I have 3 brothers and i am the oldest. I have a good family and we where raised well, so that nature vs. nurture is out of the question here. The 2nd to the youngest brother had his first mental break at 17 and i thought he was smoking crack. I was so afraid and i didnt know how to deal with it. We brought him to the ER and found out he had a mental illness. i was then relieved, but not for long. He was in many hospitals and tried many meds until one worked.
Well he cant seem to stay on the meds, cant hold a job, and cant get help for insurance. I parents went broke buying his $1500 a month prescriptions. But he never took them he was just hiding them. He resorted to doing street drugs to stop the voices, and he was stealing to buy for them. he is doing 5 years in jail. thanks the illness. he regrets everything he has done but his life is over in his eyes. He talks about how much better everyone’s life would be without him. I cant image life without him, no matter what he does or has done. NEVER GIVE UP ON SOMEONE YOU LOVE!!!!!
So just a month ago my youngest brother came down with the same thing. I thought my life was over and i couldn’t deal with this again. he takes his meds and is living well. I WILL NEVER GIVE UP!
People in their lives made fun of them & used them and to this i have to say KRAMA will be back for you.
Archive for the ‘Family Members’ Category
I am the sister of an individual who suffers from Schizo affective disorder. He was mean to me my whole life, unusually mean, often threatened that he would kill me, pushed me around, beat me, told me I was worthless. He went out of his way to ruin my life, and I never understood why someone would waste their time like that. He always had trouble with relationships and he got expelled for threatening to bomb the school in 9th grade. For years my parents struggled with him being so mean, not understanding why, flunking out of school. It wasn’t until he was about 19 when they finally got him to see a shrink., because he was having so many problems, and showed zero empathy.
One day he called the police, (he had an obsession with this), and told them someone had robbed a bank and buried the money under his storage unit, so if they dug it up they would be rich. The police took him straight to the psych ward.
He eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with hallucinations and delusions. I wasn’t that surprised.
He thought my parents were meth addicts. He had a lot of delusions. Some I don’t remember or block out. He would lock up the whole house and go in his room. One time he put a dresser in front of the door so no one could get in. Whenever he did leave his room he was incredibly mean. He would scream into a pillow over and over eratically. He ran around the house making crazy monkey noises and throwing stuff around, usually at me. He would sit outside on the curb flossing his teeth for atleast 30 minutes. He dressed funny. If you asked him a question he would either laugh, say something mean, or ignore you. He thought someone was out to get him.
He thought he had transmitters in his head and could communicate with the CIA, and thought he had been assigned government duties.
When he rode the bus to school he thought the CIA was after him with guns and that he would watch stories on TV about how they tried to kill him.
When he was on the train he thought he could communicate through telepathic code to the conductors about secret weapons they were making.
One time before he was diagnosed he thought that God had pronounced him “The Chosen One” That he was the chosen one on earth by God, and that if everyone just listened to him, they would know what was best.
After his diagnosis he tried several medications then stuck to a mix that worked. His delusions seemed to stop, and he seemed to become like a nice person that had emotion.
He stopped the meds and thought he was artificially inseminated and became suicidal. He went to the psych ward again. When they released him after being on a watch, he went home.
He stopped them again last week. He thought he was supposed to be a singing teacher, one of great grandeur. He thought if he heard anything just once he could sing it, better than anyone. He also left the dentist in the middle of getting his fillings done because he thought they were trying to do something funny to him. He was acting mean again. He tried to get money out of my parents. They wouldn’t give him any, so he got angry. He pushed my Dad and ran his finger across his throat while looking at him. He screamed my mom was a devil worshiper over the phone at her. He was driving recklessly. He left to LA, and left his meds behind. We haven’t heard from him since. We can’t find him. UCLA can’t release information, if that’s even where he is.
- A girl from California.
I was told about a family member of my firends who they had never really stayed in touch with for too long. But one night her mother recieved a disturbing phone call with her Aunt Jessica. She was screaming frantically saying that her daughter Emily was missing, the only problem was she didn’t even have a child. Her Aunt then hung up and that was the last they heard from her until they got a call about two weeks later from a family member explaining that she was found dead at a local highschool. She had apparantly been searching for “her daughter” and somehow got herself into a lot of trouble with the wrong people, she was convinced somebody had kidnapped her daughter. The exact facts on why she was at the highschool or what had happen to her are not clear at the moment, but she had fallen from a hallway set of stairs straight to the bottom of the first floor breaking her neck. They couldn’t tell if it was suicide or homocide. Maybe she thought she was being attacked or something..I really don’t know.
by Jenna Ward
Sometimes, late at night, my brother sits in his darkened room watching television without any sound and laughing hysterically. His giggling is punctuated by one-sided, incoherent conversations that he holds with the voices he hears in his head.
Doug is 30 years old, and for the past 10 years, he has suffered from schizophrenia, a fact which he neither acknowledges nor accepts. Whenever I tell someone about him, the person invariably nods, even if he or she has no idea that schizophrenia isn’t “multiple personalities” or the result of bad parenting. Almost always, the first thing they ask me is, “Does he take medication?”
