My Experience with Mentally Ill Relatives

My Experience with Mentally Ill Relatives

Probably shouldn’t say this but I had my bipolar brother living with me for a few years here. He’s homeless and has no place to stay, so he’s either here with me or he’s on the streets. He’s kind of a piece of shit, but, hey, he’s family. In my family, we don’t abandon each other. We are all each other’s resource of last resort pretty much. Before me, my Mom took him back as he was homeless again back then too.

Well, he got out of jail for threatening to kill my Mom, and he came straight here. For a while he was sleeping at the mission, but then he scammed his way in here. He ended up staying here a few years. However, I’m the only one allowed on this lease. He cycled through a few manic episodes while he was living here, and it was Hell on Earth. But this last one was the worst of all.

He’s denied that he’s ill for 40 years, and he finally just got medicated as a condition of the court. But you still can’t talk about it, and he won’t up his dose when he goes manic because when he’s manic, he has zero insight and doesn’t have the faintest idea that anything is wrong with him, which I cannot understand.

He was living here, things came to a head, and I got threatened with eviction by the manager and got into some other trouble which I won’t elaborate. I got served with a three day change or quit notice, and he talked to some people and he straightened up just like that! The mania just went away with the threat to evict him.

I will never understand this illness! It’s like they have more control over it than you think and if you practically point a gun to their head and order them to shape up, some of them will just shut the illness down.

I actually think they enjoy being crazy. It’s fun. The only times he laughs much is when he’s manic. He’s mean as a snake and full of hate, but he’s also pretty jolly and obviously having the time of his life. I think Borderlines like being crazy too.

I’ve come to the conclusion late in life that a lot of people just seem to enjoy being crazy. At the very least a lot of people seem to enjoy being miserable, wretched, belligerent assholes. Anger is very empowering.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that humans basically have zero insight into their behavior and they’re completely blind to themselves and incapable of self-introspection. No disturbed person one ever seems to figure out that they’re disturbed, even when they are, or perhaps especially when they are.

Now my experience may be tainted due to my family, but I hold to this. In particular, irritable people seem to never recognize that they are irritable or else they actually enjoy it. I’ve rarely if ever met an irritable person who would even acknowledge that they were irritable! I think irritable people enjoy being touchy psycho wretches for some reason. I don’t get it.

Anyway, we agreed to a deal where he stays here in the day and sleeps at the mission at night, and it’s been like that ever since. And he stayed quite sane for some time.

I noticed that this last time, drinking made him a lot worse, which has never happened before. The illness has been slowly worsening over the years, with episodes coming sooner and lasting longer. Recently there have been six months between episodes and lately more like three or four.

He acts a lot worse during the episodes, talks to himself all the time out loud, and when he’s not doing that, he talks to himself silently moving his lips and making laughing movements, which looks weird, like someone talking to themselves silently.

Recently he scammed his way into a few nights sleeping over, drank to drunkenness every night, and the mania got got dramatically worse almost immediately. It’s like the way he is now, I’m not sure if he can even drink one beer. I don’t think he should drink at all. It’s been days since he had a beer, but he’s still really ugly and manic, more or less just full of sheer hate, which is the way he gets when he’s like that, and it’s been that way since the very start of this bullshit.

He’s practically evil; well, wait, he is evil when he’s like that. He literally hates the whole world and everyone in it. We traditionally divide between two poles, the first being normal/disordered and the second being good/bad, right/wrong, good/evil, but now I’m starting to wonder. When he goes crazy (behaviorally disordered), he becomes evil (morally disordered, traditionally seen as outside of mental illness). How many people we think are straight up evil are instead just nuts?