Unhinged

by Anna Berry

  “What?” I feign surprise, but I’ve known for months that this was probably coming.

  Mark sighs. “I took her over there myself. She had a pretty bad episode with Bob over at the house, and he called me to come deal with her. They’ve got her on those benzo drugs that she likes, so she’s calming down. And they gave her a sleeping pill—”

  “Mark, Mom cannot be on any benzodiazepenes or sleeping pills. You know that.”

  “Dr. Agarwal called the hospital and told them to put her on that stuff. Said that she needed to be stabilized.”

  “Mark, Mom is a junkie. Those meds are like heroin to her. You need to tell her doctors to stop giving her that dope.”

  Mark sighs again. “I tried, Anna. But they aren’t listening. At least she’s in the hospital where somebody can keep an eye on her—”

  I cut him off. “Mark, you need to get Mom the hell away from Dr. Agarwal. Dr. Agarwal’s got her hooked on all kinds of shit. And even if Mom gets out from under Dr. Agarwal, you know she’s gonna start doctor-shopping for drugs—”

  “Anna, I understand all that. But it’s complicated. And I have finals coming up—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, Mark. If you’re taking Mom to the hospital yourself, the least you can do while you’re there is tell the ER docs that Mom is a pillhead junkie who’s just manipulating them for prescriptions.”

  “Anna—” Mark raises his voice, then sucks in a deep breath. “Look, it’s not that simple. Mom’s married, and that means the only person who legally can do that kind of thing is her husband. And Bob doesn’t want to get involved. He’s pretty mad at Mom right now because she grabs him and drags him down onto the floor whenever he tries to leave the house for work. He’s almost ready to move out because of it. She’s afraid he’s abandoning her whenever he tries to go somewhere—”

  “Oh, good Christ.”

  “Anna, Mom is legitimately sick. She needs to be in the hospital right now.”

  “She’d be fine if Dr. Agarwal hadn’t doped the crap out of her,” I shoot back. “She’d be fine if she was still seeing Dr. Friedman. You need to get her the fuck away from Dr. Agarwal, do you understand me? That lady is the Dr. Feelgood from hell.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mark says, and hangs up.

  But he does nothing. Mom is discharged from the hospital after two days with a hefty benzodiazepine prescription. Mark and I have never agreed on how to handle Mom’s issues, and we never will. Mark is too sick to even take care of himself half the time, so it’s not like I can rely on him to make sound decisions anyway. And it’s not like we can do anything to get Mom off the runaway train she’s on, short of a court order—which as Mark pointed out in a rare moment of lucidity, we can’t even legally obtain for her against her husband’s wishes. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

  The next few months go something like this. Mom takes too much of Dr. Agarwal’s latest prescription, then runs out of pills early. She tries to call Dr. Agarwal for more, but often can’t reach her on weekends and off-hours. She then drinks too much beer and pops too many antihistamines as she tries to mask the withdrawal symptoms, then she has an “outburst” with Bob (or the neighbors, or my grandparents) and eventually winds up in one of the area’s many ERs. Over time, the ER physicians at all the area hospitals learn that Mom is an addict engaging in drug-seeking behavior, and they refuse to admit her.

  The three months PRI gave Mom to get better come and go. She asks for long-term disability, and it is granted, but only for three more months. If Mom doesn’t improve and return to work within that time, PRI will terminate her employment.

  Mom is well into the third month of her long-term disability when it’s clear she won’t be returning to work anytime soon. PRI fires her. The only good thing to come out of the whole mess is that without private health insurance, Mom can no longer afford Dr. Agarwal. She’ll be under the care of a state-appointed Medicaid psychiatrist from now on. There’s of course no guarantee that psychiatrist will be any better, but I don’t think anyone can possibly be worse for Mom than Dr. Agarwal has been.

  Mom petitions for SSI disability again, but with the advent of welfare reform, the process has grown a lot more complicated since her last application ten years earlier. It takes almost three months for her application to go through, and then she faces further delays as she and her caseworker navigate more and more red tape. Apparently a computer glitch leads Social Security to believe Mom is still receiving private disability from PRI when she isn’t. In the meantime, no money is coming in save from Bob’s twelve-dollar-an-hour job as a maintenance man. The bills are piling up.

