<p>If you feel you “need to know” when her appointments are, then you will either (a) have to rely on your daughter to tell you or (b) ask her to change the contact information at the Drs office and ask them if they will courtesy call you and/or you will need to call them. For the gazillionth time, your daughter is holding all the cards. I hope and pray you will be able to see this. And NO you do not have to listen to her complain. Walk.Away. </p>
<p>Please take a look at the inconsistencies even in the above post. First you say “We pay for her therapy appointments but not the ones she does not go to” followed a few lines later by “Thus far we owe for d’s missed psychiatrist bill and two therapy apointments. This will make the third missed therapy appointment”. So you are planning to pay? Yes? No?</p>
<p>You are currently financially responsible for her missed appointments, and correct, insurance does not cover for a non-service. But this is also disruptive to the therapists schedule and also to the therapy process. Do not be surprised if the therapist suggests that your daughter see someone else. An adult therapy patient who requires constant reminder calls and is then unreliable and not invested in their therapy process is unfortunately not a recipe for success. Most adult therapy patients who have regular appojntments, even if they are on differing days/times, are not given “reminder calls” by the drs office. Your daughter is acting like, and being treated like, a 5 year old.</p>
<p>No we are not paying… But with these missed appointment she is not paying either. I used “we” because I feel terrible that she is cancelling these appointments and there are outstanding bills. I don’t like knowing that money is owed to anyone. I would love to know when the therapist will address getting paid in bigger installments than my daughter is putting out.</p>
<p>Jym…I agree with the last paragragh. I am wondering how long this could go on.</p>
<p>If you have signed to be the garantor then you are responsible for the bills. If you dont pay, be prepared for them to move it on to a collection agency if need be (hope it wont get that far), but from what you have said, YOU are currently responsible for the bills (the outstanding balance). I fully expect that if you do not bring the account current, the therapist will not continue to reschedule your daughter’s appointments. And you probably will not know a word about this. Once again, your daughter is giving you the shaft. And you are taking it. Please. Stop. This is truly painful to watch.</p>
<p>By the way, if you do refuse to pay for the missed appointments and the therapist declines to reschedule your daughter’s appointments, your daughter will blame you. We can all see this one coming down the pike. And if you require yoru daughter to repay you (which you should) she’ll claim she cant afford it and will yell at you and also claim this is why she can’t afford to move out or to take a cab where she needs to go or to pay for her therapy.</p>
<p>ugh…I can see that one coming too but I just can’t stand this. Jym…as a therapist how do you thionk I should proceed with this regarding the billing? I of course want her to go but I don’t want to fall hostage to her incurring bills. If the policy is under our name can we get her financially responsible for the bills? I don’t recall signing anything about the payment…Is that just a given that the insured is responsible even for an over 18 year old covered on your plan?</p>
<p>Momma, it may be your insurance, but it is not quite like car insurance where if you own the car they are going to come after you. They can hold an adult responsible for payment even if it is the parent’s insurance. The question is whether by course of dealing, i.e. you paying the bills they can establish that you have agreed to also be responsible. This is a legal question. That is why everyone has said, write to the Dr. and say that you will no longer be responsible. That clearly sets a date where they can no longer look to you.</p>
<p>BTW, what Jym said in #923, seems likely to me too.</p>
<p>I had to sign off, the dogs got into a fight and glassware was all over the floor - I just wanted to add that because your D is likely to react as Jym says, it would be important to let her know, step by step what you are doing; i.e I am not going to pay. I am writing to dr. X. etc.</p>
<p>Now back to jym’s suggestions on how to handle.</p>
<p>If I walk you through how I would suggest you handle this, m-3. will you commit here on this thread to all who are reading that you will do it ??</p>
<p>Granted I know nothing about this situation other than what I have read. But, how useful is it for your D to go to individual therapy? She is obviously not committed to the process so no gains can be made. It seems that the best bang for the money would be family counseling. You, your H, and your D all have different goals and somehow need to come together to plan your D’s living situation, whether that be at your house or elsewhere. A therapist can also help lay out some sort of contract for you all to agree to.</p>
<p>Insurance usually does not pay for missed therapy appointments. She is an adult and this should be her responsibility and structured into the therapy as such; it is a clinical as well as a billing issue. I thought that you had communicated to the therapist that you would not be scheduling appointments or covering missed appointment charges from here on out. Others may disagree with me, but I think it should be her responsibility in the therapy to cover those charges. Addressing late cancellations and no-shows has a lot of clinical value on many levels. You can call the therapist and ask (I think some therapists would want missed appointment charges to be the adult patient’s responsibility because of the clinical ramifications) and discuss this. If I was the treating therapist, I’d have a lot of concerns about this, apart from being paid. If you pay, it seems to replicate an unhealthy pattern where she can act out and you have to experience the consequences. I would want to work something out that was fair to me but also made her responsible for her choices.</p>
<p>Is your DH on board with not paying for missed therapy? Changing the billing information with the therapist so the bills are clearly D’s responsibility? Not saying you couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t pay for the appointments she keeps, but not being financially responsible, making it your choice.
