Mental Illness

Before anyone stops reading. This is not about Lindsay Clancy. To me, she reads like a psychopath and that is not a mental illness. That is a personality disorder. She is a bad person. I may be wrong on this one, but I do not care, the way she holds herself in court does not read grieving mom to me and does not read like any type of remorse. I go by my instinct here.

In my life I have seen a lot of people with true mental illnesses. I do not know why or how it has accumulated in my life so much or if it is normal, but the amount of people that I know who have suffered from various mental illnesses is enormous.

My childhood neighbor was a single child. She was always known for being spoiled rotten and having a very narcissistic outlook on life. She eventually succumbed to drug use in her teens and that triggered a severe case of schizophrenia. She essentially has been jumping from being institutionalized to being taken care of by her parents ever since. It is a tragic story. I do not know what came first: her narcissism or her schizophrenia. Maybe the personality disorder was just a symptom? I do not know. The point is that I saw her in her 30s last. She was out of her mind, clearly mentally stunted by either the medication she was on or the illness, and barely able to put together a comprehensible sentence. For someone who in her early teens was known to be intelligent and had excellent grades in school, this was a clear sign of mental illness taking over.

There are more cases of schizophrenia from people that I knew in my teens. One person, the boyfriend of a friend of mine, decided to hide in the woods to not participate in the mandatory army or civil service and starved himself to death. Another friend of my brother also triggered a severe case of schizophrenia from weed use. And yes, I think there is a potential where drug use triggered the schizophrenia, but also the reverse where self medication drove the drug use. What came first? Chicken or egg? Mental illness or drugs? I do not know enough about these cases to tell you exactly what happened. All I know is that many kids from my child- and teenhood ended up dead or mentally stunted. Drugs were almost always involved. But not always.

You can tell that my upbringing was probably more trailer park than anything else.

There is a book that I found highly fascinating. It is called “Brain on Fire” written by Susannah Cahalan. Here is the summary from Grok: ‘The autobiographical book describes Susannah’s anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis at age 24. A rising New York Post reporter, she developed paranoia, hallucinations, seizures, and psychosis that doctors first misdiagnosed as psychiatric illness. After a month-long hospitalization she could not remember, neurologist Dr. Souhel Najjar diagnosed the rare autoimmune disorder (her “brain on fire”) via a simple clock-drawing test and biopsy. The root cause is the immune system producing antibodies that attack the brain’s NMDA receptors, causing severe inflammation. Though often linked to an ovarian teratoma (sometimes called a “monster” tumor), none was found in Cahalan’s case. Aggressive treatment led to gradual recovery; she returned to work within seven months and later reconstructed her lost month through records and interviews, highlighting medical mystery, identity, and resilience.’

We do not really know much about mental illness. Susannah’s story above shows how inflammation in the brain can cause severe cases of psychosis that actually will then lead to physical symptoms like seizures and losing control over the body. This is a clearly identifiable physical cause. Most cases of mental illness do not have an easily identifiable root cause.

Have you ever tried to help a homeless person?

The common error in most people’s thinking is that people living on the streets have one problem only: They do not have housing. So they think putting affordable housing on the market will solve the problem.

If you ever worked with a homeless person, you know that this is not true. My husband who once when he was 19 years old and had been kicked out of the house by his own mom using police force ended up homeless for a few days on the Streets of New York. He immediately found himself both a job and housing and recovered. He is not a classical homeless person.

Since then he has had a soft spot for anyone homeless, but after having given a place to live, a clean bath, and money to homeless people, he learned that these people almost always end up back on the streets. The problem is not lack of a place to live or a shower, but there is almost always an underlying mental illness that prevents them from holding a job for longer than a few minutes and from keeping up the normal tasks that is living. Drugs may be involved, but not always.

My nephew also fell ill because of schizophrenia. A high performing student who ended up in the top of his class and made it into the top ten of the air force academy, he all over sudden became … weird. We all initially thought it was depression. He claimed he could not justify being in the army. He quit the air force academy, down spiraled, could not hold a job, until … he became so paranoid that the believed everyone was out to harm him, poison him with food, and he locked himself into a room and could only be forced into an institution by police force.

My sister in law is a big hoarder. Per the clinical diagnosis DSM-5-TR, she is at a level 4 or 5, which essentially means she lives in hazardous conditions in a house where most appliances no longer work, the kitchen cannot be used, and the bathrooms are also no longer useable. She lives in feces from the many cats she “rescued”, but cannot care for them as they are too numerous and she just does not have any discipline.

Four years ago, her father died who basically took care of her both financially and physically. By physically, I mean he stopped by regularly to help her clean her house. Since he died, no one has cleaned anything in the house. The toilet has a green film over it from algae and mold and does not function appropriately. The cabinets in the kitchen are breaking apart thanks to cat urine. You can smell the house from the outside.

It is a disaster.

You may ask why we did not step in before? Well, for several reasons. First reason is the simple reason: we did not know that it was that bad. The second reason is that my husband’s sister had for years financially abused everyone in the family for money essentially stealing tens of thousands of dollars from various people. She also has been lying constantly about nearly everything that there was no relationship established. We did not want to adopt another problem and thought she “would wake up” once she was hitting rock bottom.

She did not.

There does not seem to be a rock bottom for her.

It is clear that she has a severe mental illness. Like most hoarders likely an OCD and anxiety issue paired with an eating disorder (she is extremely overweight) and either a spending or gambling problem as she goes through money in record time.

Why now? Well, she was in a hospital last week thanks to a car accident (she drove without insurance or registration) and her car caught on fire. My husband and I visited her and she was worried about her cats, so we promised to feed them.

“My apologies, the house is a mess, I have not had a chance to clean last week”, is what she said when we left the hospital.

She is clearly in denial by how bad the situation actually is. Her downplaying that she just did not have a chance to clean last week is a clear lie that she hoped we would let her get away with. There are two things we cannot do, though:

1. Take over her care like her father used to. We cannot become an enabler and let her not be accountable for her own living conditions, behavior, and actions.

2. Let her rot and die.

So, yesterday, I called the Community Mental Health Crisis center of her county and spoke to a very well informed woman about the options. There is a mobile service that works with cases like this. Hoarding is indeed way more common than what people think. So, if you ever encounter someone in your friendship circle or family suffer from similar mental breakdowns, do not hesitate to reach out to these organizations. They work with the patient to get their life in order: from cleaning up the house, to how to budget, to providing therapy, and group meetings like ‘hoarders anonymous’. They work with the patient to whatever extent they are willing to help themselves.

Why is that important?

You cannot do the work for them. Rehabilitation requires a lot of work. Retraining your brain to understand firstly that you have a problem and secondly to find healthy coping mechanism cannot be done for you. Most people affected with these severe cases of hoarding fail. It is a reality we have to accept, but people who put in the effort will succeed. But only if they do the work.

So, by finding her help, we are stepping away. This is also important for our own mental health. As family (or even friends) you get drawn too close and will become a caregiver thus enabling the problem and making it more persistent. That is what my husband’s dad did wrong. He allowed for the mental illness to fester and become part of the personality. It will be really hard for my sister in law to recover.

Let’s hope she can.

Prayers are appreciated.

Thoughts, too.