Time is on our side - but only if our physical, mental, and emotional strength exists.

Mental health is a precious gift we experience each day. Some may fail to recognize this gift or realize its importance.

Electric Mental Circus image by AI

“And so castles made of sand
Melts into the sea eventually” ~ James Marshall Hendrix - 1967

Integrity and Courage are Essential in Dealing with Schizophrenia

1983 - 2017

My son’s childhood was an exceedingly difficult time for him to manage. He fell through all the cracks. He was on the spectrum from the beginning. He didn’t fare well as far as early development. Autism wasn’t a "thing” in those days. I have to own the beginnings of the situation with my son’s developmental delays. If not the nature, then certainly the nurture part. In our rural Ohio county, even books for schoolchildren were an issue. I remember this distinctly. The state used an unfair way to distribute school funds. But that is beside the point. I didn’t get him help. Hell, I barely recognized that the boy had a problem. I worked full-time. I was also a single parent. I had little help, except occasionally from a kind neighbor. His mom had personal issues. My folks had moved away. Not one of these is an excuse. The fact is that he didn’t get help early on. That's on me. Looking back, I lacked knowledge and experience, and that’s putting it mildly.

Since first grade, his teachers had been unanimous. It was like, at times, he disappeared and was no longer a part of their shared space. The class would too often find him staring obliviously into thin air. This continued until the teacher would pull him from his daydream. This type of behavior was repeated many times. I treated him in a way (as I thought at the time) that would toughen him to life’s realities. Due to my negligence and stupidity, he saw too much; it was too early in his life.

2001 - 2018

Starting at the age of eighteen (around 2001), he exhibited some of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. His hygiene wasn’t good. He started hearing and seeing things that were not there. His strange ideas and difficulty communicating with people caused misunderstandings. In 2004, two years before my third wife and I married, his mental health issues noticeably surfaced. This impacted our new relationship. At first, it did not seem insurmountable. Later, it crept in slowly, after our marriage, becoming part of our long-term relationship.

It wasn’t long before my son shared his worries. He told his roommate first, not my wife or me. He thought my wife was trying to poison me. His behavior was often troubling for the first nine years of our marriage. This was partly because he refused to stay on his anti-psychotic medicines. He used non-prescription substances to self-medicate (extremely dangerous for patients on anti-psychotics) and refused to change his habits. One redeeming thing shone through to us through the highs and lows of those years - this previously only child had felt a unique bond within our blended family. This was a first for him after such a challenging and lonely childhood. But, all in all, he remained unable and/or unwilling (due to a severe lack of insight) to comprehend his larger medical picture.

In retrospect, the number of clues I missed during his childhood was staggering. He was sexually abused (by other neighborhood children) when he was only eight years old. This trauma, I believe, is with him still. He sometimes voices strange ideas about women, and his comments on life generally can sound fatalistic. My biggest failing as a parent was my near-complete lack of understanding of the level of his trauma or how to begin helping him heal.

My wife and her children loved him, but his erratic and sometimes bizarre behavior and speech tended to frighten them. As of this writing, we regularly have very young grandchildren at home. This prevents us from protecting him (as we had for a decade, giving him a stable home). If I’m being 100% honest, that last sentence is true, but also, it’s a personal cop-out. Of course, we wanted to shield him from the harsh outside world. At the same time, we loved our happy home situation and relatively tranquil family life. After years of dealing with his lies, we didn’t want to lose that harmony again. We’d finally found peace after ten long years of trying to keep him close and mitigate symptoms as best we could. We’d insisted on his adherence to his medication regimen. This was not debatable. He outright rejected them, and was too sick to understand that a bridge had been burnt. Our hopes were forlorn. Things by that time, 2015, had fallen slowly but inexorably apart.

We loved him, but he lacked basic knowledge of the world and still had a limited understanding of people, their motivations, and true intentions, which made things highly dicey. He trusted total strangers too quickly. His family was another matter. He appeared to know almost nothing about how society works. He learned through repetition that calling 911 often brought him to safety. He did this too frequently when he just felt insecure, or perhaps, when he heard voices or saw terrifying hallucinations. He grasped onto dialing 911 early on - maybe he thought he had no choice because there was no one around him he felt comfortable confiding in. He couldn’t understand how the emergency medical response system was supposed to function. It often depends on volunteers to respond to emergencies, and he tended to react after regular hours. I have no doubt he considered those pleas for help as emergencies in his confused state. This abuse of the system went on so long without supervision that the system grew frustrated with him. He lived alone, so no authority figure was around to guide him during these moments of panic. The local emergency medical folks on call began to see his requests for “emergency” medical attention as unimportant or less important. This took resources away from genuine emergencies that needed their help more.

