Emma was 26 years old and living in Las Vegas when she first became severely paranoid and delusional about being “gang stalked”.
She was the third of 4 children, and was always that square peg that didn’t fit in a round hole. She and I did not get along, and she was “living in sin” in Vegas, imo. My husband did not seem to care what she was doing and we were perfectly content not hearing from her since almost all conversations turned into “Don’t tell me what to do” and all questions about what she was doing were met with a look that said “Don’t bother me.”
She was self centered, beautiful, independent, and focused on making a lot of money. Vegas fit her perfectly – and for the last 6 years, she lived there alone and did whatever she wanted to do, without any support from us. Her annual visits home during Christmas break were strained because of her attitude that she was better than us and she would give family members lavish gifts that no one really wanted. When she would leave to return to Vegas, I used to breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of her.
When she was away, we hardly talked on the phone. She might call once in a great while, or one of us would call her to see how she was doing, more as something we were supposed to do rather than what we wanted to do. I know I sound like a terrible mother, and for this child of mine, I was. She was like a child that I didn’t want.
Unbeknownst to us, she bought a $350,000 house in Vegas in the first year that she moved up to Vegas. With the lax requirements for qualification, Countrywide and a rather dirt bag realtor sold her a nice 3 bedroom 3 bath house in a gated community, brand new. Her goal was to have 25 houses by the time she was 25. A grand goal that was not realistic in a city that was in a huge real estate bubble with a crash coming the following year.
To pay for her house, she became a server and made a lot of money on tips. Money means nothing in Vegas, and $800 bottles of wine meant a lot of kick back for a young beautiful girl with plastic boobs. She worked at night and slept during the day.
About 4 years ago, her calls started to become more frequent, and she would say that her neighbors were loud and making trouble, and that her other neighbor hated her. She had a dirt bag of a boyfriend who was a cheater and user, and after she found out she had gotten a sexually transmitted disease from him, she dumped him and lived alone. Whenever she would call, it would be non stop about how other people were not good.
Soon after, her calls started to be scary. She talked about how men in black suits were always watching her, and that the government was out to get her. Black helicopters were always over her house or following her car, as well as police were trailing her. I would dismiss these as wild imagination and tell her to get over it, it wasn’t for real.
Sometimes she would call me several times during the day, as well as call her siblings who thought she was just paranoid and needed to chill. I mentioned it to a couple of friends of ours that lived in Vegas and they would see her from time to time. She seemed normal to them, but she would also tell them that some people were following her. She also became very fearful of Black people – men as well as women. She started looking up “gang stalking” and found several websites that went into great detail about it.
I looked it up also, and there was a woman writing extensively and repeatedly about how her life was ruined because the US government was out to get her and would invade her computers and how she had to escape and each time they would find her in her new job and invade her computer again and disrupt her life. She would post as a different person in answer to herself with the same story, and she was quite prolific and would post everywhere and anywhere and act like she was an authority and use her other postings to prove that other people were in the same dilemma.
Emma could not see that this woman was delusional and sick. Instead, the idea of being gang stalked consumed her and she became super paranoid and afraid of everyone and everything. It got so bad one night, I had to fly to Vegas and bring her home to us – broken, dazed, and almost out of her mind.
Her behavior at home went from strange to bizarre. A psychologist that we took her to suggested that we check her into the local hospital’s emergency room. After a few tests, they admitted her into the mental ward. They thought she was on drugs, but I knew that she wasn’t.
She stayed in the mental wing of the hospital for 10 days. We would go every evening to see her and bring her dinner. She wasn’t eating anything at the hospital because she thought they were poisoning her. The attending psychiatrist was a young woman with the bedside manners of a prima donna. She said that it was common to see people of this age have their “first break” of a psychotic episode. Her diagnosis was that Emma was schizophrenic and the odds she gave were 30% got better, 30% got worse, and 30% stayed the same. Thinking back, it is worrisome that such a young doctor already acts like they are God and interacts without heart. Her assessment of Emma as a schizophrenic stayed on as Emma’s diagnosis the way a tattoo remains on skin.
Because Emma was not eating in the hospital, the psychiatrist prescribed Zyprexa for Emma. First 10 mg, then 20. Emma was eating because she was now constantly hungry, and she also seemed to be more aware of her surroundings. She wanted to come home. Not sure if we were ready for her, but we did want her home too.
For the next 6 months at home, Emma got better. She started to see a well known psychiatrist with a good reputation as someone who knew what he was doing. Emma liked him right away – a rather good looking older man who was cool and hip. She was gaining a lot of weight with Zyprexa and her anxiety level was improving as well as her weirdness was diminishing, so he slowly began dropping the 20 mg of Zyprexa down to 15, 10, 7.5, and stabilizing at 5 mg.
Emma can be the most focused person if she has decided on a plan of action. Our town was too slow, too little to do, too restrictive for her, and she was set on going back to Vegas to live and make the big money serving drinks and wearing skimpy outfits.
Out of sight, out of mind. It was great when we didn’t hear from her, and when we did, she said everything was fine. She came home for Christmas and totally splurged on gifts for the family – spending thousands of dollars on things that no one really wanted. Evidently she was making a lot of money again, but this time, rather than saving or investing it, she was blowing it, and even bought a sporty little expensive car, trading in her reliable Toyota for it, getting ripped off by the dealer.
I knew something was up the month after when she asked to borrow some money to pay for her bills. This was also around the time that she had the Mirena IUD put in, and she “rolled” on Ecstacy with friends. A nurse friend pushed her to take it, even though he knew that she had had a breakdown and was on Zyprexa.
[Note: Emma recently admitted to using Ecstacy over 20 times during her high school years. We had no clue. It was during a time that my friend’s daughter was boarding with us, and the 2 of them would sneak out of the house, meet up with another friend and sneak back. This continued for quite awhile, until we caught them. Those Ecstacy trips were the best, according to Emma. This is something that a mother really doesn’t want to hear, and I would like to wring the neck of my friend’s daughter for her bad influence, but that is water under the bridge already.]
Emma used to be so adamant about not taking drugs, so even after we caught and stopped them from sneaking out anymore, I never suspected that she was getting high on drugs. Not knowing about their rendezvous with Ecstacy, I “returned” my friend’s daughter to her, because the two together would conspire and sneak out quite stealthily, and I thought that it would be easier for me to deal with one escape artist rather than two.
Emma did stop doing Ecstacy after her high school years. She went for schooling in Las Vegas, got a vocational certificate, and that is when the dirt bag realtor and Countrywide allowed her to get a house because they said they trusted that she would continue to pay her mortgage. If there was a turning point in her life, this was it. She could not come home – she had a huge mortgage to pay on a Vegas house that we knew nothing about.
Vegas is all about money and looks. Emma needed money, and she had great looks. Botox, plastic boobs, outrageous hair and makeup got her into the top clubs making huge tips. If you are a pretty girl in Vegas making a lot of tips, you are doing things that your parents really would not approve of. I knew she wasn’t a prostitute, but she did play up to men. I was always worried that someone would take advantage of her or that she would get hurt or killed one day, in the fast and furious sin city of Las Vegas.
[to be continued]