The IdrA Fan Club - Page 421

On January 14 2010 15:40 duckett wrote:

alright. my brother has a mental illness that ranges somewhere between bipolar and schizophrenia. the disease has caused him to act crazy and make too many connections. we put him on drugs but he stopped taking them multiple times. our family watched him carefully and made him take tranquilizers, and he was completely unable to think and function at times. it turned out that we just had to let psychiatry take its course over time, because after 5 violent incidents and 6 months of living with him while psychotic, he came around and started a successful career...now he's married and pursuing his masters' in statistics while working.

so here's the deal. over the course of dealing with this shit, you have to maintain a positive outlook or you get really depressed, because it is a really bleak situation. I knew I would have to deal with a lot of bullshit when talking/driving/interacting with someone who is clearly not sane but I stuck through it because I had the hope of eventually reclaiming a loved one. Every conversation when he was on excessive tranquilizers would tear me up because I saw what he was reduced to; but every conversation when he was manic was complete hell. Oh and btw, the system of mental hospitals in the united states is fucking horrible.

And the worst part was: you can't talk a manic out of his delusions. You can't explain things to them because they are making connections in their head at a rate much faster than you, and have memories that are just straight different from what happened. We were told by a social worker that we were supposed to become his "allies" in his illness and not reject his ideas outright but try to convince him of the truth slowly while overtly agreeing with him. So we worked through it, and we prayed in order to keep ourselves from crushing despair. We had to arbitrarily believe it would get better in the future, or it would feel a lot worse every time we tried to deal with it. Make sense?