  Making matters worse, Mom is pissing away all of her money and racking up huge debts besides.

  Mom calls me every evening without fail, frantic and hysterical, wanting to know if I can tell her why her credit cards are all maxed out and her checking account is empty.

  “Mom, why are you asking me this?” I always say. “I don’t have any control over your money.”

  “I-I-I don’t know where all the m-m-m-money went,” she says, her teeth grinding from all the drugs. “Where duh-duh-did all my m-m-money go?” Sometimes this same conversation loops and re-loops, ad infinitum.

  “I don’t know, Mom. Did you read your credit-card statements? Go get your statements and read them to me.”

  Mom goes to get her bills and reads long lists of credit-card transactions that she doesn’t remember making, but I recognize them as anxiety-driven manic spending habits—the very same kind of destructive behavior that once plagued me.

  There are the familiar liquor-store and drugstore binges I know are the result of Mom’s self-medicating ways. There are occasional spending sprees at local discount stores. But the bulk of the manic spending is in the form of cash advances, drawn on several different credit cards in large amounts and totaling almost $20,000 in debt.

  “Mom, why did you get all those cash advances? What the hell did you spend that kind of money on?”

  “I duh-duh-don’t know, A-A-Anna.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Think! Try to remember! Surely you’ve got some receipts or something lying around—”

  Mom starts to cry. “I dunnnooooooo! I d-d-don’t know what h-h-happened, Anna, and I nuh-nuh-need you to fuh-fuh-find that money for me!”

  “Mom, you’ve spent this money on something, and you need to figure out what. I can’t just magically get it back for you. If you bought stuff at the store and still have the receipts, maybe they’ll take it back and you can get a refund.” I doubt that’s the case, though. My guess is Mom has spent the bulk of the money on booze, possibly also frivolous things like nice dinners out or pay-per-view movies that she and Bob can no longer afford.

  Or it might well be a symptom of something much more sinister. I think back to a time in the early 1990s when my mother told me she’d started getting mysterious phone calls from people looking for someone named Edith Morehouse. There were blocks of time that she blacked out and couldn’t remember any details of, and there was always money missing from her purse afterward. She was afraid to mention the issue to her therapists, but she mentioned it to me. I told her she might have multiple personality disorder, but Mom scoffed at the idea. “That kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people except in the movies,” she said then. “I’m sure it’s just my memory playing tricks on me. My nerve medication makes me forgetful, you know.” Now, ten years later, it seems the same thing is happening again.

  “Mom, I want you to cut up all your credit cards,” I instruct her. “Your ATM card too. Give the checkbook to Bob. You shouldn’t be handling any money in your condition.”

  “Buh-but Bob says he doesn’t like to h-handle the m-m-money—”

  “Well, then he needs to shut up and get used to it,” I hiss, and hang up.

  I immediately dial my grandparents. Papaw Jones answers the phone. “Papaw, it’s Anna. I need to talk to you about Mom—”

  “I’m gon
na git your Memaw,” Papaw drawls in his thick Southern accent before I can get another word out.

  Memaw comes to the phone. “Yes, what is it, Anna?”

  “Memaw, I need you and Papaw to keep an eye on Mom and her spending habits.”

  “What do you mean, hon?”

  I sigh. “Just keep an eye out. If you notice she’s suddenly got a lot of new clothes or Bob has a bunch of expensive new tools or something like that. You know Bob doesn’t like to deal with money and then just leaves Mom to make a mess of it. Let me know if she’s eating out a lot, or seems to be carrying a bunch of cash around—”

  “Anna, honey, your Papaw and me are mostly trying to steer clear of your Mom these days.”

  My jaw drops against the receiver with a thud. “What? Why?”

  “We’re just fed up with her, hon. She’s been sick on and off like this for going on thirty years, and we just can’t deal with it no more.”

