Towards the end of 1992, I was 21 years old and had recently qualified as a registered nurse. Not really interested in a “proper” job, I signed up with various agencies and asked for the more unusual assignments, such as the one-to-one nursing of psychiatric patients who were in the hospital for surgery and such. In December, I had an opportunity to go and work with a young schizophrenic man as a live-in carer. What I was not aware of was the small detail that I was the 19th live-in carer employed by the family that year alone. I only lasted 6 weeks before I resigned from my position.
At this point, I had no previous experience of schizophrenia other than a few points of contact with the psychiatric student nurses. I could never quite understand how exactly these people were supposed to be ill. During this time with M, I learned much about the behaviours that encircle the condition referred to as “schizophrenia”, and I kept a diary for much of this time. In a letter I sent my friend and colleague during this time, I referred to an experience I had had the previous night:
I asked M why he suffered from mental illness in my ever so tactful manner. His answer was quite revealing and sad.
“My mother always wanted a son” was what he told me. But why was he ill?
“My mother always wanted a son.” He repeated, and admittedly, I was confused.
“Did she get one?” I asked.
“She never knew me. Dad sent me away to boarding school when I was 7.” Evidently, this was against his and his mother’s wishes. When he finished school at 17, his father left home, saying that he wanted nothing more to do with the family – especially the children.
“I always told her that one day she’d have to pay.” He said quietly. The schizophrenia seemed to be a punishment for his mother for allowing it all to happen.
Now the question arises of what happened in those two years between his father leaving and the beginning of his overt schizophrenic symptoms?
“My mother got her son.” He told me.
30th December 1992.
I’m fascinated. I find myself in the company of M.- a 29-year-old man afflicted with a strange mother. However, this affliction seems to be interpreted by a few as “schizophrenia.”
I arrived at 7 pm last night to be greeted by the mother, who took me to M’s house, which was filthy. It had no fridge, no bed linen, no soap, toiletries, washing up liquid, washing machine, or vacuum cleaner. There’s a distinct lack of furniture upstairs, and there are no fittings, nowhere to hang a towel or coat.
“I just don’t understand how it gets so filthy.” She says.
10 am today. Phone call: “Is the house still dirty?” She enquires.
I am told that M has a friend K. coming to stay for the week, a girl whom I am also asked to look after. She is coming today at 3 pm. M tells me that they met in an acute psychiatric unit – he warns me to be careful because she tends to be a bit unpredictable. Oops, she just arrived, 5 hours early!
During this phone call from the mother, I am informed that my charges and myself are to go to the mother’s for lunch and again later in the day for tea.
11 am. Phone call: Best if I just come for lunch and not for tea. Just M and K should go for tea.
12 noon. Phone call: “Is M out of bed yet?” – no.
1 pm. Phone call: “Where are you?” – M won’t get up, says he’s “too weak.”
2 pm. Phone call – M. answers it: Mother will bring lunch to us at his house. I do not know what’s happening with tea.
But I tell you what, K’s parents are as odd as K is. They have left the house, and M and K are downstairs swapping stories of how ill they have been.
5.45 pm. Phone call: “Is the kitchen clean yet?” To be honest, I nearly laughed. I am ordered to go to the mother’s house for “supper.” She’ll pick me up in 10 minutes.
45 minutes later, she arrived to pick all three of us up. Her house is simply amazing. Grandiose simply will not do justice to such a building, and not unlike myself, the mother obviously has a talent for finding enough clutter to fill every conceivable bit of space. Not one single room looks like it hasn’t been turned over in some bizarre burglary. I must admit that the mother did prove to be a remarkably nice lady; it is just a shame that she is so obviously hopeless. After dinner, we eventually, after much fussing and changing of minds, went out to a pub where a friend of hers was singing.
M’s behaviour changes remarkably depending on his environment. At his mother’s house, he is a shy 3-year-old. In the pub, both M’s mother and another one of her friends flirt with me outrageously, whilst M is a sociable and outgoing 29-year-old. At home with me in his house, he is a pain in the arse, playing the sick role admirably.