He longed for connection and needed the right anti-psychotic medicine. We hoped for a stress-free life for him. So that he could start to recover and feel fewer symptoms, we prayed that he might reach a stable baseline. He is fortunate that his condition is treatable with medication. During the best times in those early family years, he seemed to improve with a loving family around him. He was able to work a regular job out of his home. Schizophrenia is not always treatable with drugs. The doctors I most respected said that improvement comes from both drug and patient choices. It's fifty percent medicine and fifty percent decisions of the patient. The best medications for him were injectable anti-psychotics like Invega Sustena. Since they are intramuscular, they are pretty painful. The injection is time-release, and it worked well in conjunction with a mid-level dosage of haloperidol (another antipsychotic). Some pills may have good efficacy alone, but he often forgot them. He also made himself vomit to get rid of them quickly. It was a destructive cycle of fear and denial. When he felt better, he decided there was no need for meds anymore. It's a classic schizophrenic reaction embodying the attitude: “I feel great! I’m not sick!” Stopping anti-psychotics suddenly can be risky. It’s another example of his lack of insight, indicating that he can't manage his condition independently.

His pronounced lack of awareness meant social signals were a mystery to him. He never seemed to learn by example or even by experience. Later in life, pride and an increasingly un-humble attitude worked against his development. He lacked social awareness and often felt overly emotional and unstable. Public encounters began to exert pressure on him. Many things that seemed routine to him confused strangers, and vice versa. His odd comments and actions often frightened people who didn’t know him. Such unfathomable encounters with strangers were more pronounced during times of extreme mania. They showed his inner chaos.

2022

We were in a new state of residence by this time. Stuck in Ohio with no family or friends, he used the money from his disability check and followed us to Connecticut. He’d been isolated and had mainly gone untreated for several years. I found him pushing a shopping cart (of his few belongings) in Brooklyn, NY, late in 2022. He wanted to return to family life, which was understandable. But we could no longer offer him that experience in the same household. His actions leading to and immediately following our reunion showed us that the old familiar chaos would soon return. Recognizing the urgent need for change, I hospitalized him, and fairly soon, I appealed to the court system in Connecticut. I wanted to ensure he received the recovery time he needed. Rest and the proper medications could provide him with the peace of mind he sorely wanted. He required long-term psychiatric care. An empathetic judge at probate court realized his behavior was abnormal and wouldn’t change without intervention. Facing psychoses is tough any time, anywhere. Looking back, his time (and my time) in rural Ohio felt like emerging from a bad dream. He finally got the care (he'd needed for ten years) in Connecticut. The sudden involvement of the law when he acted (out of fear) violently in public only confirmed the growing consensus. He was so confused by then that he wasn’t in control of anything. He was never violent except when prompted by amygdala-driven fear out of a sense of perceived self-protection.

More than twenty years after his initial diagnosis, although the lyrics changed at times, the song about his mental condition remained the same. He had only two choices:

1. Stay medicated

2. Face harsh consequences and run-ins with the law.

In Ohio, his disability payments would stop immediately if his account had exceeded $1500.00. Connecticut had no such archaic rules on how much money a state-supported disabled person could have in the bank. He has a sizable savings after almost three years in the hospital. With his conservator's help and the Lord's grace, we can help him start a new life. One where, at least initially, he will be free from debilitating symptoms and can afford to keep a roof over his head — an opportunity to end his permanent homelessness and lift that burden of constant stress for good. That is my new assignment.

2025

We want to know whether those close to us see family life and love in a similar light. Feeling responsible for someone’s mental illness can dim the natural beauty of life’s mysteries. We see our loved ones suffer, and we often fixate on their symptoms and traumas. We want to (at least ) try understanding their journey to wellness and wholeness.

The anguish of watching my only child endure such suffering felt genuine and gut-wrenching. I wanted to find my son again, whom people in his orbit had kicked around for most of his life. The person who re-entered our life in 2022 in a close personal way was familiar, but he was not my son. He showed a mix of strange behaviors and had a harder edge. Was this due to broken internal circuits or a combination of that and behavior issues? Due to the way unkind people have treated him most of his life? His traumatic experiences shaped him. After years of mistreatment and stigma, he holds strong beliefs about himself. A nihilistic belief system, shaped by chaotic life and mental struggles, has made him feel unwanted. He thought he'd never get married (that it wasn’t allowed for people like him). We notice his manic behavior (an overworked amygdala is a terrible thing to witness). Where he would always react (but rarely act out of volition), such a life of fight or flight must be highly disorienting. He long ago adopted a self-protective street mentality. We, who love him, have felt helpless at the frightening events surrounding his choices. This twisted panoply of thoughts impacts no one more strongly than the poor patient-sufferer. I kept reminding myself that many hopes and dreams for my child may never come to fruition. I accept that and love him just as he is. The question becomes: does he accept and love himself as he is? Does he wish to grow and accentuate his development? The answers to these questions will dictate his future strength in thought and action. I want his happiness. No matter what he chooses, he will have my love and support. I would hate to see him short-change himself by remaining unwilling to try at least to adapt to modern life.

