Too many to mention. I am the sane / normal one.
Father, aunt, and first cousin, all now deceased, were schizophrenic or had other serious mental problems.
Remaining members of my nuclear family are OK, but a couple of relatives by marriage have serious substance abuse problems.
In my immediate family my brother went through a phase of being deeply and aggressively religious but seems to have mellowed a lot in the last few years.
Moving out a few tiers: my dad’s cousin is a barely functioning alcoholic who’s husband works like a slave to keep them housed/fed etc. He has an old Alfa Romeo that he is slowly restoring and which he drives at insane speeds along narrow country roads (guess how I found that out?). I don’t think he really cares any more if he makes it back or wipes himself out on a tree.
Wife’s family:
[ul]
[li]brother got involved with a cult, left that, got into drugs and then killed himself.[/li][li]half-brother, young and stupid guy with a lot of anger issues, wanted to be an outlaw biker and did some drug carrying for them before getting arrested on a conspiracy-to-commit murder charge and narrowly avoided going to prison. He seems to have straightened his life out a bit but not before draining his mothers retirement savings for his legal defence.[/li][/ul]
I’ve got a niece who is bulimic and a cutter. I also have an uncle who the family doesn’t talk to because he is crooked as the day is long and regularly gets involved in lawsuits with business associates and then tries to drag other family members into his self-created problems.
I have thieves, drug addicts, a murderer, several alcoholics, cheats, gamblers and generally selfish people and deadbeats in my immediate and extended family. So no, no one really messed up. Having an education, a successful marriage, and a decent income makes me the odd one out.
I think it’s definitely genetic because my stepdad’s side of the family is pretty normal. That being said, my biological family is insane. My sister has schizophrenia/Asperger’s, my other sister has BPD, my father is a depressive sociopath, and my mother has BPD/drug addictions. I suffer from OCD and paranoia (good times!). Anyway, I think most people have 1 person in their family with some type of psych disorder or addiction.
Unfortunately I have a DIL who is schizophrenic. My son married her thinking she was just Bi-polar, turns out that she had a psychiatrist who thought he was a better doctor than any before him. She has put my son through hell.
My cousin was a paranoid schizophrenic who was on lithium for all of his adult life and lived in group homes that he had to keep switching from home to home because he couldn’t handle there being black people in the home or working there. He smoked like a chimney and eventually died of lung cancer at 55. His brother committed suicide on the lawn of their parents’ house. Nobody knows why.
I have another cousin who has two kids both of whom are bipolar, alcoholics and druggies.
My sister’s stepdaughter got involved with an older man when she was a teenager and she helped him in a home invasion robbery. She’s been in jail for several years.
Àn aunt of mine is an alcoholic - she lost her husband in her 20s and never really got over it. She’s in a nursing home home now so isn’t still drinking, but has health issues from all the years she did. A cousin seems to be schizophrenic - she regularly mentions voices telling her various things. Her family had her evaluated but apparently it wasn’t that bad; she’s not on meds or anything.
[quote=“septimus, post:37, topic:711945”]
Aren’t you missing an option?
[ul][li]Most or all of my family members are seriously messed up[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I came in to say this.
Only in my most optimistic dreams.
I’m sorry for you. My mother is in her 90s and does not have dementia, what she does have is a serious mental illness. There are times dementia seems it would be easier to live with, at least she could be happy now and then. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard her laugh in the last year.
My moms side of the family has some serious white trash lifestyle issues. Some of them have been cleared up through “Death by Misadventure,” but others remain.
Haha.
My mom has serious mental illness (BPD, most likely) and is a hypochondriac and emotionally abusive. She will not seek help for her illness as “therapy doesn’t help her”. Her family is full of drug addicts, alcoholics and criminals. My sister is a former opiate addict in a seriously co-dependent relationship.
My dad’s side is relatively normal for a large Ukrainian family.