I really think you should take jym up on his offer to walk you through this process. Something has to change. And if your DH is tuning it out, not on the same page, well I’d be taking him to a therapist to work out a plan. Your well being is at serious risk here.</p>
<p>It seems to me that this thread is replaying a fair amount of what is going on in m3’s house. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Many of us tell m3 over and over what to do, even when she apparently is not doing it. Just like in m3’s household, where D does not do what she is told over and over to do.</p></li>
<li><p>Many of us tell m3 to reduce contact with D substantially, since D is an adult and does not do as m3 wishes. We ourselves, however, are not modeling this behavior by reducing contact with m3 when she does not do as we wish. If anything, we are increasing our involvement.</p></li>
<li><p>Many of us object to m3 micro-managing D’s life. We ourselves, however, are willing to attempt to micromanage m3.</p></li>
<li><p>Many of us urge m3 to limit her emotional involvement with D. We ourselves, however, openly express frustration with m3.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I am so tired this morning…two sons left for school other son off at work. I have three clients to meet later and four presentations to complete. I am leaving now for my morning visit with my dad. Too much to do today so I will be on and off throughout the day.</p>
<p>ADad…I am making changes. They are slow but they are so out of my normal way that I just can’t make them happen over night. I have tried very hard to not only hear but put things into place. I am not feeding into my daughter any more when she rants and I thionk she is getting tired of not getting the reaction she wants. Today I let her sleep and when she did wake up she knew she blew getting to class on time…her problem not mine. You just can’t change everything over night or even in the course of months. I have learned so much but I am also processing it and implementing little by little.</p>
<p>jym, what I said was if D gave the office permission to leave messages on the home phone when she filled out the initial forms, then the office could call the home number (I’m not saying they should follow m-3’s requests). I’ve (unfortunately) filled out close to a dozen variants of the form you were talking about - just in the past year, but thankfully, not a single psychiatrist’s one : )</p>
<p>m-3, please do what jym and everyone else says: pay the bills past due and remove your name from that office’s forms. If any of these bills is more than 90 days past due, chances are it is already in the hands of a collection agency. You took out an umbrella policy to protect your assets from being ruined by D’s reckless driving. Are you willing to let your D ruin your credit score and jeopardize your business?</p>
<p>I know other suggested getting your name off the therapist’s office forms as the one who has to pay. That is one possibility going forward. </p>
<p>I made another suggestion. That was that when each appointment is missed, your D pays you immediately directly. Your D earns money at a job and I imagine has some sort of bank account or savings account of at least $100, yes? If she refuses to pay you, consequences are given. </p>
<p>Further, insist on knowing the appointment schedule (from your D directly) each week in advance as you are now the driver and impacted by fitting this into your schedule. Each week you ask her to tell you the appointment time. If she is not forthcoming, consequence is given.
