When I was 11 years old and living in a small town in Oregon, my mother came downstairs one day holding a gun. She told me, “Men are coming to rape you and chop you up.” She planned to end our lives herself.
I said, “OK, Mom, let’s just think for a minute...” She put the revolver down on the dining room table in front of me. My aunt burst in and told me to walk down the street to the police station. She said later that she threw the pistol in the Willamette River.
I was used to navigating my mom’s psychotic episodes — but this was the first time she had a gun. It wasn’t the last: My family has counted at least six firearms over the years. We have spent decades trying to keep her from using them to hurt herself, us, and other people.
I’m 54, and this task has shaped my life. Twenty years ago, I had to leave my publishing job in New York so I could be in Oregon, ready to help at all times. I have spent days in hospitals and courtrooms, hours on the phone, pleading with social service agencies for help that almost never materialized. For a long time, I gave up hope of having a husband and children, convinced it wouldn’t be safe for anyone.
And at the quiet suggestion of police officers, I have gone into my mother’s house — twice — to take her guns away. Once, that meant flying cross-country to break in while she was out running errands.
The officers didn’t suggest that lightly. They knew it was not legal for me to steal a gun, even from a dangerous family member. They knew it wasn’t legal for me to enter her home without her permission, or to do anything about her mental health or her guns without her agreement.
But they also knew the urgency — and that there isn’t much help available for families like mine.
After shootings at schools, stores and other public places, families often get blamed for not stopping violent incidents before they happen. But my experience shows that even trying their hardest, relatives of adults suffering from severe mental illness are not equipped to keep weapons out of their hands. Police, courts, the healthcare system and social service agencies don’t seem to be able to do the job, either.
Too often I’ve been told, “Our hands are tied.” My mother would have to be caught committing a crime to qualify for actual help.
Studies show that most people with mental illnesses are not dangerous or violent, and I worry that talking about my family’s plight will stigmatize people who already face so many problems. But we need to recognize that there are degrees of sickness, and that a single remedy won’t work for every situation — or every family.
Mom is definitely on the extreme end. But she is very smart and off-the-charts talented. Collectors treasure her “wearable art” jackets, which galleries sold to celebrities and socialites back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She taught me many things: to cook, sew, and refinish furniture; to work hard; to speak up for those who have less in life. She sang to me and told me to “Stand tall with what you’ve got,” as I was a tiny late bloomer.
But her co-occurring mental illnesses can involve terrible symptoms, including delusions and hallucinations, anger and impulsiveness. She cycles rapidly through mania and depression, sees demons, hears voices in cupboards, fears that terrorists or the government are spying on us. I get why she wants protection from what haunts her. Thus, the guns.
As far as I know, my mother has never actually shot anyone. (According to family lore, she fired at my stepdad once.) But she has harassed and threatened to kill almost everyone in her family, as well as neighbors, roommates and countless strangers. She once phoned me 45 times in a row until I called the police.
The officers in our small town know her. Thick stacks of police reports document her acting badly or claiming people were after her. She’s been taken off in squad cars and ambulances. In spite of all this, county mental health officials told me they consider her “high functioning.”
She has told me that the only place she’s ever felt safe is in a hospital. Until recently, I think she had spent a total of about a year in psych wards. Stays of a month or two helped her most.
But the psychiatric hospitals that people like her need were mostly closed decades ago, with no backup plan. Short stays at local hospitals were bandaids — but as soon as she was semi-stable, she wanted out, because of the cost for uninsured patients like her. Mom excels at “turning it on” for 5-10 minutes, long enough to fool busy mental health evaluators into thinking she is OK for release.
Because she had involuntary stays in psychiatric wards, federal law (and Oregon’s statutes) say she can’t legally buy guns. But that has not stopped her from getting weapons. She has inherited them, borrowed them and persuaded friends to give them to her. In my part of the country, like much of the United States, guns are everywhere.
