Everyone’s experience of mental illness is different: from the person cursed with it to the person who brought them into the world to the person who might have unknowingly tipped them over the edge at some point. So my experience may only be helpful to comfort someone, as it will be comforting to feel like my experience is being shared. My brother has what we call schizophrenia, a mental illness which he developed apparently when he was 13, and had for ten years before it was recognised. I believe a lot of the difficulty in understanding and dealing with a disease is related to the environment you live in. Obviously a healthy body is a healthy mind, so we may say an environment where there is ganja, pills, coke, heroin, mushrooms, LSD, crack, ether, ketamin, excessive amounts of alchohol and cigarettes is not the kind of place you would expect to find a healthy mind. These things were there in my life and in my brother’s, and were not used sparingly. Another healthy bodily
requirement is space, freedom, the freedom to exercise, the freedom to scream and run free, and to not care what happens when you do. We live in a school where there are many facilities, many fields, many reasons to smile if only we werent cut down and judged when we did. An institution is a dangerous thing when its leaders or founders dont understand human nature, and so my leaders frowned on me when i went for a swim, shouted at me when i picked apples on the roof of a shed, and still couldnt let it go when i’d left the school. Results, results, results. When we care for results, we do not care for people. And so the teachers who got bullied by the headmaster, then bullied the boys who went to the school, and a lot of them could hack it having come from afar to the school, and where they would return every holiday. But for Will and I this was not the case, we would walk across the road, and into our house to meet our father, a teacher at the school, and spend the holiday in the
midst of the teachers, finding occasional solice in smoking a joint with someone else who was unlucky enough to be trapped there, but rarely feeling free.
When you mix this with a complete lack of women (another healthy element to any man’s life, in whatever capacity) and a complete lack of money, and an invented social heirarchy which meant that you really felt you were above the people in macdonalds although deep down you knew you werent, there is no doubt that it is completely understandable that my brother is schizophrenic, and completely confusing why i am not. So when i asked myself last night why i cower away from emotional reactions to things people have said to me, i know it is simple. Where i have learnt my life, good human values do not exist. This “blog” is not enough to do justice to the vast world of one person’s life, let alone two. But i hope in reading this that someone may find some hope or comfort in the fact that we are not alone down here in the depths of thought and distress and that there are so many paths back up to the surface, although some are booby trapped, and some are just bloody difficult.