  “But Memaw—”

  “Anna, sugar, your Pap and me, we’re getting too old, and we can’t deal with it no more. Hell, Bob’s her damn husband, and he don’t even wanna deal with it no more. And Mark—well, you know how Mark is. Don’t think ’bout nothing but himself. Your Mom’s fifty-some years old now, and she’s just gotta learn to take care of herself. So that’s all I know to say, hon.”

  Memaw Jones hangs up without another word.

  I’m furious. My mother is disintegrating back in Indiana, and the people who should be taking care of her there have all washed their hands of her. And there’s little I can do from Chicago but watch the whole thing unfold from afar.

  I try to help Mom as best I can for the next few weeks, but with all the other members of her family shutting themselves out of her life, I become Mom’s anxiety receptacle. She starts her incessant, histrionic telephone calls, causing problems for me at work and home. She gives no consideration to the fact that by doing so she jeopardizes my job and my marriage, and instead she makes me feel guilty when I become angry with her for it. In short, she uses her illness as a weapon, uses her status as a victim of a terrible disease to inflict pain upon everyone around her, perhaps in an unconscious effort to force those she loves to endure the same emotional hell she herself lives with every day. It’s familiar territory, and not just because Mom has behaved this way in her past episodes.

  I recognize the behavior for what it is because I have done all of these things myself.

  Experts on clinical depression and other forms of mental illness have stated time and again that the afflicted person is not the only one who suffers. Families and friends suffer too. And they are often just as powerless against the raging torrent of emotions that inevitably result from dealing with a mentally ill family member as their afflicted loved ones are themselves. Some of this is from the deep social stigma mental illness carries, even in a society that is more open and educated about it than ever before. But mostly it’s due to the way mental illness has a succubus-like effect on the afflicted’s loved ones—it simply drains the lifeblood out of the family, the accidental caregivers who often just have to stand back and watch the growing catastrophe like a cameraman does a plane crash. Friends, spouses, and colleagues can walk away from the afflicted (and often do), but blood family cannot—at least, not permanently. That doesn’t mean we are any better equipped to help our loved ones than a stranger on the street, though. We often have no choice but to feel helpless.

  Sometimes we caregivers—who are all too often survivors of mental illness ourselves—have no choice but to stand back and let the horrible happen, let the afflicted find his or her own way out of the abyss. By the fall of 2004, I’ve been fired from my job at the library software company and I’m back to doing freelance writing work instead. Angry and frustrated, I join the rest of my family and walk away from Mom, leaving her with nothing but a silent prayer that she won’t kill herself or end up a crazy bag lady. I will be happy if she merely stays alive and off the streets. But I consider the chance of her ever getting better as likely as a winning lotto ticket or a Chicago Cubs World Series win.

  I stop taking Mom’s calls. I stop trying to monitor her health from afar, stop combing the Internet for the next miracle cure for depression, stop dedicating my yoga and meditation practice to her health and well-being. I stop everything. I sever all contact.

  In short, I give up on Mom.

  When you and your family are all nutjobs, you learn to manage your expectations.

  1. Not his real name.

  2. Not his real name.

  3. Not his real name.

  4. Name changed.

  5. Name changed.

  6. Not her real name.

  Chapter 6

  Mark: The Lost Cause

  My brother, Mark Landon Berry,[1] is an enigma.

  I have never known what to make of my brother, and neither has most of the rest of the world. And Mark doesn’t seem to know what to make of himself either. Over the past fifteen years, he has flitted between many different personas, never settling on any one of them for long—liberal atheist, flunking college student, U.S. Army medic, Catholic priest-in-training, ultraconservative Republican Party canvassing volunteer, pyramid-scheme salesman, Dungeons & Dragons devotee, social worker, volunteer who supposedly helps veterans win disability benefits, server of legal subpoenas, all-around general con artist, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

  My brother, Mark Landon Berry, is a paranoid schizophrenic.