Most mental illnesses are treatable. Too often, the medical establishment only offers medication as an answer. Those who care for the afflicted appreciate this option. Watching someone’s life fall apart due to schizophrenia is hard. Poor choices and long silences can lead to strained relations that tend to take on a stifled permanency. It's normal to want a smooth path back to sanity after a challenging manic-depressive event. Each bout of depression (after months of mania) makes him a little less my son in the aftermath. More of his mind is gone (maybe permanently).

But shouldn’t there be spiritual paths to recovering what was stolen from him? Lessons should have been learned from all those hard knocks on that difficult road. Those potential lessons could have been helpful. Are brain chemicals not working right? Oh, might they be corrupted or stuck in faulty synapses or inactive brain cells? Could this stop him from really accepting his reality? How often will my son keep losing his grip on reality? When will he stop repeating old behaviors and making mistakes born from poor choices? Hope and experience with the illness are key to any spiritual answers to his condition. When will he attain insight? For his family to have this hope, clear communication is key to success. Medical experts will also need to monitor him. Therapy should be ongoing. For many schizophrenic patients, pharmaceuticals combined with other therapeutic treatments are a key part of a long-term solution.

I've seen this young man get knocked down repeatedly, year after year. Now, at forty-one, his paranoia and broken spirit are finally receding again. I’m always amazed that I can still believe in his healing. I even dare to hope for a cure through modern science (or at least some new effective treatment) to help him learn right now and thereby help ensure his continued development.

Prayer is powerful; is forgiveness less so? I believe they can have equal value under the right conditions. About a year ago, he ranted at me from the psychiatric hospital about my negativity. He said it stemmed from my lack of confidence. He thought our family’s actions, and especially my attitude towards our shared history, twisted his good sense of reality. It turned out he was on the wrong meds. A calm and stable environment helped him. With a predictable routine (and the proper medication), he’s been given a reprieve from some of his old delusions.

Many of these thoughts I’m expressing are just guilt-tripping about our family's happiness. We tried for a decade to make sense of his unmedicated presence in our home. When he encounters trouble, we suffer along with him. We were worried about how to act and his troubling behaviors in challenging situations. I was always too close to it; a lousy dynamic had set between my son and me over the decades. I had enabled him out of love for far too long. How can I make better decisions amidst terrible or frightening events? It’s been nearly three years since he was hospitalized in Connecticut.

The ideas I keep returning to are “progress” and “starting over from scratch.” Every setback has brought on the same inevitable result. He often tossed aside small gains in knowledge and life improvements. This was linked to his habit of giving up all his belongings for quick but inadequate rewards. In earlier years, if his car ran out of gas, he would abandon it on the road and not mention it until it was impounded. How can one deal with someone so clueless about the society in which they are trying to function?

I want to tell him: "Don’t play games with your mind! It affects not only you but also your loved ones!"

He must take those words seriously to connect with his family again. All of our behaviors have an indirect effect on one another. For we see him as he is and accept him as such. We have loved and loved, and things have only marginally and ephemerally improved. Yet, by some seemingly unearthly form of grace, his journey of hope is ongoing, and we fervently pray that so will be his learning. I hope this gentle and kind person I tried to raise can start anew, with a strong mind and an intact sense of hope. This time, I want to help him gain insight into the possibility of enjoying a more fulfilling life.

Synchronous Resonance ~ AI-generated

March 24, 2025

Son,

I’m unsure if you’re holding back your thoughts from me or wishing to avoid arguments. If that’s the case, please don’t hold back too much. Of course, you need to think things through before speaking out. However, sharing your thoughts clearly and unemotionally can yield new insights from others. People have wisdom to share. The people near you now want to hear your thoughts. They want to talk about it and help you realize your potential in life, which isn't as limited as you might think. You’re in a great spot right now from a clinical view. Consider reaching out to others as you prepare to manage daily tasks on your own again. Be open to discussing complex issues in the group. Let logic guide you, not feelings. Share your true thoughts. You can also question what your mind suggests. Lead with your opinions, but close your argument with facts. Life can genuinely improve for you. Your life may have more promise than you can personally see for yourself. Your family, if given the chance, will take a hand in helping to guide you. However, the personal work (and that means work on yourself) will be tremendous. Sometimes, it might feel too harsh because life isn’t always fair. You will benefit when things go well. So, face life with more energy and less confusion. You’ll need to take the time to learn the facts before jumping to conclusions. I will be there for advice. As always, I will remain, I can assure you, your emotional supporter. And, as always, I love you ~ Dad.