Oh, absolutely. I've been in individual therapy weekly for ten years, and we have a counselor that sees our family (my husband and I alone half the time, ourselves with our daughters the other half) every week, too. Both have offered to make statements to the social services investigators.
I know reddit can't offer advice on what to do about the CPS thing. I know what to do anyway — hire an attorney and cooperate with them. (reddit might offer a variation on screaming, "AM I BEING DETAINED?" — yelling "AM I BEING DETAINED?" seems like a great way to get yourself arrested because the officer is tired of your being a dick. Children's services has even more power. No, playing their game is to everyone's benefit.)
It's that I've tried every intervention I can, and … I'm not sure when you say, "You know what, I tried, I love you always because I'm your mother, but you want to drop out of school, you want to steal money, you want to use us and treat us terribly — I have another kid to worry about, and you need to go figure out your life. I will weep and worry every single day, but I can't make your life work, and you not only won't let me help, you will hurt me every time I try." to a kid.
There are definite limits, and she hasn't gotten a criminal record yet — but she's looking at expensive colleges, she's talking about doing a gap year, all this sort of thing that would be totally reasonable if she wasn't draining us financially on therapy and treatment, and actually did her schoolwork. (At $1750 a day for residential treatment, a good part of which isn't reimbursable by insurance …)
I know parents who are saying they can't wait for their teenagers to go to college, that they're tired of the nagging and arguing, and yeah, I'm tired of the nagging and arguing, but this is … different. And I'm not sure, in good conscience, I can endorse her applying to college, given what happened last time we sent her away to school. Certainly I doubt she'd finish even the first semester at this point.
She's either disconnected with reality or disconnected with morality, and either way, I just feel like I'm out of everything I could give her. She's enthusiastic about beginning treatment, but I'm afraid her next step will be to become a professional patient. I know people who did that, and not only am I not okay with her walking that road, if she doesn't finish school, our health insurance won't cover her for that much longer. I think she'd be singing a very different song if she wasn't in an expensive hospital with a huge landscaped campus.
I also feel like what benefit she could have gotten out of this brief stay — it's all about CBT and DBT — is now going to be erased by her understandable fixation on the potential implosion of her family. The terrifying part is that given how she is as a person, she's going to see how she can twist all of this to her advantage.