FCYU-Feature Story

My Brother and Me
Schizophrenia can't break our bond

By Anonymous

My brother and I are tight. We’ve been together our entire lives through thick and thin, including separation from our mom and other siblings in foster care when we were small.

Even when our mother did not take care of us, we took care of each other. Many times in my life, my brother and I were literally starving, with no food whatsoever. I remember once when I was 7 and my brother was 9, he had a jar of change and he went to the bodega and bought me so many snacks and junk food. He was, and is, a genuinely good person.

At the start of his senior year, he was a typical teenager. He worried about deadlines and colleges. He played on his basketball team winning championships, was the class clown, and always had a little girl trouble. When the pressure from school and from home stressed him out, he handled it by playing basketball and hanging out with his friends. Then, one quiet Friday night, everything changed.

What Should I Do?

We were home alone. Suddenly, I heard my brother cursing and yelling. At first I dismissed it, thinking he was arguing with a friend on the phone. But after 10 minutes of shouting, I realized something was wrong. His yelling was not comprehensible; what he was saying wasn’t right.

I cracked open his door and saw his bedroom in ruins. There were clothes on the floor, the walls were cracked, and his television and stereo were smashed into pieces. The talking I heard was not to a friend on the phone, but to himself. I was too scared to say anything, so I quietly closed the door and went into the living room.

I sat in the living room wondering if I should call the ambulance, but I wanted to wait for my mother to come home. After a while, my brother came out of his room. When I looked at him, I saw a stranger. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears. His forehead was wrinkled with anger. He looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. He wailed about how he needed to be cleansed. He asked me to take him to a church, but I knew he needed to see a doctor, not a priest.

Without aggravating him, I tried to convince him to stay inside. Then my mom came home. He asked her to take him to a church. Instead, my mom called her friend and she came and did some weird prayer for him. My mom believes the answer to everything is prayer; she thought that my brother was possessed by a demon. That’s when I realized I should have called the doctor.

After the prayer, my brother still wanted to go to the church. I said I would go with him because I wanted him to calm down. But it was after 10 p.m. and all the churches were closed.

Something Wasn’t Right

After about half an hour of walking around, he seemed calmer and more like himself, so we went home. My brother and my mother went to sleep and acted like nothing happened. I knew my mom’s nonchalant reaction wasn’t right. I was still concerned. I knew he needed medical treatment.

I was freaked out and couldn’t sleep. But the next morning, my brother seemed completely normal. My mom thought he was OK and she let him go out by himself. I wanted to go with him, but before I knew it, he was out the door.

When he came back, half of his face was swollen, and he had cuts and bruises everywhere. He was scared. He told us that he got beat up by a gang of boys in our neighborhood (we later found out when he recovered his memory that he was actually hit by a car). We made him stay home the rest of the day, but still we didn’t take him to the hospital.

The next day we went to school. I worried about him all day. Then the principal called my mother and told her that my brother was acting strange, and she picked him up from school. He finally went to the hospital, and he stayed there for three months.

He’s Still My Brother

After the first month, I thought he wasn’t going to get any better. I still didn’t know exactly what was wrong with him, but I knew it was mental illness. After a few weeks, my brother himself told me he had schizophrenia, a chronic brain disorder that can cause symptoms like delusions and hallucinations. He was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, or manic depression.

When I first learned he had schizophrenia, I thought it meant that he’d be walking around talking to himself. I thought he’d be hearing voices and have to be in the psychiatric ward for the rest of his life. I was afraid he would never be his old self again. But by the second month, I saw signs of my brother coming back.

The day he came home, I realized that he was still the same brother I had before, still cracking jokes and acting like his old self. I tried to act the exact same way I did before he got sick. I avoided talking about his condition. I wanted him to feel like home is home, a place where he could feel comfortable with himself. But as much as I wanted things to be normal, we had all changed.

Adjusting

Before my brother got sick, my mother and I were constantly arguing. Yelling, whining, and complaining filled my house. When he came home from the hospital, we went from a house full of screaming women to a house empty and silent, everyone fearing that one little remark would upset him.

We had to adjust to make him feel comfortable without making him feel different or stressing him out. We tried not to baby him or make him uneasy. At first I felt like I could no longer be myself, because I’m the loudest person in my house.

We used to kid around together all the time. Now, I was afraid to make jokes around him or say the littlest thing for fear that it might make him sick.

Watching His Struggle

My brother is 19 now and having trouble adjusting to being an adult and doing things on his own. Sometimes it becomes my responsibility to look after him and make sure he’s OK, even though I am younger than him. But soon I’ll be going away to college, so I’m choosing schools that are close enough for me to get home quickly if anything happens.

I also feel guilty sometimes because his schizophrenia stops him from doing things that I’m able to do, including going to school (when he gets sick he misses up to three months of school). It’s not as hard for me as it is for him.

Even though my brother has a lot of people looking out for him, I still worry. What if he has a breakdown alone on the street? He sometimes has bad reactions to medications, and sometimes I get scared and imagine the police shooting him if he’s acting aggressive during an episode.

Learning to Live With It

At the same time, my brother is getting better at managing his illness. He knows when he is symptomatic and he has better control of himself when he’s having a breakdown. When he was first diagnosed, it was a very dark time for our family, but now we’re learning how to live with it.

Mental illness changes your life forever, and I’ve discovered that this isn’t always a bad thing. My brother’s struggle encourages me to be a better sister and a better person. I am more considerate of people and their feelings. I don’t argue over petty little things anymore.

I also have more empathy for people who suffer from mental illness, just like anyone else who has a chronic disease. When I see mentally ill people on the street now, I think about the fact that they have families. I realize that person could be my mother, brother, or sister—mental illness does not discriminate. I know I’d be terrified if my brother was out there alone on the streets.

Three years after being diagnosed, my brother’s not letting his illness hold him back. He’s now comfortable speaking about it, and he plans on going to college and studying psychology so he can become a peer specialist. After coming through all that sickness and hurt, he wants his life’s work to be helping other people with mental illness. I think that’s a heroic thing to do.

Many people think that if someone has a mental illness they are no good to society, but my brother and many other people with mental illness prove them wrong every day.

Write a letter in response to this story. If selected, your letter could be published in the next issue of Represent.