I Have a Family Member with Paranoid Schizophrenia. Here’s What Hollywood Didn’t Tell You
Mass media likes to neatly label and box up mental illnesses
Paranoid schizophrenia. You probably see people with it from time to time on TV. Reid’s mum in Criminal Minds has it, and viewers probably feel sympathy for both him and her when she’s institutionalized. Lolly in Orange Is the New Black probably has a form of schizophrenia, and believes numerous government conspiracies that made her so paranoid she was eventually imprisoned for perceived attempted assault. We all probably feel bad for these people — in some way they’re victims, hurt not through their own intentions actions but because thoughts that went untreated landed them in ultimate isolation. In most cases like this, it seems to me that there’s often a disturbing level of impersonal characterization and distanced concern that puts these people almost in a different class of humanity than those watching. The reality is, mental illness can’t be so easily separated from perceived ‘normal’ or neurotypical people.
There’s a fundamental misconception of mental illnesses, including paranoid schizophrenia
A few years ago at a school fundraiser for the Trevor Project I participated in, a speaker said something I’ll never forget. He said that mental illness isn’t an alien or inhuman thing that makes people with that experience any less human. It’s about some part of their humanity being exceptionally present or heightened.
I mean, this makes sense. With conditions like anxiety disorder this is a little easier to visualize — something a lot of people experience to some level being especially present in a way that causes a level of discomfort or ongoing expressions such as panic attacks. But somehow, people still don’t seem to get this key idea.
Now I’m seventeen, and I don’t by any means claim to be an expert in the field or a psychologist or anything like that. But I do have a family member who has paranoid schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, I have several diagnosed mental illnesses myself, and I have been at the intersection of experiencing one thing at home and hearing another in TV shows and when people at school make jokes about ‘schizo voices’.
Paranoid schizophrenia: what Hollywood left out
The truth is, my relative (name omitted for privacy) doesn’t have crazy conspiracy theories about the CIA or the FBI or anything like that. He doesn’t have the type of schizophrenia where he has visual hallucinations, either. He hears voices telling him bad things are going to happen to my family and me, and telling him to hurt himself.
Sound familiar? I mean, haven’t we all worried about our family or those we love? Worried about someone hurting them? Called home when you hear sirens? Felt fear or guilt at the thought of someone or something hurting them? For him, it’s just the extra step of having something in his head confirming and aggravating those fears.
My mum explained it once as sort of a stream of fast-moving thoughts he can’t stop. English is my family member’s second language, and that combined with speech impediments from medication side effects makes it difficult to articulate the symptoms sometimes. Still, it’s clear it’s not just the ‘departure from reality and distancing from humanity’ stuff that you see on the screen. To me it seems like the part of my affected relative that’s most human, that cares about his family, is accentuated to the point where the worry affects him more strongly than it does most people. That’s it. And yet this and other mental illnesses carry such a horrible, wide-spread stigma.
This isn’t everyone’s experience, but that’s the point
This article isn’t to claim my affected family member’s experience as that of every paranoid schizophrenic, or even something that I’ll ever fully be able to understand or explain (after all, I haven’t experienced it). But the thing is, I see a similar story replicated in the media over and over — paranoid schizophrenia as some impersonal conspiracy theories that are the sad product of someone who’s lost their humanity. It deserves more personalization than that. For my relative, and for the many other people out there who have paranoid schizophrenia and who have individual lives and experiences that go beyond the media stereotype, I wanted to share a more personal view of the experience.
My experiences interacting with my affected family member as a human being are juxtaposed every day with the surreal and detached images of paranoid schizophrenia represented by popular media, and I believe this is something that deserves to be seen.