<p>Aside from that, as you know, it has been advised to you many times that D live on her own and learns to take on responsibility as she'll be forced to. I was wondering, since your D belongs to a sorority at her university, if they have a sorority house she can live in?</p>
<p>~~~~~~~~~~
If I may, I am confused about your oldest son. I believe you said he went to MIT and has since graduated, right? You said today he went to work. Does he now live at home? I thought you said that once the boys leave after winter break, it is just you, H, and your D. I thought your three boys live away from home (the twins are seniors at Cornell and the oldest works?)</p>
<p>soozie, I think somewhere in this thread or perhaps another, m3 said college grad S was going to live at home while working for a while…</p>
<p>apropos of what ADad said above, if m3 talks to us or the H and m3 talk about the D but not to the D about the problems, they are never going to get anywhere. As has been said ad nauseum before in this thread, M3 can only change her behavior, and she has said that she is slowly doing that. All the suggestions in the world about what M3 can or can not do will not help much until M3 is ready to do something.</p>
<p>Agree with everything Mimk6 and ADad said in posts 928 and 930. I had decided to stop posting in this thread for all the reasons ADad so beautifully delineated, but got pulled back in to correct something that was mis-attributed to me yesterday afternoon. </p>
<p>Bunsenburner-
Did you fill out new patient forms on yourself or for family members (eg your kids) in doctors offices? It will make a little bit of difference in terms of who the Drs office will/ can appropriately call if they are using a form filled out by the patient vs the patient’s family member. And as you said-- you are fortunate that none of these forms happened to be in a mental health providers office, where the confidentiality bar gets set pretty high.</p>
<p>Mom2mom-
I am not a “he” I am just an increasingly frustrated parent who happens to have experience in this field, as do several of the other posters here. I am using a stronger “voice” here, as a parent, than I would in my office with clients. I am not wearign my professional hat-- jsut a parent with knowledge in this area.</p>
<p>M3-
The pace of some of the changes you need to make need to be quickened, such as this one re: the responsibility for payment. Your dau has no reason to show up for her appointments if she feels there is nothing of value in it for her and there is no consequence to her for no-show’ing or late cancelling. It is one more example of the SAME THING over and over and OVER, as everyone here is saying. Mimk6 did a beautiful job of addressing how the noncompliance can be worked with as part of the therapeutic process. That said, there are limits as to how much any client will be permitted to run ripshod over a doctors or therapists schedule before the doctor elects to refer the patient out elsewhere. I would bet this is about to happen to your daughter. I have made my offer to suggest how you may handle this issue re: financial responsibility for the appointments your daughter scheduled, but to be blunt, I want to hear a commitment that you will do it. No excuses.</p>
<p>Momma-three when one of my kids was seeing an out of town therapist I made arrangements to pay the bills. I talked with the billing person and gave them my credit card. They took my money but never was anything signed that I would be respondsible for the bill. The SS number they had on file was my D’s. My D was hospitalized and missed a couple of appointments. I called and let the therapist know. I assumed they would cancel all scheduled appointments. They did not. Fast forward two years, D has moved and she pulls her credit report and she has a collection item. After some research it is from this therapist who billed D for two missed visits. Therapist knew d was in the hospital. The point of this is that while I was paying the bills and the therapist knew it I was not legally respondsible for the bills.
I think I would find out who is legally respondsible in your D’s case. It might very well be her own credit she is screwing up if it goes to collection. If the bills are legally yours pay them, remove yourself from respondsiblity and tell your D. Protect your credit.
I think it is a terrible idea for you to try to collect missed appointment costs from your D. You will be lose all the way around. Your D will make each payment a nightmare. Turn over to your D all her own “stuff”. She is 20 yrs old and functions fairly well when she wants to. Give her the dignity of taking care of her own business. She might have to learn the hard way but she will feel so much better about herself because she did it herself.
Try this mantra for a few days -I will not do for someone else what they are capable of doing for themselves.
Please take care of yourself. Get a facial or a massage or go out for a peaceful walk. If you keep up this way of living you are going to end up in the hospital.</p>
<p>ADad, great post (#930)! I think some here are way too invested in what M-3 does or doesn’t do. </p>
<p>Someone mentioned that “Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” That is exactly what some posters are doing in this thread by posting the same advice over and over. It isn’t getting the desired results, so why are these posters continuing to do this?</p>
<p>I think some posters attach too much importance to their opinions…</p>
… but isn’t this exactly what the OP is doing? I think that the posters on this thread can see that this situation is essentially unchanged from the beginning of the thread - and not much changed from M-3’s earliest threads about her daughter, going back to 2009. Perhaps we feel that we can somehow make something that’s so obvious to us apparent to the OP, if we just say it often enough.</p>
I am just an increasingly frustrated parent who happens to have experience in this field, as do several of the other posters here. I am using a stronger “voice” here, as a parent, than I would in my office with clients. I am not wearign my professional hat-- jsut a parent with knowledge in this area.</p>