professional was there. Within a few weeks, Roxann was able to get another mental health care professional to come to the house. Nick met with that person, but turned the tables and focused the conversation of his Mom’s needs.
For more than a decade, Nick lived on and off with Roxann. When he was there, the house was filled with arguments. Nick blamed his mother for not staying with his Dad. He blamed his mother for what he saw now as an unhappy childhood. He blamed her for whatever was wrong in his life.
When he lived with her, Roxann couldn’t sleep. She was always worried about what was going to happen next. For example, one day he was completely restless and couldn’t sit still. She told him to drink some water, instead, he picked up a jug of fish fertilizer and started to drink that.
Things came to a head one afternoon. Nick was in his bedroom when Roxann asked him through the closed door for his keys so she could move his car and gets hers into the driveway. He started yelling obscenities at her. She opened the door and he threw a shoe at her. Then he slammed a hole in the door and then the wall. Roxann called 911. Nick was arrested for domestic violence and spent a night in jail. Then, he moved to his Dad’s house.
In his late 20s, Nick began seeing a psychologist and saw the professional faithfully each week for two and a half years. He refused medications for years, but eventually the psychologist was able to get him on an anti-depressant, but he still had symptoms.
On April 19, 2022 at the age of 31, Nick went missing. He was living at the time with a man he considered to be his mentor, but whom Roxann questioned whether he was a good influence on Nick. This man reported Nick’s absence to Roxann and the police were called. Ironically, Nick’s life seemed to be going better at the time. He had a janitorial job and there was talk that he could be a supervisor at some point.
While Nick was missing, Roxann took the NAMI Family to Family course. This course is designed to support family members of those who have a mental health condition. One of the main things that Roxann got out of that course was healthier ways of communicating with someone who was experiencing a mental health condition and how to separate herself from feeling personally attacked. She looked forward to trying these new methods when Nick came back. She also learned of the peer to peer NAMI support group and wondered if her son would join it and if he could learn from his peers ways to improve his mental health.
On July 21, 2022, Roxann opened her door to a policeman and a chaplain. She knew immediately she had lost her son. They told her he had two phones, a wallet and a gun with him when he died. He had climbed over a barbed wire fence to get into a local abandoned landfill, then killed himself with the gun. Later, Roxann found a receipt for a gun. He had had that gun for some time before he used it.
Roxann had two friends from Seattle help her put together a celebration of life for her son and Roxann began her journey with grief. She joined a group call Bipolar Hope and that helped. She also joined a Facebook group on grieving the loss of a child. For a long time, she didn’t talk about her son, but has since found that talking about him helps.
Roxann suffers from depression, and after Nick was gone, she experienced depression for longer periods. She is on medication for depression. However, Roxann works hard to be positive. She says, “Being positive is what I hang my hat on.” It also really helps her to be outdoors. Being in nature helps her put things in perspective and help things calm down. That was one of the things she had tried to teach her son.
One of the main things Roxann has learned during her journey with grief that helped her to survive is to live one minute, one hour, one day, one month at a time when you’ve suffered a devastating loss. That is the best answer she has to the question, “How do you continue to live?”
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The NAMI support group for family members of those with a mental health condition, meets in-person on the third Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at the NAMI offices at 152 S Jefferson Street and virtually on the third Tuesday from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. To register for the in-person group, click here, although participants can go to the in-person group without registering. To register for the virtual group, click here.
The next 8 week course for family members of those with mental health conditions will be offered Fall 2024 on Saturday afternoons. To register, send an email to office@namispokane.org. The support groups and 8 week courses are offered free of charge.
Roxann McNaughton is a nurse who owns a foot care business. She is also a facilitator for NAMI Spokane’s Family to Family course.
Emalee Gillis is a writer and blog editor. She is the author of the memoir Adventures on the Path to Living Well with a Mental Illness and has a related TEDx Talk.