My dad recently reconnected with his old friend who is our neighbor and the dad of one of my sister’s best friends. We’ve known the family forever and he’s always been a little bit of a party guy, but apparently he’s having a full fledged mid life crisis. He has my dad drive him to bars often, he forgets his car in the parking lots, and he’s busy picking up young women while he’s out drinking like crazy. He also claims he brings home “friends” from the bar and they continue to party into the night some nights. My dad doesn’t really like spending time with him since he is so irresponsible and has tried to limit their interactions to getting him food or bringing him places. His friend however gets so drunk that he THINKS my dad has spent the entire night with him.

Yesterday, he called my dad in a panic and said there was an “intruder alert” and that he saw a hand that was bleeding. He thought maybe he had cut it. He said he needed my dad’s help and asked him to come over. We obviously told him to call the police because like hello! We aren’t equipped to handle an intruder! My dad was still determined to go over and check on him, but thankfully we got him to wait until the police got there. The police got there and…there was no one in the house. They asked if his friend had any mental health issues but my dad said he didn’t think so. The guy claims he has celiac disease and that somehow causes him to hallucinate sometimes. I looked it up and I guess that’s a thing…..but I got the impression it was pretty rare so idk if I am buying that. Anyway he was completely freaked out and asked my dad to stay with him, but we were going to a concert so we couldn’t. The police left him with no resources. My mom contacted his ex-wife since we were worried about his mental state to see if she knew someone who could stay with him. She also mentioned that he actually did have a history of hallucinations and said it was probably best if we weren’t around.

My sister texted her friend and she said he actually had a similar spell just a few months ago where he called the police thinking someone was in his home. They found him hiding in his tub with a gun. Luckily, they took his gun away, but the daughter confirmed he now had a switchblade. She said that he had told her that he saw the arm and was slicing at his couch where he thought it was, so it really seemed like he could be a danger to himself. He texted us later during the concert to say some friends came over and he felt safe, so we thought that we could at least leave him be for the night.

Nope. Today my dad followed up with him to see if he was doing okay and remembered anything. Turns out no one actually came over last night and he didn’t sleep at all. He also was crying and said he got a phone call from his mom saying she didn’t have much time. Problem is, his mom is in a nursing home and can’t talk, so we knew something was still up. My dad brought him some water and Gatorade and said he seemed really distraught. He was worried he might hurt himself, and the way he was talking about his conversation with his mom it seemed like it might be an end of life goodbye type of deal. His daughter decided she should go out to see him and try to convince him to go to a hospital. She contacted the police who responded to him yesterday to see if they could go with her since she was scared, but they said since he wasn’t actively a threat they could not help. We called the non emergency line as well and tried to emphasize that like, this guy is hallucinating he is not safe alone! But the police said they could send out a crisis unit in about 30 minutes and that was it.

We ended up going with his daughter to try and back her up. I haven’t seen this guy since I was a kid, so I felt weird tagging along, but I didn’t want to be home alone while everything went down. The guy seemed exhausted and out of it. He was drinking a beer when we got there. What was crazy though is he was ACTIVELY hallucinating while we were there. He thought he saw a pizza delivery man twice and was talking to him. He told us he had 8 friends from the bar over, but no one was there. He thought water was dripping from his ceiling onto his skin, but nothing was there. He would come in and out of it. Like he’d joke about hallucinating, but then tell us he saw something that wasn’t there in all sincerity. The crisis workers finally showed up after about 30 minutes as promised, but they were just volunteers and couldn’t do much. They tried to interview him, but he refused to talk to them because he admitted he wasn’t in his right state if mind and this wasn’t a fair judgement of him. They spoke with his daughter too, but they ultimately decided they couldn’t force him to go to the hospital and left.

His daughter pleaded with him to seek some sort if help, just for his “celiac” if nothing else, but he refused. His excuse was he was pretty sure his mom was going to die tonight and he didn’t want to miss that call. His daughter was smart and asked to see the call records because she wasn’t convinced they had talked either. There was no trace of him calling her nursing home. His fighter called the nursing home to ask if her grandma was okay and if she had tried to make any calls today. The lady at the desk said no, everything was fine with the grandma and actually her dad had called earlier, but to ask if he called before that!! I guess he forgot that call. We finally had to leave once it was getting late, it was clear we weren’t going to convince him to go anywhere.

I feel bad for his daughter, she really tried. I know you can’t force someone to get help, but I genuinely don’t understand why he wasn’t deemed a threat to himself. He has had his gun confiscated for a similar incident. He has a switchblade that he obviously was swinging around at imaginary people. He’s having full fledged conversations with people that aren’t there. His arms are covered in sores….he says that from his celiac too but idk. His house is also kind of falling apart. It’s loaded with junk and there is a hole in the ceiling from a leak that happened a while back. He has a Christmas tree still upstairs because he struggles to make it to the upper level of his house by himself. I feel like he is at a tipping point, I wish there were other resources for him to maybe try and help in the interim? Luckily we live close, so we promised his daughter we’d try and stay in touch for the next few days to let her know if things start to improve.