Looking into the eyes of someone you love and not recognizing or understanding them anymore is startling. The first few times you may miss it and let it go–angry or confused–but it is still there, regardless of your recognition. They become like one of those children’s toys that rotates to show you another face with a different expression. Once you see the signs and glimmers of mental illness in someone you are close to, you can’t unsee or forget it even when the person you know returns. Not that you ever should forget, of course.

My earliest memories were of us in the eaves of the house, my brother David and I. We shared a room; he was sweet and naive, I was impetuous and curious. While he was older, I had to frequently be called out for abusing his kind, giving nature with my controlling, bossy tendencies. Looking back, this makes perfect sense, but at least I had a partner in all of the trouble I was causing!

Things began to change as David entered his teens. I was younger and often did not realize what was happening when he came home from school feeling dejected and unwelcomed. While not exactly popular myself, I was one to respond more aggressively in the face of my troubles, than to be downtrodden by them as David was. David struggled to find a place to fit in, a place he felt that was worthy of himself and as he came to express his feelings at home and to me, he was angry that he was not accepted when others were. Amidst his expressions of sadness, however, there was something else–a tinge of something unfamiliar to me. Later on, as I saw it more, I came to recognize it as flares of irrational paranoia. He felt that all the prettiest, most popular girls should want to date him and that his company should be desired above others. The sweet brother I had known started showed a side that rarely saw the sun and it was frightening.

I was too uninformed, immature, self-involved, and ill-equipped to see how I should change my behaviors to help David. Instead, I made things worse. I teased him and together my sister and I would give him nonsensical nicknames and then refuse to explain to him why he got them. He would stew on it for days. Eventually I would find him waiting for me in the annals of the house, hidden. He’d tackle me and, with an unfamiliar wildness in his eyes, accuse me of saying that he was gay. He’d never really hurt me, but the intensity of this confrontation rattled me. My parents, eternally otherwise occupied, turned a blind eye and said I was stirring up trouble, which I was. The true issue, other than my idiotic behavior, was missed.

David had an unpleasant high school experience and more and more turned to religious devotion to find his answers and counsel. I never invested heavily in religion and the intensity of his religiosity drove an even greater wedge between us. He regularly called me out on my light attitude and perceived impiety and I pushed him away as stodgy and fanatical. After high school, he waffled about for a year or two, whilst still living with my parents. He seized upon direction and moved to Michigan to join a conservative, Calvinist, Christian seminary on his own. My parents supported his decision on the surface, at least, and my mother attempted to write down every possible instruction and domestic process possible to shore up his lack of domesticity. My brother arranged to live with some other young men who were interested in religious life as well. News was slim from David in Michigan. He called each week, though we rarely talked. We had grown so different and he seemed to have little interests in small talk or talk of any kind beyond discussion of weighty theological matters and I did not much care for those matters.

I came home from my job one weekday evening to find my oldest brother, Michael, and his wife, Shelly, sitting on our couch with my mother, while my father nervously milled about. The anxiety in the room was palpable. I asked what was wrong and no one wanted to speak. I persisted with my questioning. No one wanted to be the first to speak to me but instead carried on their conversation as though I had not entered. Someone announced that Shelly’s plane ticket had been purchased. My mother thanked Shelly and tried to brush the action off as not being a big deal. The dates were selected and David would need to be talked to because he was unwilling to leave. Shelly would gather his possessions into his car and drive him back to the Rectangle States. I pressed and pressed for details until someone finally shared. My parents had received a call from a friend in the seminary David was attending and they had expressed concerns about my brother’s mental health. A friendly suggestion was made that he be retrieved, a suggestion that was doubtless due to become a request and then a requirement if we did not act. Shelly had a free schedule and my parents wanted to keep the news as closed as possible. I did not need to be told that this was serious and the family mantra “Don’t tell anyone anything” was unspoken but understood.

They returned a week later. Shelly was exhausted and disappeared from family life for a few weeks. Stories were finally shared. David had become isolated in Michigan and in his isolation came to radicalize and began to believe that certain Biblical passages were referring to him specifically. He had ceased to pay the bills for his apartment and had been living without power, water or telephone for weeks. Shelly arrived to a scene she rife with vermin and grime. She saved time by throwing away his clothes, rather than trying to salvage them from the stains. Perhaps most damaging, David had acted oddly and behaved poorly in the public sphere when my parents were unable to curtail him. We were not to talk of any of these things openly, to anyone.

Within a few days of returning, I asked David to come to lunch with me. I was in college myself and had encountered enough information to recognize mental illness, even if I did not know names and diagnoses. By this point we were far from the level of closeness we had had as children. David attempted to shift the conversation to more of his Biblical critique of my life but I doggedly drove it back to his activities in Michigan and how I was concern that we would have another episode unless he was connected with professional help. David insisted all the care he needed was found in the Bible and that he could overcome any issues with the help of a minister. I was dumb-founded and incredulous and stubbornly refused to accept that as sufficient. This was one of the last times David and I spent time one on one. I had become more and more enamored with the discovery of my own sexual identity and seeing more of the world. He became increasingly deeper wrapped in his religious texts and internal searches. I remember nights before I moved out, when he would wake in the middle of the night to tell me he knew he was going to hell when he died. He would be visibly shaken and the earnestness of his concern was obvious. His devotion left him terrified. One night it was so bad that he woke up my parents, then nearing their 60’s, to draw them into his concerns. He would go up to their room in the small hours of night, tomes in hand, frantic and frightened. Confused and frustrated, I would continue attempting to sleep.

In time, I forgot the David with whom I grew up. The sweet, naive boy turned into a confusing and often intense man. I thought perhaps some of his issues had waned when I came out, but I was the naive one there. I received multiple emails from him, each without opening or closing that were brimming with hostility and religious fervor. They were difficult to read, as much for the obvious rage as the garbled, confusing syntax and lack of continuity. I attempted contact only to sporadically receive a glut of confusing messages every so often. I eventually gave up and simply deleted them without reading. Years later, I asked my sister how he was doing and whether “he was in care,” as we say in the industry. She said that the family had agreed he had mental troubles, but that he was autistic and that he did not need care. She said my parents were afraid he would live with them into adulthood and never really achieve independence. Later still, I hear he had actually met someone, a home schooled girl, and that they had married. I do not envy the struggle his wife and child must endure.

For years, I was angry at David. I did not understand exactly what was happening with him and I was frustrated at the person he had become; incorporating his zealotry in place of human interaction. Watching him tear himself apart emotionally as he dug through dogma, looking for personal answers to his inescapable thoughts now hurts instead of angering me. My frustration is instead focused on the community that would not assist him, my parents for hiding him and his problems, and a religious system too antiquated to understand science and medicine. My only hope is that he finally has gotten the help that he deserves.

I do not know how thinly to disguise my experiences here. I want share the difficulties I had growing up with mental illness in my family but I do not seek to shame or pity, because neither of those will help curb the tide. Only understanding and professional help.

P.