I distanced myself from Mom after I married a wonderful man and had children whom I was determined to keep safe from her. A therapist assured me that agencies out there should be able to do this work, so I don’t have to anymore. I wanted to believe.
From afar, I helped support her financially, sometimes getting reports from my aunt and brother, Dylan, who live in our hometown. And I knew the police had my phone number.
In late 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I had to go back. According to my brother, Mom decided the student she rented a room to was going to attack her, so she started carrying around a loaded shotgun. After my brother hid the gun in the attic, she filed false reports about him, claiming he stole from her and physically abused her.
Then my 75-year-old mother left her house to wander around town in her car. We couldn’t find her. I later learned she spent a week in a nearby hospital. After being discharged, Mom got into a neighbor’s house and wouldn’t leave, complaining about “demons in the walls.” Before the police arrived, she took off. “Too bad,” an officer said to me. “If we caught her in the act, we could’ve finally gotten her real help.”
I called every agency I could think of and learned of new ones. Adult Protective Services, Senior Services and volunteers from the National Alliance on Mental Illness tried to be helpful. Police officers have been our most reliable allies over the years.
But the primary agency in charge, Adult Behavioral Health, treated me like a pest — and an adversary. Even when I said, “I understand privacy laws won’t let you tell me about her case, but please let me tell you her history and recent behavior. Do you know about the guns?”
A police officer told me about a new “Red Flag Law” petition I could try, which, if granted by a court, would at least require my mother to turn over any guns to the police. I got the name of a qualified lawyer from a state referral line (there were just two in Mom’s county). But the law was so new in Oregon — it took effect in 2018 — that the attorney said he wasn’t familiar enough with it to advise me.
I have since learned that Mom’s mental health diagnoses would not have been enough to get an Extreme Risk Protection Order; she would have had to make specific threats. In Oregon, law enforcement files the majority of petitions and has a higher success rate than families.
The lawyer suggested we ask the court for an involuntary commitment instead, so my mother could get better medical care. We did — but a judge denied it.
Someone reported to the police that Mom had abandoned her two poodles in her garage. An officer said that since I had helped with her dogs before, I could go in and rescue them now. “While you’re in there,” he added, “why don’t you get that gun out…”
So my brother and I did. We also removed a Tupperware container of shotgun shells, labeled “Ammo,” along with an Excalibur-style sword and some kind of homemade spear.
I loaded all this into my SUV, onto the backseat where my kids usually ride. I dropped the shells off at the police department; they said they could not take the gun.
By searching hospital parking lots, I found that Mom got herself to another psych ward and stayed for 10 days. No one told us when she was released. Instead of going home, she returned to her car.
Adult Behavioral Health finally told me they knew where she was, but couldn’t share that or intervene because they didn’t consider her “within 48-72 hours of imminent death.” So I drove around until I found her in a Safeway parking lot, surviving on cold hot dogs.
At that point, I tried to get a court-appointed guardian for Mom — but she refused that help. So I went back to checking in from afar.
Recently, I learned Mom is in a nursing home. She had developed physical problems during the pandemic, according to my brother. Again, medical privacy laws made it hard for me to find her, but eventually I talked to the social worker handling her case.
By some miracle, Mom had landed at one of the few facilities in our state, I’m told, that has a psychiatric wing attached. While Mom was receiving treatment in the regular wing, staff witnessed her delusions and recognized she needed more serious help. When all other systems fail, they told me, folks make it here. They promised me she would be cared for and ok.
Mom is sometimes catatonic, staff told me; sometimes she is agitated. But she is safe. They take her for ice cream and give her presents on her birthday. They do art therapy. And she doesn’t have access to weapons.
I haven’t visited her yet. After all that has happened, I’m very worried about disrupting the safe place she seems to have ended up in. I don’t know where else she could go.
Mom’s last gun is hidden away, still illegal for me to keep, also illegal for me to give to police, to destroy, or to otherwise dispose of.
I’m still searching for a legal way to get rid of it forever.
Adult Behavioral Health in Yamhill County, Oregon, did not respond to a request for comment.