Oh dear, that’s a frightening story. I can relate whole heartedly to it! My husband and I lived in a house with three other people once. The homeowner was a longtime friend, and the two others were just roommates when we moved in. One of them could have been the friend you describe.
He was trained as a physicist. He was utterly brilliant, and had what I liked to call “Genius Syndrome” At first it was just that quirky, socially retarded, misfit air that you sometimes see out of people who have developed their mind with books, and never with people, so it is easily explained as such…but this became so much worse than that. (Did you go see “A Brilliant Mind”? That movie came out late in this story when things were getting bad, and his sister didn’t want him to go see it because she just KNEW he would think it was a message to him from the government.)
So, I lived in this house with him for two years. We used to sit outside and smoke cigarettes and talk about politics, and theology, and great things. He alluded to problems he had had in his past, like having been homeless for some time up in the mountains, having been homeless in Europe, not being able to find a job, wanting to leave the country; anecdotes of what are borne of a mildly disturbed mind, but nothing you think is dangerous or anything.
Now I knew that his family has a history of mental illness, and I figured he had more than a touch of it himself. He would explain that he would never be able to trust anyone for the rest of his life, because the government had been trying to ruin his life ever since he was in college and he wouldn’t build weapons for them. He would never go to the doctor for any malady, because they were told by the government to put microchips in him, and he was also convinced that doctors would try to make him sicker.
Things rolled noticeably downhill in his head for the two years I lived there. Nobody else in the house would deal with him anymore. He stopped bathing, he stopped sleeping, except for in the day, or really early in the evening. He had no teeth left…he had them all pulled some time before because he didn’t want to deal with them…
So, the short cut to the end of the story is that about six months or so after we moved out of the house, he waited for everyone to be gone to work or meetings one day, left a note about how he couldn’t go on, and shot himself in the head. In the back yard. His sister found him there.
I remember being pissed off at him for becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that some entity were trying to ruin him on a grand scale. I remember feeling acute rage when every conversation would turn to it, and there were no more conversations that were deep or had any other meaning than to illustrate HIS peril. I remember not wanting to go out back and smoke because I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It got too ridiculous. I remember thinking that suicide was going to be his end, and feeling powerless to help him combat it because he just WOULD NOT GET ANY HELP. How do you make someone who doesn’t seem dangerous get help? Even if you could force some type of help upon them, you can’t MAKE them take the medicines that they perceive to be the next mind control device…
I hope he’s much happier wherever he is, and that he now sees the error of his ways. He was so damaged.
Uhhh. Sorry about the fit of catharsis there…I wish I knew what to tell you. I would hate for you to lose your friend to something more sinister than the government or the illuminati, or any organization could ever be. His own mind.
Good luck.