A post at 
Reenie’s Reach reminded me a few days ago about the movie A Beautiful Mind, which had a big impact on me. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand schizophrenia better. The first time I tried to watch it I couldn’t get past the diagnosis, after having lost touch with my oldest brother due to that devastating disease. I had to stop watching. I finally saw the movie again a couple of months ago, after my husband bought the DVD. Together we watched all the way through.
My oldest brother Jerry has paranoid schizophrenia. I’ve read of a few other schizophrenics who somehow were able to understand their disease, to realize the voices or imaginary “friends” weren’t real, and were able to cope better as a result. But getting to that acceptance . . . who knows how to make this happen? How to sustain it? It’s tragically rare. Medications used in the past, and many still used today, don’t do much except numb a person to life. Who wants to live that way? There’s a lot of misunderstanding of the disease, apparent when you read reviews of the DVD at Amazon. Many people think schizophrenia is a psychological condition, a result of experience or events, or that sufferers have a choice if they would just snap out of it. In fact schizophrenia is a brain disorder, usually latent until the late teens or early adulthood.
When my parents lived in Oregon during the early fifties, they took in foster children while waiting for their own children to come along. Two of the kids they cared for were Nancy and Jerry, a darling pair of preschoolers, a brother and sister two years apart in age. Their troubled parents eventually gave them up for adoption, and my parents, who’d already taken these two precious children into their hearts, took them permanently into their lives. To me they were my big sister and brother, always family, for years before I learned what the word adoption meant. I didn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been there.
We always knew Jerry had behavioral and learning problems. He was held back two years in elementary school. He got in trouble a lot. Mom worked with him daily after school to help improve his reading skills. But no one understood the scope of what was going on inside his head. When he was a teenager my parents tried to get him to hang out with different kids, thinking some of his friends were a bad influence. He would do things that frustrated and angered my dad. We didn’t know why. We just didn’t know.
When he was old enough, Jerry and his best friend joined the Army together. We all worried about this, especially with a war going on. But he was old enough to make up his own mind. After his second tour in Vietnam, he came home a broken hero, full of horror stories, and at first we thought this was the normal hardship of a returning war veteran. I’m sure a lot of it was, but hidden inside him was this latent disease. What in other people might’ve caused posttraumatic stress—which is serious enough—for him triggered paranoid schizophrenia. Still, no one recognized it. He’d survived, earned medals, fallen in and out of love. During his last few days in Vietnam his pet monkey was killed. He’d hoped to bring it home and was trying to arrange for quarantine so he could bring it to the states, when it was killed by mortar fire. That seemed to break my brother’s heart. But he seemed to get over it.
He stayed in the Army a few years after that, but finally got in some trouble over a church he belonged to. Jerry went AWOL, and that was the first hint of his obsession with religion. Schizophrenia works in the brain in such a way that the auditory and visual centers are affected. In many schizophrenics those voices are so literally real they make the person believe God or a divine being is talking to them. To them it’s not an imaginary voice at all. It’s as real as a person actually speaking. If you heard a voice you couldn’t connect to any living person, who would you think it belonged to? It’s no surprise the disease often manifests with religious delusions. But we didn’t know that. We didn’t understand. We thought he’d gotten involved with some fanatical friends.
He didn’t make rate fast enough, so the Army eventually wouldn’t let him re-enlist. I think the structured life in the military had been good for him, even if going through a war hadn’t. When the Army let him go, he fell apart. Soon after he got out he took welding classes. He did great at welding, and he liked it, but one night he left for class and didn’t come home. I remember the day, because I was just 18, and on his way out the door he wished me happy birthday. He was 25.
After months of not knowing where Jerry was, we learned he’d joined a religious cult somewhere in the Mojave Desert. The local sheriff called to tell us he’d abandoned his car, his belt, his shoes, and his wallet. Later he turned up working in orange groves in Florida. Later he was hospitalized in the VA psychiatric ward in Chillicothe, Ohio—among many other places. He came home for a while, but he’d always liked to travel, enjoying the new and interesting places he went while in the Army, from Germany to Southeast Asia, to Panama. He continued to like to travel. He would just pick up one day and leave.
