By: Revanche

Mental illness in our family

November 25, 2019

Mental illness speckles my family tree like leaf mold.

The bipolar uncle who cackled uncomfortably like a cartoon character, his mirth punctuated by random outbursts of rage. The cousin fallen prey to the lure of drugs to quiet his anxiety, lost when the drugs pushed him to suicide instead of helping as he’d hoped. Then his brother couldn’t handle the anger and loss and pain, he was finally diagnosed as bipolar and refused to be treated. Then Mom’s dementia and anxiety and depression, desperately intermingled, trapped her in a dizzying kaleidoscopic world until she passed. My dad was, and remains, a hardcore narcissist. If he doesn’t actually have NPD, his life and choices certainly mimic it very strongly, and he raised a son who was the same.

Mostly this kind of thing is hushed up by the family, as if not talking about it means that it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t work, family. It hasn’t protected any of us.

Some of got lucky. Some of us danced with acute depression and/or anxiety, lasting weeks, or months, admitted it, got help, and finally made it through to the other side. Humbled and a little wiser about the realities, and vagaries, of mental health with some tools to manage that anxiety and depression, we’ve understood the struggle a little better. And some of us who won free still live with the specter, daily.

My brother wasn’t one of “some of us”. He didn’t have a sharp psychotic break. He didn’t step in and out of schizophrenia, managed and not. It was almost a gentle transition. He’d always had delusions of grandeur – he flashed through get rich quick schemes like credit cards. Braggadacio fed his outsize ego which fueled his arrogance in an endless loop.

He never worked harder than when he was trying to dupe me, our parents, or family and friends. He was the first to fall head over heels for the earliest MLM scams of our time, dragging our worried parents and their connections in with him. He managed two quarters at the local state college before dropping out with parking tickets and failing grades trailing in his wake.

He slipped into the warm embrace of true delusions easily, just like he’d done every night when we lay in bed in our shared room, dancing through one imaginary scenario after another. His created world had always been far more desirable than the one we lived in, the one of bills, of hard work, of gritting your teeth and dealing with the daily mundanity that keeps the car running and the water on.

Is it any wonder then, as his delusions deepened, as he swatted away our reality to create a new world for himself where he didn’t have to do any actual work, that it simply wasn’t clear if this wasn’t just another one of his long cons?

For an uncertain number of years, his decline mimicked his earlier cons. Every weird encounter with him was nearly exactly like previous subtle schemes to force me to embrace his version of reality and not so incidentally, into providing his basic support. He has had a lifelong history of modeling fake helplessness. Those years of experience are how I learned to see through his scams and reject them. But because of his addiction to scams, for years, I couldn’t tell if this wasn’t another version of that exercise that had been successful in the past.

A year after Mom passed, when it was finally clear that whatever his choices or flaws, he truly had an undiagnosed mental illness, it was too late. He was too old. We could not force an adult to seek treatment against his will. We could not convince him that he needed to seek treatment. He was the normal one. He was right, he was the brilliant genius with ideas crackling and sparking up in the night, lighting the way for those of us too shortsighted, too fool, to see.

Several years ago, I considered what it would take to get him back. To get the brother I so briefly had a relationship with as nearly young adults. I’d have to leave my job hundreds of miles away that was supporting the whole family, personally babysit him to force him to tell the truth to his care providers, and then force him to take medications we could only hope might work. But there was no guarantee he would cooperate, nor that the medications would work, and that’s entirely aside from the fact that I doubt it’s moral to force an adult through those paces if they don’t want to change.

It’s been 8 years and he’s still convinced of his righteousness. We’ve lost him, too.

Why is this coming up now?

These memories resonate so strongly because for many years, I had to act like the parent to him. No one else could manage him. And this has preyed on my mind when I ponder our future. Unlike Ali’s aunt, I have very few fond memories of my brother: “After all my Aunt was able to remember a time when her little sister was a sweet and loving little girl. My only memories of that same person are of a very mean spirited woman who never has a kind word to say to anyone.”

Ironically(?), my (financially abusive) dad still feels a sense of responsibility to his elder child that he apparently never felt to me, so they stick together for now as I’ve gone no contact with the two of them. Maybe it’s because they are so alike.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about them as we get older. I say that as if I’m supposed to do something about them. I say that because my gut says that after so many years of being pushed into the role of my brother’s keeper, if Dad predeceases him as one might expect, I’m going to have to be his keeper again. I don’t want that job. I’ve never wanted that job. Or if Dad gets seriously ill, I’m going to feel eyes on me, expectant, waiting for me to step up like I’ve stepped up a million times over 20 years. That might be worse. I don’t know, they’re both bad.

Maybe those eyes are just in my imagination, leftover vestiges of being trained to do only my duty to my family of origin and never considering myself or my own choices. I hope they are.

Because after all I’ve done, paid, and sacrificed, and then learning of Dad’s betrayal, I don’t want to do any more. I don’t want to feel obligation to them. I don’t want to feel guilt over leaving them to fend for themselves forevermore. I don’t think I should feel any of this, which is progress. (Though I do, so there’s still work to be done.) It’s been years since I’ve spoken to either of them, and the one time he tried reaching me in the past two years, it was only to try to manipulate me into wrongdoing. He’s choosing to double down and I don’t want any part of that.

I want to be shut of them, emotionally, financially, in all ways.

It’s taking me what feels like far too long to shed the guilt on principle alone. I must let go of it because I have a higher responsibility to my child, spouse, and chosen family but this may be one of those things that time will heal more effectively than effort.

Our next generation

After many long years of these machinations and manipulations, I couldn’t imagine building my own biological family. For years, I was against the idea of having biological children. I felt as though all the genetics were arrayed against us. How could we take that risk? How could we possibly risk passing on my desperately flawed genetics to another person?  Yet some of us DID make it through. I live with my history of depression and balance that with my everyday life, even with depression-inducing chronic pain every day.

Of course, we did take the risk of having a child and we are doing our level best to provide the nurturing and the environment least conducive to those illnesses breaking through if it is at all possible to nudge zir away from the tracks that my family have run down.

I don’t know how the NPD works, other than anecdotally. I don’t know how strongly it breaks out when it’s not encouraged and nurtured. Has it bloomed greater in men than women since our culture accepts that type of behavior in men and doesn’t allow it in women?

There’s not a lot of great data out there but there are suggestions that it is an inheritable disease and that the early life environment will affect or determine whether or not the trait ultimately manifests. He was under stress as an infant and toddler since those were the years our family were refugees and trying to make their way to the States, whereas I was born when we were already here and settled in very humble lodgings. We were poor for most of my childhood but it wasn’t “traveling from one country to the next with only the clothes on our backs” stressful.

Whether it’s just correlation or causation, the manipulations and scams he ran on me started when he was 4. I was only 1 or 2 when he started finagling away my milk bottles, my candy, my toys. It could just looked like normal childhood manipulation of a sibling, and Mom did her best to stop him, but he never stopped.

JB’s life experience is about a universe away from that: loved, cherished, and even semi-coddled from Day 1 with all zir needs met without any upheaval or stressors outside of the one that made us move (evil neighbor). Even then, ze was not personally exposed to that horrible person, we kept zir safe and away from him at all times. I have at least one very close family member who knows our family history and will do their best to help us steer JB to a happier and healthier life but I also have to accept that there’s only so much we can do.

I don’t have any answers here. I just hope to have hope.

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