The day my mom called me and told me dad hadn’t eaten anything for three days and wouldn’t drink any water and unable to have a bowel movement, turned into the worst day of my life.
My husband and I rushed over to the house to pick up my niece and nephew adopted by my parents. When we arrived, my brother, the children’s father, cooked hamburgers in the kitchen for my niece and her twelve year old girl friend.
The rests of us sat with my father while I gave my dad the third degree. What had he eaten? What medications had he taken? Could he walk into the emergency room if my mom took him?
I heard the back door slam.
My brother ran through the house something in his hand, then crack, he swung and hit my husband’s hands and head. My husband fell to the floor with my brother repeatedly hitting him.
I screamed. My mother turned beet red screaming and crying. We were all standing and yelling, “stop, stop.”
Somehow my husband rolled onto his knees and prepared to tackle my brother who was stabbing him in the kidney area with a cultivator with three inch metal spikes on the end.
My brother backed off.
Meanwhile, I frantically searched for something in the house to defend us with, a lamp, anything to stop him. My brother rushed by me and then I saw the hot metal frying pan, grabbed it and followed him to the back door. When my brother was outside, I locked all the doors of the house, called the girls into the main family room where I could see they were safe and went looking for the phone.
I called 9-11. “My brother just tried to kill my husband,” I said
They wanted to know what my husband had done. “Nothing.” Did I want an ambulance? “Yes”, I said. “My husband was bleeding and my parents were elderly and I wasn’t sure they were going to be okay.” The police arrested my brother while the medics worked on my husband and my mother, whose blood pressure had skyrocketed over 230/140. I was terrified she would have a stroke.
Eventually, the children went home with us and my mother got my dad to the hospital for an IV and blood transfusion that resolved his health problems. My brother served 2 years in the mental hospital before being released on parole, eventually ending up back with my mom in her house.
The reason I am telling you this story, is that this is what it is like living with a person diagnosed as a violent paranoid schizophrenic. I shook for weeks after the event. My husband had nightmares and bought a gun.
Many days go by where a person like my brother with schizophrenia lives quietly and helps out around the house.
Then there are the days when the schizophrenia and paranoia and depression medications don’t work very well and he goes drinking or taking drugs and all hell breaks loose.
The true crime is not that he drinks, or that he is mentally ill, or that he has hurt members of our family, or that his children were raised by members of the family or that many people pay to help him live. The true crime is not that our government thinks the cost of keeping mentally people with violent paranoid schizophrenia like my brother in a mental hospital or prison is too high. Nor is the true crime that mentally ill people such as schizophrenics are abused by society and may themselves commit crimes.
The true crime is silence and lack of education.
Until my brother was in his late thirties, we didn’t discuss the family history of depression and mental illness and alcoholism.
Persons that are diagnosed at a younger age as schizophrenic can be educated about the disease, treated with drugs that control the mental illness rather than exacerbate it the way that alcohol, pot, cocaine and methamphetamine do. These are the readily available drugs on the street that persons with mental illness seek in order to self-medicate. Instead of missing school and feeling an outcast in society, my brother could have been trained to find the means of communicating effectively because he would have understood his condition and had drugs that would aid him.
Families with a history of alcoholism, thought by many to be a genetically inheritable trait in which alcohol is turned by the body into a drug similar to heroin, can be educated that alcohol is not safe for them.
Depression is a leading cause of suicide and drug use with drug use increasing the likelihood of depression in an endless feedback circle. From my own experience, depression is also associated with too much sugar in the diet and fluctuations in my hormones.
The existing ways that crimes involving alcohol are addressed are only partially helpful. Most drug rehabilitation programs cost $20000 or more and are only partially covered by health insurance plans and only for those insured. By the time a drug rehabilitation program is needed, it is often too late to change either the behavior or the addiction.
What is especially bad is that what is essentially a medical condition, like schizophrenia is treated as a crime with continual need to pay out money that is often lacking. Without a driver’s license, it is hard for mentally ill people to work. Placed in jail for several days, mentally ill persons such as schizophrenics lose their jobs. Without money, it is hard to pay off increasingly hefty fines and medical payments required for counseling, drugs, and treatment. Schizophrenia medications can cost as much as $2000 per month or more.
The cure for mental illness such as schizophrenia or alcoholism starts in the home. The cure starts with honesty among family members. It starts in a society that accepts drug and alcohol problems as mental illness, sometimes even schizophrenia. It starts with the knowledge that anyone may be susceptible to the diseases of schizophrenia and alcoholism and a test should be made available to find out, just like any other illness. It starts in a society where the treatment of mental disease is not punitive. Few other diseases are treated by the criminal court system.
We really need a drug addiction and mental disease prevention program. It would help everyone.