We lost track of Jerry, years ago, and we don’t know where he is today. If he’s alive now, he’s 56. If he remembers where home is (my dad lives in the same house and has the same phone number), he hasn’t found his way there in a long time. The last time I saw him was shortly after I married, just over 23 years ago.
Jerry once owned a pair of orange sneakers I’ll never forget. He loved animals and people. He was generous to a fault, easily taken in by people who weren’t so nice. My dad used to get after him for giving his belongings away to people he thought needed them more. He never demanded much. He enjoyed a simple life. He loved to fish, ever since I can remember, so in my mind I place him near a body of water, fishing every day off a pier or a riverbank, maybe playing chess in a nearby park. He used to beat everyone in the family—everyone he knew—at chess, and it amazed us that someone who did so poorly in school could play chess so well.
I never understood Jerry, but I’ll never forget my big brother. I wish I could hire someone to find him, who would then just follow him around full time to make sure he’s okay. Though I know he needs help, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want him to ever lose his freedom. There’s something beautiful in every mind. Sometimes we have to look harder to see it.
11.
I read your post a few days ago, and it made me so sad I just couldn’t comment. I came back today to read the comments you received.
My heart goes out to anyone who has a loved one with these troubles.
Cas
Comment by cas — January 31, 2006 @ 7:04 am
10.
My mom could’ve told you exactly, but I’m fuzzy on the years he was there. I’m thinking he left Vietnam sometime in 1971, but I could be wrong. If he was 18 he must’ve enlisted in late 1967. I wasn’t paying much attention to the dates, I’m afraid. (Head-in-the-clouds, clueless kid sister.)
Comment by Barbara W. Klaser — January 30, 2006 @ 7:50 am
9.
BTW, my husband had a pet monkey when he was in Vietnam, too. He was there in 1969-70. When was your brother there?
Comment by violetismycolor — January 29, 2006 @ 9:57 pm
8.
Hallucinations and lies. I had the chance to watch this again the other day, I had seen it a couple of prior times. From my perspective as a viewer it was difficult to discern what was the protagonist’s hallucination versus what was real, but I suppose that was the producer’s or writer’s intended effect. The major challenge for him is to learn to distinguish the hallucination from reality, to adapt to life as it actually is, instead of the fiction his brain tells him it is. As far as I know, I’ve never personally known anyone with schizophrenia, so I suppose it is hard for me to identify with the character.
However, it did occur to me that it’s much more common in life for us to have known people in the past, who in the present are absent from our lives, and whom we never will see again: this inverse manifestation of a past long since gone, represents a different, but perhaps related, difficulty of adaptation.
I’m not thinking of deaths particularly, though violetismycolor’s example is one, nor people we might meet casually in our travels who we are unlikely to ever meet again, but rather, people that had an extended impact on our lives, who, because of either the mobile or synthetic nature of our modern society, or for some other reason, are no longer in our lives. The fact that we’ve been trained in and with a disposable culture that when something no longer fits our definition of ease or beauty, we simply get rid of it so we don’t need to look at it anymore, and that this phenomenon can be and often is increasingly applied to people, may be related to a much more common type of modern-day reverse-illness that more of us can identify with.
One example of this might be lovers who, for whatever reason, decide their future lives might be happier without that other person who was at one time so very beautiful, but as they grew older, one, the other, or both of them changed and the match-up of the two became rather ugly—or perhaps was not what was imagined in the first place—so they decided to throw the relationship away permanently, to banish each other from their futures. Another might be a dysfunctional family whose members wear various metaphorical masks, but one day some or all of them wake up and realize they have little in common with each other and go their separate ways.
We might well have just hallucinated their existences in the first place, since they are either no longer in our hearts or perhaps we never were in theirs, but their shadow—the memories they gave us—are not forgotten, and we must live with those shadows everyday. In this reverse way, it may be easier to identify with the main character of Beautiful Minds, whose problem isn’t only a past he no longer has, but also is a present of persistent illusions against which he must always be on guard.
*
A completely different type of memory is the lie we’ve been told, essentially a calculated illusion; how it effects us when the truth is discovered, and how that process may be similar to the schizophrenic’s challenge, is curious.
