I lost an Aunt to Mental Illness... Here in CA, family has very little course of action when dealing with the mentally ill. Despite being picked up multiple times for all kinds of endangerment to herself, every time she spent her mandatory 72 hours under psychiatric care, she would take enough anti-psychotics to say the words she needed to say in order to get herself released from State custody: "I will continue to take my medications, and I will no longer be a threat to myself or anyone else." It used to be that we would hear from social workers every 6 months or so, but then things went silent for over a year. It turns out she was catatonic in a hospital in PA... then she got herself back to CA, got free, and went back to "Looking for her Family." (Her schizophrenia has her thinking that we are all moving "away" and she has to keep hitch-hiking to catch up with us. As it turns out, the Pope has also planted diodes in her brain, my mother has 17 love children with George Steinbrenner, and I am the second coming of Jesus. Despite how many times we have gone before Judges, and Doctors asking for them to commit her, they won't because she has "the liberty to choose her own destiny."
Neither we, nor her children, have heard any word from her in over two years. I pray that she is safe, but I fear that she is gone onto the next life.
