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Type 1 Anyone with experience of forced treatment (non-compliant teenager)

N

NaggingMum

Newbie
Messages
4
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
Our daughter (14) has been in and out of hospital over the last few months due to deliberately not looking after her diabetes. She has severe emotional problems (she is getting help with this) and is unfortunately communicating her feelings to us by refusing insulin and/or testing, sometimes not eating or drinking either. I think this is a way for her to she feel in control when her feelings are very out of control. Things are escalating and she was on an insulin drip recently, this was nearly forced on her but in the end she very reluctantly agreed. I fear she may soon start completely refusing all treatment in hospital. My question is...how easy is it to obtain permission to force treatment? Our daughter's lovely doc said he would need two doctors and CAMHS to agree, then the hospital director to sign it off. This would be for a max. of 72 hours, after which it will have to go to court. Anyone who has experience with their child of having gone through this? Is it straightforward to get this permission? Anyone had trouble with this due to their child deemed having capacity? I can imagine this will be a thing to worry about with her, especially as she gets older. She is able to understand the risks of non-treatment and chooses to do so anyway...
 
Thank you for the link, much appreciated. You're right of course, the problem lies very deep and is definitely not easily solved. We know how much she struggles with life, and also have a good idea of why. We are obviously working very hard to help her to feel better/less overwhelmed. Meanwhile though, I am terrified this will escalate and she will become medically very unwell.
 
In one of my other lives I am in contact with hoarders - emptying the house is not the way to cure them.
One of the common arguments used is the time it would take to sort out - so there is the quarter hour solution - only 15 minutes but every day.
Bringing that solution to this problem - would it be possible to ask your daughter to think about her diabetes for 15 minutes a day - maybe just 5 minutes at a time, and make a bargain that outside of those small sections of time it would be as though her diabetes did not exist - unless she wishes to discus it.
I don't have any experience of insulin use, but I suspect that it is not actually the problem here. I am assuming that five minutes morning, evening and before a main meal would resolve a lot of the dangers.
 
Hi Resurgam,

Thank you for your suggestion. We are parenting therapeutically, and we are very patient and accepting of her. We never tell her off or shame her etc. She will still perceive any gentle attempts to help her to manage her diabetes as 'nagging' (hence username!). She has an excellent therapist, we are very mindful of how we communicate with her. The diabetes isn't the main issue as such in her life (not saying this flippantly, I know it definitely can't be much fun). Without going into too much detail, there are other very important reasons (severe trauma) why she is not coping. The non-compliance is how she tells us she isn't coping. With all due respect, I'm not really looking for suggestions on how to help our daughter emotionally (we already know this is where the answer ultimately lies) as we're already doing this, but am interested to hear if there are other parents who've been in our situation. We really don't want to go down the road of forced treatment, as it will make her feel even more out of control, not good for her mental health. But we obviously don't want our daughter to become very seriously ill or worse. She was heading for DKA and it could only just be avoided this time round.
 
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