Comment by Ken — January 28, 2006 @ 6:09 pm
7.
My old boyfriend from college had a sister who was had schizophrenia. She killed herself when she was only 22 and he was 24. He is still devastated by it. And he was really afraid to have children, himself, since he was afraid he might pass a gene or something. He is making peace with it but it is hard and his parents are having an even harder time. This is a horrible thing for any family to deal with. I am so sorry that you are going through this, Barbara.
Comment by violetismycolor — January 27, 2006 @ 5:23 pm
6.
The movie “A Beautiful Mind” always makes me feel anxious. It presents John Nash’s delusions as actual people and events, and it’s easy to see, because of this, how there’s no distinction for him between them and reality. Something about that just keeps me totally on edge while I watch, wondering, is this supposed to be real or an hallucination? But it is a great movie. I understand it’s based on a true story, a mathematician at MIT who was eventually able to find a way to continue his work and keep his hallucinations at bay, basically by rejecting them, and eventually won a Nobel Prize for his economics theory. Here are a couple of links about John Nash.
John F. Nash, Jr. — Autobiography
John F. Nash, 1928-
Inspiring. It’s directed by Ron Howard, by the way. I watched it again last night, and again it made me anxious. Odd, how it affects me that way.
Comment by Barbara W. Klaser — January 27, 2006 @ 3:44 pm
5.
Oh Barbara, what a nice tribute. Thank you for writing that. Some things in life can leave me feeling a bit sad. While other things leave me experiencing such joy. The duality of this world we live in is truly an amazing thing. I too hope Jerry is ok and not locked up somewhere. Now I am a bit aprehensive about seeing that movie, but I plan to soon.
Love, your sis, helen
Comment by Helen — January 27, 2006 @ 3:03 pm
4.
I believe there are people who have visions or receive messages of either a psychic or spiritual nature. I do think some of this is real, though there are also charlatans who dupe people, and of course mental illness. I’ve been planning a lengthy article one of these days on just that: Delusions, lies, and visions. Seems maybe I’ve started already, with the prior post on James Frey’s book, and this one on schizophrenia. One might add to the mix the experiences of fiction writers engaging with our fictional characters. Sometimes the line between reality and imagination blurs—or moves. Even skepticism is an area where I think people sometimes go overboard.
Comment by Barbara W. Klaser — January 27, 2006 @ 1:44 pm
3.
Too much or the wrong medication can have strange effects, too. At one point my husband was hallucinating and acting out-turns out the medication was supposed to be taken only once a day, not 3 or 4 times! Medically induced and easily remedied. Still scary, though, with lots of flashbacks to the real thing with my mother.
The funny time was when he thought the dragon screen printed on my tee shirt was going to crawl off and fly away. He kept trying to catch it…yeah.
Comment by Sarah — January 26, 2006 @ 4:21 pm
2.
Remarkable if sad story. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to hear voices. The world as it appears to most of us is hard enough to cope with. I suspect people with such problems would do better if our society was more willing to recongize that they exist, that people can’t always help being the way they are.
There is this idea too many have about people who are “crazy.” And it’s that it’s all “crazy” all the time. But usually, problems are not all encompassing and people with problems can do many many things and often very well. They aren’t different in the sense they are completely different, only in the sense that certain functions are impaired. It isn’t the whole person who’s somehow “wrong.”
Comment by Eric Mayer — January 26, 2006 @ 10:38 am
1.
My two recent blogs have addressed schizophrenia, too. The most heartbreaking responses have been —off-site— where people have emailed me to share their sorrows and jumbled histories related to mental illness or abuse.
I have had symptoms of being an empath, absorbing the pain, and I’m feeling a little limp. But I do know and this is very important: No one heals in a state of aloneness — others are absorbing my pain, as well.
Though I’ve gone deep the past few days regarding my mother’s illness, I am smart enough to know her illness does not define me — I am more than her illness. So, life goes on — as Annie Lamott would say, bird by bird.
Thanks for sharing Barbara. You share the story about your brother with such tenderness. xoxo
Comment by Reenie — January 26, 2006 @ 6:54 am