It is becoming evident that my indifference to this behaviour is not right and doesn’t seem to help. I think I got a hint of how to handle it last night whilst waiting for a taxi to go home after the pub. K went all a bit peculiar and adopted a strange look in her eyes and moved strangely. I jokingly quipped that if she should look at the taxi driver that way at this later hour, she was likely to “scare the shit out of him.” M laughed along with me and K’s behaviour immediately changed for the better. I should emphasise that the laughter was not at K but at the inappropriateness of my comment that clearly came as a bit of a shock. I guess people do not usually say these things to schizophrenics.
31st December 1992.
Both M and K were up by 1 pm. The mother had arranged for Dave her gardener to pick all three of us up so that we’d all go out for lunch and spend the day out and about. Dave arrived at 1.15 pm and Diana the cook arrived at 1.20 pm with three lunches she had been ordered to bring for M, K, and me.
I decided for the sake of some sort of consistency that we would still go out for lunch since
both M and K were ready for such. Dave wholeheartedly agreed – the poor chap never normally knows whether he is coming or going.
We went out for lunch and spent much of the afternoon on Hayling Island playing in the amusement arcades. M really came alive, he keeps stating that he cannot even think, let alone concentrate on anything yet in the arcade he was able to play some of the more complicated “shoot ’em up” video games. On the star wars game he really became very excited and beat me on every game we doubled up on.
Dave: a big man, ex-army, and a proud Scotsman of unshakable character really shine in his love for M. M is clearly like a son to him and is treated as such. It is really warming to see such a relationship.
1st January 1993.
11.45 am – I try to encourage M to get out of bed. K gets up.
12.30 pm – I try again suggesting that we were waiting for him to get up so that we could go and get some lunch.
1.15 pm – another try.
2.15 pm – I’m getting hungry and irritable. M finally gets up but is moaning continuously and blaming me for waking him up. We go into town and the day continues in a similar vein.
2nd January 1993.
The mother strikes again.
At about 3 pm today, M and K went for a walk, and by 5.30 pm they hadn’t returned and I had visions of them wandering aimlessly lost in Nowhereland with M still moaning and K threatening to kill him just to shut him up. Finally, M ‘phoned to let me know that they were at his mother’s house and that they would all be back shortly to pick me up to go out for an Indian meal.
6.30 pm. Another ‘phone call: “Mum said” that just he and K would be going out for a meal, can I try to fix my own meal. No problems, I say, and without hesitation, I put a pizza in the oven.
7.30 pm. M ‘phones: “Mum says that” they are getting a takeaway and they’ll pick me up a chicken korma.
8 pm. M, K, and the mother arrive. She launches into an immediate house inspection, “Coats must not be left downstairs. They are to be left in the bedrooms!” She is really angry about this. Yet, upstairs, there are no cupboards, no hooks, and no chairs. The coats are taken off the chairs in the hallway and put onto the floor of the uncarpeted spare room.
Next, she rages, “Meals must always be eaten at the dining room table!” and she thrusts a tub of pinkish powder into my hands. She tells me aggressively that M needs his vitamins. Unfortunately, she says, the hospitals won’t give them to him—”They seem to prefer bad health to good health.”
She tells me to give him a heaped tablespoon of this powder 4 times a day and, much like he were a dog, she adds, “They seem to do him so much good.”
This powder turns out to be ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and minerals:
1 gram delivers about 2550% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.
1 tablespoon delivers 10200% of the recommended allowance.
1 tablespoon, 4 times a day is equal to 40800% of the RDA. Now I understand why M always has such bad diarrhea.
She sees my reservations and says patronisingly, “We really must sit down sometime, so we can have a chat and let me talk to you about what’s really best for M.”
8th January 1993.