It’s not a bad question. In the past several years, there have been some real breakthroughs in drugs to treat schizophrenia. Scientists have come much closer to pinpointing the ways in which neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin go awry in the brains of schizophrenics, and they are creating better medications to adjust the balance of chemicals.
These drugs, which have names like risperidone and olanzapine and clozapine, are not a cure. Often they have miserable side effects, and they are only partially effective in combating the so-called “negative” symptoms of the disease, things like apathy, social awkwardness and emotional withdrawal.
But the drugs can make it possible to live independently, to work and to interact with people, and to banish the hallucinations and voices. The new drugs are one of the few causes for hope in an otherwise devastating affliction, but there is one problem – if your brain is sick, how is it able to recognize its own illness?
This is not a hypothetical question. Consider that if your stomach hurts, the nerves in your body pass the information on to your brain, and it figures out what to do. But what about when the problem originates in the brain? How can one little piece of the mind hold itself apart, like some island of sanity, in order to make a self-diagnosis?
Doug, like many other people who have schizophrenia, cannot or will not realize that something is wrong, and he refuses to take any medication. So for my family, it all becomes useless, all the groundbreaking research and fancy new drugs, because he will not help himself.
Sometimes I want to just shake him and scream, “Don’t you know? You don’t have to be like this!” He is so lonely, so profoundly isolated from all that exists outside the cacophony in his skull. He has no friends, almost no human connection with anyone at all. He often imagines he smells horrible odors and sees vomit covering the television, his stereo, the carpet, his shoes.
Conversations with him go like this: “Kansas, you know Kansas is actually in Dallas, because there is the road, and then you’re in Texas and that’s why Texas sports teams are so good. Never buy Campbell’s. Chunky soup is really important. Never buy Campbell’s.”
But once upon a time, he was just my big brother who liked to tease me and taught me to water-ski and wanted to be an accountant. Now I barely remember that person.
And there is nothing we can do about it – we have no way to force him to get help. If a person with schizophrenia refuses to take medication, the only recourse is to have him or her involuntarily committed. But you can only do that by proving the person is a danger to him or herself or others.
I think we would have my brother committed if we could, and we watch for symptoms that would make this possible, but so far, he is just plain-old insane, not violent or dangerous. The system can only intervene when something goes terribly wrong, if Doug tries to harm himself or attacks my parents or a stranger. All we can do is wait for the crisis.
“He may have to get worse before he gets better,” Doug’s psychiatrist told my mother. If or when he breaks down completely and lands in an institution, only then will we be able to force medicine into his body, medicine that may have the power to bring back the person we lost 10 years ago.
And hopefully once he starts taking drugs, he’ll recognize he needs them and continue to take them on his own. I imagine it will feel like coming down off a 10 year acid trip.
But my brother has already lost a full decade of his life. Doug is in no position to make rational decisions about his own health care, and there should be some recourse other than acute crisis to allow for intervention.
I believe that another factor in assessing involuntary commitment should be the need for treatment. Doug may not be an immediate danger to himself or others, but he is clearly ill and highly unpredictable. I believe – and the statistics tend to support this – that at some point he will try to hurt himself or someone else. He needs medication now.
What makes it more depressing is the knowledge that, as with so many illnesses, the chances of recovery from schizophrenia improve with early, aggressive treatment. We missed that chance with Doug. Maybe things would have been different if we had been able to intervene when he first got sick.
Some – the same civil libertarians with whom I normally side – would call this a victory, that a person has some right to be insane. I call it cruel and an enormous waste of human potential.
My mom has been schizophrenic now for four years she only started with depression and anxiety 10 years ago. The depression was so rough on her brain that she needed shock therapy treatments so she received 8 of them over a period of a year and it did help, she lost some memory for awhile but it did eventually come back. She did great again for a few years and it was like I had my mom back again the way she was when I was growing up.
But four years ago when she was diagnosed with the schizophrenia and bipolar disorders we were told that she developed this due to the shock therapy causing brain damage. She got really bad for awhile and would refuse to take her meds, she would sleep for 22 hours a day, I would walk down the street to her house everyday to make sure she took her meds and she would always tell me the doctor said she didn’t have to take them anymore. Thankfully my uncle and grandma stepped in to help because I had my hands full with a husband, daughter and special needs son of my own. My family worked with the doctor to get my mom the best care she saw a neuropsychologist and he made a huge difference for my mom he ordered her to sell her home and move into a nurse staffed group home similar to a nursing home.
The staff keeps her up, they have activities to help keep her brain active, the keep her in a strict schedule everyday with everything the same everyday with meals, meds, and fun time and she is doing so much better her meds make her kind of gloomy and tired looking all the time, but she can function now and take care of herself much better.
I am grateful everyday for my family and the doctor helping her get her life back.
