Started by silentpilot6 · · 👁 9 views · 165 replies
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Morgan Cooper34 said:God, I have to weigh in on this.
Anyone who hasn't been in a relationship with someone struggling with severe mental illness honestly has no clue what we're talking about. It is just constant giving. You pour yourself out until there is nothing left. And the worst part? You feel like you're running in place. There is zero progress. They stay sick, the relationship is anything but harmonious, and you’re just watching your own battery drain to zero. Every single day gets harder. It keeps spiraling until you reach a breaking point where your own survival is at stake—where your basic instinct to just *survive* forces you to walk away.
Very few people can handle that kind of weight. And those who can't? They shouldn't be judged for it.
Not everyone was born to be a healer. 🙄
Angela Morgan3 said:Look, I’m not out here discriminating against gay people or anything... I was just trying to point out that even they deal with some level of bias, though honestly, it feels like nothing compared to what people living with schizophrenia go through. It’s like, they can be open about their orientation, but people with schizophrenia? They practically have to hide away in some corner just to get by.
In my opinion, being gay is more of a choice, whereas you don't really get to choose an illness like that.
rustyskipper7 said:I haven't seen this much trash being thrown around even in the parlaonica...
I don't want to exhaust anyone with my personal opinions, so I’ll just tell you the truth about what happened in my life and let you draw your own conclusions.
My mother has schizophrenia.
Basically, I grew up living with a schizophrenic...
It was like this: my parents were constantly fighting, the house was always a mess, and the whole atmosphere was chaotic, unhealthy, and incredibly tense.
Every three or four years, my mother would end up at a psychiatric facility in Queens. When she was actually home, she’d smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, drink three liters of coffee, and just stare blankly at a single spot on the wall; she was so heavily medicated that she couldn't even move.
There was no joy in our house, no guests—people actively avoided us. And then there were those times when she would get some new fixed idea and cause total mayhem (for example, when I was 12, she somehow convinced her father to kill my dog because he was getting "too much attention"—WTF?!—or she'd fall in love with some stranger from work and demand a divorce, even though the poor guy had no idea who she was. There are books about that kind of thing, but I won't bore you with it...
People with schizophrenia can't be "cured"; they can only enter remission. That happens when they finally become conscious enough to realize the absolute nonsense and misery they've inflicted on their loved ones, so they feel guilty and try to make amends. But honestly, that just leaves you feeling even more bitter, because you can't even hate them properly when they're acting like that.
The bottom line is that given the situation at home, I started using drugs at 16. All that chaos resulted in my father—who originally entered the marriage as a completely normal, healthy, and cheerful man—losing his mind. He ended up institutionalized in Queens with a diagnosis of PTSD and personality changes, etc.
When he came back from the facility, he was a different person. His eyes were somewhat vacant, and he basically stopped giving a damn about anything. Within two months, he found a woman about twenty years younger than him (he was around 50, she was about 25) and divorced my mother.
He found me a job out on an island (we're from New York City), drove me to the bus station, gave me the money for my ticket (I was 18 at the time), and said, "That's it. You've finished school, you're an adult, you have a job. Fight for yourself... Bye."
He moved away from New York City, has two little girls with his new wife who are already in third grade, and lives a relatively nice, normal, and peaceful life. So, in a way, it's a happy ending for him...
So, I guess that's how you handle being the spouse of someone with schizophrenia...
Unfortunately, this is all true. I haven't written everything down; to give you a real picture, it would take me a week...
I'm 29 now. If you're interested in seeing what kind of person a child turns into after growing up in an environment like that, or if you want to know what happened next with my mother, let me know and I'll write it (I don't want to bother you if you aren't interested).....