I realise that I can do little good for M – As long as the mother is alive, M will never “recover”. Sadly, she is the <deleted> for a leading <deleted> charity for schizophrenia research and patient rights and is very much respected. She is very much obsessed with the mega-dose vitamin idea—that vitamin C reduces hallucinations in LSD users, and as such, it must be useful in schizophrenia and beneficial to M. I’m quite certain the vitamin C and LSD correlation is merely nothing more than a popular drug culture myth.
Last Monday, K’s parents came to collect her. We (M, K, K’s parents, and the mother and me) all went out for lunch, where both mothers delighted in swapping anecdotes about their children’s psychotic episodes. Throughout, they behaved as though both M and K were not present.
Clearly not happy with what he was hearing, M began to complain that his ears were hurting and left to go and stand outside for a while to “cool down.”
“Of course,” the mother tells me, “M has such sensitive hearing; the noise really bothers him.”
Both mothers then debated for my benefit (a registered nurse) how the medical and nursing professions were brainwashed into thinking that schizophrenia is a personality disorder and is not really a chemical imbalance (which is blatantly untrue). And through all this, K’s dad never spoke, and come to think of it, apart from a “hello”, I never once heard this unfortunate man ever say anything at all.
Then it happened. The question came.
“How are you getting on with M’s vitamins?” I must admit, I was in mortal terror at being outnumbered by the enemy. I should have just lied, but I felt too much on the spot, so after floundering for a moment or two I foolishly said, “Ahhherrrr.ohhhh.errrrr I meant to talk to you about that.”
…and in 1, 2, 3, seconds, the whole world exploded. With rage and fury like I have never before witnessed, the mother rendered me into a “narrow fucking minded, brainwashed fucking idiot.”
I think the entire public house came to a standstill at this point, and I was the central focus of it all.
Apparently, I was “out of date” and a “medical dinosaur” who had not bothered to read the latest research by the pyramid sales company that supplied her with vitamins. (The day I went to her house, I looked in the bathroom cabinet where she had stocked over 60 different tubs of these vitamins from the same company.)
It was evident from both these mothers that their child’s “illness” is their very focus in life.
It is as if the illness makes them able to function as mothers, where maybe before their “illness” they were not “real” mothers. Both offspring were treated as though they were sick pets.
They were treasured and loved, but only so that they could serve a function that satisfied the owners’ need to belong. The will of the child has been broken only to be rebuilt to serve the mother’s need. Their every decision and motive is decided for them by the mother, who always “knows best.”
Unable to relate to society or become in any way independent by breaking free from the mother’s bond, the rationale is sought to reconcile the broken will. Unable to control their own lives, this will is directed inwards in a way that attempts to reconcile both the love and hatred they feel for their mother. This is just horrible.
I have a manipulative, devious mother, and it has made me insecure, worry a ton, and self – doubt . .
I am often insulted at the dinner table, in ways the other guests don’t know, for instance I’ve told my mother I don’t like fish, but every time there’s fish, she goes out of her way, when there’s guests, to ask me if I don’t want some fish . . It’s an obvious, subtle way of saying, she doesn’t care about me, but she can get away with it, because the guests don’t know, she has asked me the same question, since I was like 8, over 5000 times, and I everytime say no, I tastes of salt-water, and I drowned once, and I also don’t like the consistency, ie. I prefer steak, pork-chops, bec. it feels closer, to ‘ meat ‘, more solid, she has done the same, in many ways, when she feels bad, or can’t handle, or manage a situation, she takes it out on me . . I think it happened bec. she married a succesful man, and that made her arrogent, a bit hostile, to others, from the paranoia, depression . .
Today, I have a disorder, several disorders, my main problems is I don’t know how to ‘ work ‘ in social situations, and I’m more insecure than my peers, and prefer, to play alone, be in ‘ my mind ‘, where it’s safe, protected . . That’s the only place where the rules are off, and I can have fun, she also destroyed my interest in sports, I went volleyball playing in early mid-school, and I was so happy, I was learning something so I could be cool, and met people there, had fun . . On the way home, she told me, when it was me, my sister, and her, that I was ‘ too ugly and fat, to do that, ha ha . . ‘ . . I got so angry, that I never went back, even if it made me happy, and there were friends . . When she has a bad day, can’t handle contact, or intimacy, she lashes out, on me, for being her son . .
