Joyce
11-01-2007, 01:23 PM
I have an 18 year old ADHD son who is on Adderall and is living on a college campus. He started on marijuana as a sophomore in high school and we took him to counseling and that’s when he began treatment for ADHD. He may be using his book funds to buy marijuana, because he makes cash withdrawals and then lies to us. Before the end of summer the counselor asked that we take him to the psych doctor because there may be a “biological component” to our problems with him, since he was going into rages whenever we confronted him. He is depressed, he maybe has what the psych doctor referred to as “baby bipolar” and he received an extremely low dose of Lithium for it but my son will only take it intermittently. We are also concerned that he is selling/trading his Adderall because he used it at double the rate he had in the past. Again, we feel he snowed us because he said he just decided to use it a lot.
The counselor said the best thing would be for my son to cut his ties with us because our relationship is so damaged. We have spied in the past (reading emails and text mails which gave us this information). The counselor is disgusted with us because we spied on him, and disgusted with my son because he gave us good reason to spy. We could tell that the last time we were in his office the counselor was done with us. Your advice to parents is not to spy, yet we feel that we were trying to save him from the very path we saw other family members take. There is a strong history of addiction & alcoholism in my family, plus some emotional disorders. My husband told my son not to come home anymore from college if he is using. My son denies his use. We are at a standstill and the pain is too unbearable for all of us. Do we listen to the counselor and let my son cut the ties? Do we encourage him to break the ties with us?
The counselor said the best thing would be for my son to cut his ties with us because our relationship is so damaged. We have spied in the past (reading emails and text mails which gave us this information). The counselor is disgusted with us because we spied on him, and disgusted with my son because he gave us good reason to spy. We could tell that the last time we were in his office the counselor was done with us. Your advice to parents is not to spy, yet we feel that we were trying to save him from the very path we saw other family members take. There is a strong history of addiction & alcoholism in my family, plus some emotional disorders. My husband told my son not to come home anymore from college if he is using. My son denies his use. We are at a standstill and the pain is too unbearable for all of us. Do we listen to the counselor and let my son cut the ties? Do we encourage him to break the ties with us?