Quarantined with Schizophrenia
My Family’s Struggle with Mental Health
Part 1 of 3
Nobody likes talking about mental illness, especially when it comes to schizophrenia. But for someone like me, that’s really hard to do. I have, in my immediate family, three people disabled by this powerful illness.
No, it doesn’t run in my family, and yes, this could happen to anyone. Here is a little bit about my family and our lifelong struggle with addiction:
Alchohol, Physcadelics, Cocaine, Heroin, Pills, and Meth…. Oh My!
I guess its fair to say we’ve dabbled in it all. Ive been around addicts my entire life, from my party loving Alcoholic father to my closeted functioning meth addicted Mother and Step Father.
I’ve been through a drug raid at 8 years old, having guns pointed at me, screaming for me to “GET ON THE FLOOR!” You might even be able to guess what drug was the precursor to my family’s descent into madness.
Meth is the drug that caused the voices to tell my Uncle to walk into a 7 eleven and demand that they give him cigarettes and anything else he wanted, because he was God.
The same voices impelled him to walk into the Davis County Jail and ask for his drugs back. My Step Uncle is considered permanently and irreversibly disabled by the state.
Sunburnt and unkempt, he walks several miles everyday. Roaming the city streets, he waves his arms about as he shouts silently to the unseen entity’s of schizophrenia.
He collects newspapers, magazines, and books from the local hotels on his route, going as far as to go through people's trash to obtain mail and ads that have been thrown away.
Bringing bags and sometimes shopping carts home full of his loot. From there he makes “Mailers,” a term my family has coined the bundles he makes everyday.
He goes through all the pages of everything, and I mean thoroughly, making a mark on every page.... of every magazine...... and book. Sometimes several times with different color pens.
He writes large X’s, or Amen Greg Freeze, on every single page. He also does this to books or magazines that people accidentally leave out. Including my favorite books and magazines that I collect!
He then puts everything he gets into a tight bundle and puts it in his closet, the next day he does the same thing and stacks that bundle on top of the other one. In his closet in chronological order are stacks and stacks of these mailers…
To describe how the mental illness presents in him, is radically different than that of my sisters. For one, he still finds ways to use. He is extremely lucky in that he has a trustfund set up for him that he got after his father’s passing. He is set for life! However, he doesn’t manage his own money. His sister’s have power of attorney over him because of his disability and his inability to do anything for himself.
It’s like he is living in this world, but his mind is stuck in a parallel universe that nobody but him has access to.
He never showers, washes his clothes, cleans, or cooks for himself. He has no friends or any connections to the outside world except that of his sisters and brother, my Stepfather, whom he rents a room from.
When he isn’t walking the streets, he is in his room pacing and breathing loudly. I can hear him in his room continuously doing deep and rapid breaths as quickly as he can. I assume it’s because of the head rush you get when breathing like this, and am unsure as to how he does it for 24+ hours at a time.
One can only begin to imagine what is going on in his head. Stuck with daily habits he adopts to appease the voices, performing rituals that an outsider looking in would probably percieve as voodoo.
I am not close to my uncle, even though I am in the room next to him. I would say it’s near impossible to have a relationship with him because of his mental state. I actually hold a lot of resentments toward him because of the negative attributes his disability presents.
I have kid’s that live with me and find it hard to have compassion for someone that doesn’t shower, or clean up after themselves. I know his mind is gone, but when he leaves his door open, and exposes my kids to his trash and drug paraphernalia, I lose all ability to empathize with him!
I do however, remember him when he was "normal." Before drugs and mental illness had a hold of his mind. It’s hard for me to imagine that he actually had relationship’s with women, a good job working on computer’s, a car and driver’s license, and his own place to live.
Things we take for granted everyday, things that he will never have again because of Meth.
I don’t mean to sound insensitive or offend anyone by my feelings toward my Uncle. I can’t help the way I feel, just as he can’t help who he has become.
I want to say how hard it is being stuck in a house with just one person afflicted by this mental illness. Let alone 3, and as you can tell, my feelings towards my Uncle aren’t very pleasent.
Like I said, he isn’t the only one in my family who faces these demons everyday.
I am a recovering addict, and have been for 6 years now. The way I look at drugs is how I see my Uncle, he is the poster boy of why you should never use. Losing yourself to meth is not knowing if you’ll ever be yourself again.
I have accomplished many things I never thought possible again with my sobriety and continue to suprise myself everyday. One important factor of my sobriety is my ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.
I would probably not be sober and able to share this story had meth not stolen the minds of people I care about.
The stigma that goes along with being labeled schizophrenic, especially presented the way it does in my Uncle, has haunted my family for 20 years now.
He has lived with us for about 15 of those years, and it embarrassed me to no end when I was a teenager. My friends would recognize him off the street and automatically pass judgment on him off to me. My sister’s had the same thing happen to them… So to get a second, and even third diagnosis for both of my sisters was extremely traumatic.
We had all these preconceived notions and assumptions about schizophrenia and assumed it meant that both my sisters were doomed to walk the streets like he did, having no real life to speak of for the rest of their lives.
In Part 2 of 3 I will talk about how schizophrenia presents itself in one of my sisters, the first of which to show symptoms, and how different it is from my Uncle’s. Part 3 of 3 will document my youngest sister’s journey so far.