I’m mostly functional, but I do bad around people, and fear situations, with too many people . . I guess, I became my mothers son, in many ways, took the dysfunctional patterns I learned, and made them my own, and so have become isolated, social stuff is hard, I always feel, it’s a disaster, or scared . . I think my mother took the money, and status, of a rich, succesful marriage, it went to her head, and she became a bad mother, that ruined me, gave me poor nerves, security, well-being . .
My mom is nowhere near as bad, as the above, but it’s constant, and during more than 50 % of the visits, or close, she tells bad things about it, and beats me down, verbally, etc . .
I have mild autism, depression, and I play computer games, bec. in the friendly world of the pixels, everything is happy, secure, there I can be a hero, bec. my mother never cared about games, and didn’t figure out how happy, they made me, for playing, it was ‘ nerd ‘ territory, and she never used a computer, or played games . . If she had known, from personal experience, she would have told me I was a bad gamer, or taken my computer, from me . . The only constant is, she doesn’t want me to be happy, she likes destroying me, and things, that are good for me, my life . .
I think that’s why I’m socially withdrawn, miserable . . I never got the affirmation, of other-love, that is necessary to believe, the world is a good place, you belong, or so . . Also, when I was a kid, I couldn’t defend myself against it, she was a lot smarter, and could always get me, where it hurt . . . So, I understand that guy, he withdrew from the outside world, into the safety of his mind, and made imaginary friends, places, and worlds, where he feels safe, from abuse, persecution, violence . .
It’s a defense mechanism, people retreat, until they finally find a safe place, and the only place where mom can’t destroy your fun, or ‘happy’, is in your mind, bec. she can’t see it, and so begin terrorizing that, etc . .
Looking back, as an adult, I know realize how much damage my mother’s aggressive, insulting, bad attitude has had, on me . . I take the same ‘ social skills ‘ with me, and treat others the same way, so they shun me, and also, I have a ton of anger, that I take out, on others, like I don’t know where to put it, I feel furious, pissed-off, and I have to play nice, in school, around other people, etc . . But, I can only keep a lid on it, it seeps out, sooner, or later . . I got beat, with verbal, and psychological abuse for many years, as a kid, and it still hurts . . .
Scars, I can’t remember, or place, but it’s like they stay, the memory of what happened goes away, but the anger stays, like a boiler, or so . . Anyway, I can understand why he’s withdrawn, when he sticks his head out, he gets beat, insulted, demeaned, or worse . . No wonder he has no appetite for life, he probably expects the worst, when he goes out, to others . . So, it makes sense, he got hurt, abused, or violated, verbally, socially, psychologically, and instead of being calm, relaxed when he goes out, he has his guard up, bec. that was all that mattered at home, to ‘ stay ‘ sane . . And, when that doesn’t work, you go deeper, and deeper into yourself, to hide . .
Sucks, for all the technology we have today, bad parents aren’t going away soon, bec. families are the last thing, we will surrender to society, or maybe tech – parents, or so . . We have air-planes, better computers, amazing medical progress, but bad parents, isn’t going to be so easy, to fix . .
No wonder he’s scared, or terrified, withdrawn . . He got beat, abused, or worse, and now he’s frightened, solitary . . Bec., at home company didn’t feel good, it was a nightmare, terror . .
My two cents, been there, this stuff cuts deep, it’s life-long . . Sadly . .
Also, if you don’t get love, at home, you don’t feel like you ‘ deserve ‘, to be in the world, ‘ belong ‘ . . It’s like, you were never wanted, despised . . And, bec. you don’t know how to act any other than what you’ve seen, when you try to socialize, it’s a pain, doesn’t work, or so . .
