What is weird is that that also describes my brother, every bit of that. Including attacking a police officer (although all I know was that it was “assault”; I’m not sure if it was actually a physical attack or a threat of one). He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and a borderline personality disorder.
My brother has attacked my mom twice (once strangling her) and had a lot of domestic violence incidents with partners. While the vast majority of people who suffer from mental illness are just people who are more vulnerable to others, a small percentage are actually dangerous, and my brother is one of those.
My brother also goes through periods of psychosis. At one point he sent me a series of emails where he clearly did not know who I was, and he kept emailing me asking “why I am keeping him from her” (no idea who he was talking about) or getting very paranoid. I ended up taking all of the emails he sent me and packaged them in a zip file to send to his lawyer, who was trying to get the Department of Corrections to allow my brother to get mental health treatment.
The posts on Facebook by this lady are not too far off from stuff my brother would say.
My uncle used to call and leave like 24 voice messages overnight (not exaggerating the number.) Because of some of the things he said, I had to distance myself from him. The last time I saw him was to inform him of my other uncle’s death, it was deeply uncomfortable and he died not long after.
I simultaneously feel like our family let him down and also we didn’t have the resources to help him. My Mom became obsessed with him and went from describing his erratic behavior as a child to thinking he was uniquely evil and getting more and more exaggerated about things he’d done to her. I’m convinced he did some shitty things to her, but her story has not been consistent so I can’t gauge the extent. My Mom’s thing is constant paranoia and obsession with seemingly innocuous things, and an increasingly disorganized and inconsistent account of her own childhood. By the time I stopped speaking to her, she couldn’t have a normal conversation without bringing it back to her trauma, and she frequently said things that just didn’t make sense because she would provide no context. My Aunt called it “trauma salad” because it was word salad about her real and imagined traumas. This is when we started talking about some kind of psychosis. By the time I stopped talking to her it was not much different than talking to my uncle.
With my Mom I go back and forth between whether or not she was responsible for her own actions. Although as a different uncle once pointed out, “Does it really matter if she had control? Isn’t the impact on you about the same?”
Yeah pretty much.
And sadly that’s the case here. Those kids got seriously hurt and the impact on their lives will be about the same.
I tried helping my brother financially and emotionally for years. I let him stay with me for a while. I helped him try to find jobs. But his behavior just got too erratic for me to be able to help him. I think it was the time I sent him money to help him get his footing in Athens, TN but he then bribed a cab driver to smuggle him into Canada in the trunk of his car that I gave up on that. (True story; he met a girl up there online, you see.)
That was also before he tried to strangle my mom, which was the point where I pretty much cut ties with him altogether.
You have to be safe. The truth is there’s no good supports, in this country at least, for people with psychosis. Some countries have much better outcomes, but in the US there is no political will to support these people, and families often are totally unequipped to handle it.
It’s easy when someone does something like this to say, “Better mental health care!” And that’s true but there’s also just this foundational reality that some people cannot be helped, they can only be managed and it’s very difficult to predict who is going to engage in violence, no matter how well trained their mental health team.
I’m gonna go all Hippocratic here – First do no harm, to themselves but especially to others. Help them if it is possible but always, always keep in mind that first tenet.
I can only imagine the guilt feelings from that.
A bloody men.
She doesn’t know the details because she was like four years old but DesertRoomie had an older sister who was institutionalized. She loved her sister and tried asking about her a few times when she was growing up but got shut down hard and could learn nothing. When she was in her mid-twenties she tried to track down where she was but her parents refused to give any information and she was unable to do so.
I suspect that and other things her parents did is why she is asexual today. She’s never felt loved, fsmilial or romantic.
I have a brother who is off the deep end. One sibling was still in contact with him for a while, but the rest of us had to cut him off completely because he was just too abusive. Apparently, he has really strange hallucinations and beliefs. Fortunately, he isn’t violent.
Well, I know people who are asexual who had pretty good childhoods. I think some people are just born that way.
I don’t want to keep the truth from my son but I don’t want to overwhelm him either. For now I just tell him my Mom couldn’t be a good parent, that she hurt me, and that I don’t want her to hurt him. He once asked me about hallucinations so I did tell him about my uncle. Not the details, just explaining that in the same way something can be wrong with your body, something can also be wrong with your brain.
Because people who post bizarre shit about supernatural stuff are, for a variety of reasons, not considered crazy. It is a blind spot in our definition of lunacy.
There is technically a DSM diagnosis for people who get carried away with religion, but they won’t come out and say that’s what it is. And I think it only counts if they believe something that’s not in line with their cultural beliefs.
We don’t have comprehensive police surveillance of all social media posts looking for anything and everything that might be of interest to various government agencies.
I looked up the DSM diagnosis for crazy religious people. It’s schizotypal personality disorder.
Kind of a mild form of psychosis. Would not explain the violence this person committed. Also the Facebook posts incorporate a lot of paranoid beliefs not just religious beliefs.
This looks like paranoid schizophrenia to me, just based on having an uncle with the disorder and her ramblings setting off similar alarm bells.
However it seems like someone with schizotypal personality disorder could maybe have been exposed to some trigger and gone into full blown psychosis. That is not an empirical observation, just speculation. It seems to me if you are a little crazy you might be vulnerable to a lot of crazy, given the right circumstances.