US Authoritarianism

My girlfriend tried to self medicate for years before I met her to deal with her mental health issues. We dated for about a year when I noticed things going off the rails, and she was acting like a bad person, going into fugue like states, and getting in trouble with neighbors and the police.

I had no resources to do anything for her at the time, and I kicked her out to her parents for her own sake, as one of the neighbors she was either intentionally or unintentionally messing with was the kind where I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to use some castle doctrine actions and they also had 2 edgy German Shepard type dogs.

She was one good terms with her family, and I had been discussing her state with them for a few weeks, since I had been noticing her behavior get worse but they hadn't been around her enough to notice I guess. I had no idea she had any actual medical issues at this point, so I was really lost and confused as to what was going on, so I had been secretly calling them a few times trying to figure out why she was acting so different.

Her parents were fairly well-to-do, at least compared to me. They owned a decent sized business the grandfather had started and left to them, and they had the resources to get her voluntarily committed until they could clean her up off street drugs and get a working regimen of real medicine and they got her into therapy and DBT class.

I went to see her almost every day, and now that I had a clear picture of what had been going on, I was relieved to know it was something that could be treated and we could work on. I had mainly been concerned she was an asshole and it had been an act to that point. Her family was able to cover her during that period and until she was able to get on disability.

Fast forward a few years, and we rebuilt her credit through a prepaid credit card, I fronted the money to send her to community college, and I handled everything else so she could focus on her therapy and classes.

Now she has a better relationship with her family than I do with mine, she has a better paying and more satisfying job than I do, and she is really loving life and being the best person she can be. I don't know what it cost her family to have her hospitalized for a month and for the lawyer that helped get some medium severity charges she got while being blackout out, and it required a ton of patience on all our parts and to be supportive while watching her struggle for the first few years afterward, as she had extreme anxiety and self-consciousness problems after falling down so hard.

So many people do not have a support network like that, and she could easily have ended up homeless, jailed, or dead if we weren't all there and able to play our parts. All these people were someone's child, someone's friend at some point in time. My family would not have put in that effort or expense for me. I learned so much from the experience, and I'm forever grateful that she had people she could count on and had the ability to take care of her needs when she couldn't. It's so easy for life to take a different path.