The point is, I’m not sure if having such a mother makes you ‘ schizo ‘, but I do think it makes you socially with-drawn, insecure, and to have little faith or, belief in yourself, bec., whenever someone hurts you it’s like you ‘deserve’ it, you assume that, and feel small, helpless, and clueless, scared . . .
Another thing is, people like to bring you to their level, so they can feel good, succesful, about themselves . . so, if you have a sadistic, cruel mother, she’s not happy until you’ve been brought to her level, in social terms, acuity, skills, so on . .
Your description of him, like a beaten, abused animal, sounds about right, glad I’m not him, hope you find a way, of alleviating it, if a cure is not possible, good luck, he’s prob. very confused, insecure, from what he’s seen, at home . . and, he fears others, what comes next, maybe also with strangers, he expects to be beaten, when he hears the door, or a voice, verbally, psychologically, etc . .
Sad as it is, I recommend stuff like a beer, or beers, and for the really bad times, the deep depressions, stuff like heroine, cocaine, weed . . when the buried pain, and misery bubbles up, or he reminisces, even subtly, it’s probably a mine-field, for him, inside . . So, good luck, stay strong . .
Whenever I felt strong, free, confident, or joy, mom was there to stick a fork in it, with hate . .
I guess I never felt those things at home, as much as the other kids, and never really developed in that direction, bec. it was subverted, with verbal, and psychological abuse, to the point, where I don’t know what they are or, mean . . At least, as much as the other kids . .
I also took some of her anger with me, and treated others badly, and I’ve ‘ become my mother’s son ‘, bec. it made me take bad decisions, when I got mature enough, to do that . . I got mean, and selfish, bec. the anger, when I got old enough to do that, made me do bad things, feel them . .
I can’t say that is good, but at home it was expected, or ‘ normal ‘, no real consequences, no fear, of those things . .
Being 41 years old, I still find it difficult to let it go, and most of all, to be a good person, I saw and, felt it was okay to be bad, and so my social skills are poor, bec. that’s like me, my ‘ mother ‘, when I do the best I can, to be pleasant, sociable, relatable . . .
I’ve turned to religion, Buddhism, to find some sanity, relief . . Buddha was nice, and kind . . Also, the Bible, prayer, other stuff . .
But, I never got over the part, of not being good ‘ socially ‘, maybe bec. all those situations were destroyed for me or, undermined . . Some kids, get the hate, terror . .
And, they ‘ feel ‘ it . .
They, remember . .
Let’s just say, I get 90 % of that person, that was talked about . .
Bec., it hurts, when parents turn on their kids, cause them pain, bring them down, destroy them . .
Like, a hidden valve, with too much pressure, one takes anger, and problems with one into the world, and when social relations fail, or others shun one, it’s a lonely life, difficult, to recover . .
I’m not sure what can heal such a person, I haven’t found the answer, myself . . But, I know it’s a long road, where progress is slow, and every victory is won with kindness, every obstacles is overcome, with mercy . . Sadly, those aren’t the things one is taught in nurse, and medical school, and so it’s often pills, until the person becomes ‘ calm ‘, fixated, chemically . .
The people that don’t ‘ work ‘, inside, as people, are often sedated, and so become more withdrawn, less sociable, or so . .
The hard truth is, loving someone back to health, is simply hard, very, very taxing . . And, in the face of such a task, the system often uses chemicals, pills, to get some sedation, ‘ relaxation ‘ . .
A worker isn’t a failure, bec. they can’t love someone back, to health, when one tries, one finds it’s such a task, that one gives up, takes so much energy, and investment, that one settles, for the pills, or so . . Also, I doubt a person ever fully recovers from such experiences, to 100 % normal, it’s not possible . . Relief, and progress is possible, beyond that, I can only guess, must, be hard, seem impossible, ‘ super – human ‘, so people give up, settle for the pills, treatments . . .
Thx, J. Brooks, my little story, that’s all <3 . .