  The DSM-V and other major psychiatric tomes describe schizophrenia as a mental disorder characterized by impairments “in the perception or expression of reality and/or by significant social or occupational dysfunction.” My brother fits both of these criteria with such perfection that his profile could serve as a case study in any college freshman’s Psychology 101 textbook. He first got the official paranoid-schizophrenic diagnosis by our family psychiatrist Dr. Nickelback as a teenager, and it’s stayed with him ever since, though he’s somehow managed to convince some questionable doctors that he’s perfectly normal, or just ever-so-slightly bipolar. The one thing that has remained consistent about Mark is that he has never lived the life of a stable, functioning adult. He’s never maintained any kind of employment, he’s always on antipsychotics, and he seems unwilling or unable to grow up. His life revolves mostly around playing computer games, visiting the VA psychiatric department on a near-daily basis, and exploring get-rich-quick schemes. He gets by mostly by manipulating others to his every whim.[2] Mark is very good at getting everyone around him to agree to do ridiculous things in the name of keeping him from falling apart.

  Throughout his life, though, it was difficult to determine what Mark’s actual illness was, or if he really even had one. The 2007 school shooting at Virginia Tech, however, helped put my brother’s lifelong illness into sharp relief for me. The shooter in that tragedy had allegedly undergone some psychiatric evaluation but had had no actual diagnosis or real treatment of any kind beyond a few brief consultations with non-MD psychologists, according to news reports. Reportedly, his Korean immigrant family had essentially abandoned him due to his severe mental illness. And his parents obviously lived in a state of denial about that severe mental illness, going so far as to say that the only thing wrong with their son was that he was “quiet” and “had difficulty fitting in.” But to my mind, he wasn’t “quiet” or even a little eccentric. He seemed to me to be the worst extreme of what an adolescent paranoid schizophrenic can become when he isn’t properly treated, when he is written off completely by his family and society. While I watched the shooter’s “multimedia manifesto” on NBC Evening News, I recognized him for exactly what he was—an untreated, unmanaged paranoid schizophrenic. I could see that so clearly because my own brother has been the exact same thing for most of his life.

  I sat frozen on my living room sofa, feeling rivers of ice flow through my veins as I saw the shooter’s vacant, staring eyes, listened to his rambling monotone, heard him rage against the “you” who supposedly forc
ed him kill thirty-two people without explaining who that mysterious “you” was—and I saw my own brother’s vacant, staring eyes looking back at me, heard my brother’s own rambling, raging monotone coming out of my plasma-screen’s stereo speaker. (Unmedicated paranoid schizophrenics are remarkably alike in their behavior—like clones, even.)[3] I stayed up half the night watching CNN, and I shuddered as I realized that only a few random strokes of luck separated me from the paranoid schizophrenic who went wild with two handguns on a college campus and my own paranoid-schizophrenic sibling, the one person on this planet who shared the biggest component of my DNA.

  Mind you, most paranoid schizophrenics are not violent or dangerous, and my brother has never been violent. But knowing that even a tiny fraction of people with that illness are capable of such heinous acts if left untreated terrifies me to the core—especially since I know first-hand what a poor job the American mental health system does of caring for them.

  I’ll itemize Mark’s schizophrenic characteristics—and there are many—before I get into how his schizophrenia has affected his relationship with the world, with our family, and with me.

  Significant Social Dysfunction. Mark was odd practically from birth—needy, prone to violent tantrums, unable to play normally with other children from an early age. He had a series of medical problems and hospitalizations from birth (crooked legs that required casts, severe allergic reactions to penicillin and vaccinations, extreme high fevers), and he was a difficult child to control even when healthy. He couldn’t make friends. He was the frequent target of bullies, large and small. He failed at school from kindergarten on; he often couldn’t grasp the most fundamental norms of social interaction either in school or on the playground, and he got into frequent conflicts with teachers. In one case, a teacher specifically asked that he be transferred out of her class because she simply didn’t know what to do with him. The principal tried putting Mark in Special Ed, but he didn’t fit in there either (despite his behavioral problems and failing grades, he had high IQ scores), so he bounced around from class to class until he fell so far behind there was no way for him to catch up. In fourth grade, Mark’s teachers decided to hold him back a year, and he ended up in the same grade as me, which only made his behavior patterns worse. So the school bumped him back up to fifth grade in the middle of the year, mostly as a peace offering. If born today, Mark would probably be diagnosed (incorrectly) as autistic.