I (21F) need help finding a living situation for my schizophrenic mother
I am in college in LA and my schizophrenic mother lives in my hometown. She's very severely schizophernic. When I was a senior in high school, there was an incident where she attacked my dad with a weapon while she was having a delusion, and she was taken into police custody.
After that, I didn't see her anymore. I didn't know what happened to her until she got back in contact with me a year later while I was in college. She's taking medication now and I believe everything is fine. I have been to visit her at her halfway house and she's better now than I've ever seen her before. She's being cared for under a government program called Telecare, which helps people rehabilitate.
The problem is that her probation will end in May and the halfway house wants her to find a new place to live and a job. She said that they don't like people to stay past their probation time, so it kind of sounds like they might kick her out. She hasn't been holding jobs very well. She's had a few telemarketing/call center jobs so far that she held for a few months. She's also very bad with money and has a lot of credit card debt that I don't even want to get into. I don't know how they expect her to pay rent on a place when she can't hold a job.
I suggested to her that she tries to get transferred to a program in LA, where I am, so that I could visit her and check up on her. What ended up happening though, is she told Telecare that she was gonna move to LA when her probation is over and they told her she could leave. She currently has no plan and no place to stay once she gets to LA. She's looking at motels but I know she won't be able to afford them without a job.
My question is: What can I do to help her? My dad has entirely abandoned her and is filing for divorce. We have no other relatives that we're in contact with. Me and my older sister are the only family she has. I'm really scared she's gonna end up being one of those crazy homeless people on the street because this seems like a path to homelessness. She can't live with me because I live in a college apartment with 5 people. I'm not sure if my sister would want her to permanently live with her and I don't want to put her in that position, she's only 2 years older than me. I want my mom to be in LA because she has nobody where she is now and for my own conscious, I want to be able to check up on her. Does anybody here know of any programs I should be looking into? I honestly don't have a lot of money because I can barley pay my rent and my loans, but if me and my sister needed to work out something where each of us paid half of her rent, I could get a second job. I don't want her to live alone because I believe she needs to be staying with people used to caring for schizophrenics to make sure she takes her medication, but I'm not sure if any programs here would take her in for free, or how expensive they would end up being. I also don't even know where to start looking for government programs that might help her.
I genuinely just need a place to start looking. I'm only 21 years old and obviously I've never had to be anybody's care taker and I don't even think I am in a financial situation to help her, but I'm gonna do what I can to keep her off the streets. If anybody has been in a similar situation, where did you get your schizophrenic loved one settled?
Posted Mar 12, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC