FYI...
My Brother Has Schizophrenia — Here’s What I Want People to Know
Health Lifestyle Arena <healthupdate@healthylifestylearena.com>
In high school, my brother Dan* was the big man on
campus. Kids idolized him; teachers loved him. He was an athlete, super
handsome, and smart. He graduated with honors and had tons of friends.
I’m a few years older than Dan, but even my friends would call dibs on
who would get to marry him.
He didn’t have signs of depression or any type of mental illness when
he was a teenager. It wasn’t until a couple years into college when he
started experiencing symptoms of paranoia. Dan was convinced his
roommate had stolen his phone while he was sleeping, and he started to
think his neighbor was stalking him. He slowly started to isolate
himself from friends he had known all his life and sever ties with
people.
When Dan came home for Thanksgiving his sophomore year, his
personality was different, but we just thought he was being a brat. Even
with the previous incidents of paranoia, we didn’t realize things were
bad enough to require help or medical intervention. Then he ended up
having a physical altercation with my dad, and my parents called the
police. The police came and took him to the hospital, to the psychiatric
ward, but they ended up releasing him right away. He wasn’t
experiencing any symptoms to keep him there, and we didn’t know enough
about mental illness at the time to know if he needed any additional
help or intervention.
I hadn’t heard much from Dan until the
next Spring when he called each of my siblings and my parents to tell us
he loved us. It was out of character for him; we knew something was
off. He was home alone because my parents were out of the country, so we
had a neighbor go check on him. We were expecting the worst.
Instead, Dan, our two family dogs, and the car were all gone. We had
no idea where he went. My dad was able to track the location on his
phone – Dan had come to the city where my sister and I lived, a few
hours from my parents’ home. He drove all the way there with the dogs.
He rented a hotel room; apparently, he wanted to go see a baseball game.
We were tracking his location and knew he was still in the city, and I
was worried sick about him. That night, when I saw he was making his
way out of the city to drive back home, I tracked his car down and
stopped him in the middle of the street. I begged him to stay the night
and drive home the next morning; I was in tears. It was getting late and
I didn’t want him driving in the dark.
Finally, I convinced him to stay the night at the apartment I shared
with my sister. I woke up the next morning to make sure he left. He told
me he had to go to yoga and had to be somewhere at noon. I was
so confused. He left and when he came back, he was acting really
strange. Then it was getting late again, so he said he was going to wait
and leave the next day instead. I was getting pissed because I thought
he was playing games.
That night, I heard him take a bath in my bathroom. It got really hot
because my bathroom doesn’t have a lot of ventilation. I heard the door
slam – he was gone, even though all of his clothes were still there. I
then heard the fire alarm in the building go off. He had gone up to the
roof in my women’s Patagonia jacket and nothing else. He’s 6’3″ and I’m a
foot shorter than him; it didn’t exactly fit. He was sweating and had
the wildest look in his eyes. “I’m not safe here,” he said.
In hindsight, I should have gotten help for him right then, but at
the time, I didn’t realize just how bad things were going to get. I
managed to get him to come inside and get through to him that we were
absolutely leaving the next morning – I would drive him the few hours
back home – no questions asked.
Finally, he got up again the next morning and we were getting ready
to go. He said he was going to leave to get breakfast. I went to go find
the car so we could drive home, and he never came back. Not only did he disappear, but he left his phone at my apartment. We
later found out it was because he thought Apple and Verizon were trying
to hack him. I also found some hospital papers in a grocery bag he left
behind that stated: The patient should follow up with a mental health professional. I called all the hospitals in the area asking if they had seen him. No one had any information.
We knew it was bad, and we weren’t sure how to find him. I was able
to log into his bank account and track what he was spending on his debit
card. I saw he went to a Starbucks so we called a bunch of Starbucks
locations trying to find him. That night, I was expecting him to show
up, but he never came. It was going on almost 24 hours of him missing,
and that’s when panic started to set in.
I saw he spent money at my gym, so I called the facility. They said
they saw someone who matched the description of my brother come in to
shower but they had to kick him out because they found him sleeping in
the locker room. I stayed home from work and spent the day tracking his
spending. Every time he would spend money somewhere, I’d call to see if
they had seen him.
When I saw he spent money at Petco, I called and a woman said my
brother came in and bought a large $100 Tempur-Pedic dog bed. We knew he
was going to use it to sleep on the street. Although we had initial contact with police officers, they weren’t
being helpful or taking us seriously. But after he was gone for over 24
hours, we went back to the police station and found some understanding
officers who helped us file a missing persons report. My parents came to
town to help us find him.
I decided to look through his texts and Facebook messages to see if
he left any clues but couldn’t find anything. Then, I opened up his
Instagram direct messages, and that changed everything. He rarely posts
on Instagram, but he had been DMing celebrities incoherent messages,
having lengthy conversations with them as if they were responding. There
was one celebrity in particular he messaged multiple times, saying he
would meet him at a diner down the street for lunch. That is why he said
he had to be somewhere at noon a few days before. We knew then he was
seriously in trouble.
On the fourth day he was missing, my parents and I were having lunch
and we decided to check his bank account one more time. Turns out, he
had bought food from the grocery store around the corner. We called the
detective who had been working on our case to come check out the
surveillance tapes. As my sister and parents went to go look over the tapes, I decided to
look for him on my own. It was a beautiful spring day and I thought to
myself, “What would Dan do?” I knew there was a tea shop nearby and he
loves tea, so I checked there. Sure enough, there he was, sitting at the
counter. He looked like he was back to himself. Whatever
psychotic break
he was in, he was done. “How did you find me?” he asked. “We’ve been
looking all over for you,” I told him. “You’re a missing person. Your
photo is all over the city. We love you, we were worried about you. Of
course we were looking for you.”
The detectives and an ambulance came and took him to the hospital. I
rode in the ambulance with him, and that’s when I got a sense of what
was going through his mind during those four days. “I felt unsafe and I
removed myself from the situation so nothing would happen to anyone
else,” he told me sternly. “You want me to tell you I’m crazy – I’m not
crazy. This is how I felt and this is the way I handled it. It’s the way
I wanted to.”
He went to the hospital but the doctor decided that since he wasn’t
experiencing any symptoms of psychosis at the moment, there wasn’t much
they could do. They held him for 24 hours for observation, and the next
day we picked him up. We found out that he left our apartment after
taking a bath because he was convinced someone was trying to poison us.
Before he went missing, he even visited the police station and they sent
him to the hospital, hence the papers I found, but he was released
right away. In his own way, he was trying to protect us.
It’s been a couple years since this incident. And while my parents
sought to get him help, it took a lot of trial and error to find a
psychologist or therapist who would even see a patient who was
experiencing the symptoms he was: paranoia, hearing voices, and having
had a full-blown episode of psychosis. Eventually, they were able to
find a psychologist who said Dan absolutely has
schizophrenia,
but the exact diagnostic process was complicated. To make things more
confusing, Dan refused to see a therapist regularly or entertain the
idea of taking medication.
My parents go to a support group throughout the
National Alliance of Mental Illness
(NAMI) with other families in their area. The other members of the
group include another family my parents already knew from when Dan
played sports growing up. It just goes to show that mental illness, even
serious mental illness, is
more common than people realize.
Right now, Dan is doing better. He got a part-time job, and his
employers said he is the hardest-working person there. He has plans to
go back to school. He does well when he has a set routine, and he eats
super healthy and does Bikram yoga regularly. He still exhibits signs of
paranoia – he’s convinced that any food that isn’t organic is poisonous
– and still hears voices, but for the last couple years, he’s been
pretty stable. As much as we have tried to convince him to have a more
clinical intervention, he still doesn’t take medication and would rather
handle his illness through a healthy lifestyle. He said he can control
the voices and goes through periods where he doesn’t hear them at all.
We know that another episode could happen again, but we are more
prepared for it this time. It’s not a matter of if it will happen but when.
Some things are different, but my brother Dan is still the same
person I’ve always known and loved. When things get tough, my family
stays calm and rides the wave. But we don’t treat him any differently. I
don’t tiptoe around him, and I don’t handle him with kid gloves. I want
him to feel as normal as possible.
I didn’t know anything about schizophrenia before my brother had his
psychotic episode. When I first heard that diagnosis, I was scared. I
wasn’t sure what it meant. But now knowing what we know, I want other
people to realize that they shouldn’t be scared of someone who has a
mental illness, and it’s not something that should be stigmatized.
People should open up the conversation more and talk about it. You never
realize what someone or their family is going through.
If other families are living with a loved one with schizophrenia, I
want them to know not to turn to fear. Try to set up as normal of a life
as possible; they can’t help what’s happened to them, so allow them to
get as much out of life as they can. And keep talking about it. The more
I’ve talked to people about our story, the more I’ve realized that
everyone knows someone who has been affected by mental illness.
My brother Dan is who he is, and we love him and support him – there’s nothing to be ashamed about.
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(4/30/2019)
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...SO THE FLOOR IS OPEN HERE during Mental Health Month. SHARE YOUR STORIES HERE!!! I'll share mine... if you share yours. POST & TELL below. Our Narratives help others and help to take the stigma out of MENTAL ILLNESS.
...In my practice as a Health & Wellness Coach, I teach Relatives of Relatives with Mental Illness and others to TREAT those with mental health issues as if they were TRAUMATIZED or have PTSD. This kind of Trauma Informed Approach (TIA) is a new and different way to take the fear & stigma out of mental illness. The TIA allows us to look at ourselves and others as WHOLE PERSONS and beyond the the illness. AND, thankfully, the Trauma Informed Approach engages those with mental health or behavioral health issues by allowing us to ask different kinds of questions like:
WHAT'S GOING ON!
Try this approach & then leave a Comment to let us know how the TIA works for you.
- DrGlo 5/6/2019
#IamStigmaFree
Charita Cole Brown, author of Defying the Verdict: My Bipolar Life,
earned a BA in English from Wesleyan University and an MAT in Early
Childhood Education from Towson University in Maryland. A retired
educator who lives in Baltimore, she is committed to helping others
create strategies to defy their personally challenging verdicts.
