Letters to the Editor
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me, too
The last time I saw my sister, she was throwing her laptop, carton of cigarettes and random bits of clothes into her car before screeching out of my mom's driveway. She'd finished screaming at me, my husband, my mom, my brother because I wouldn't let her spend unsupervised time with my two year old son. The doctors have said she's psychotic, schizophrenic ... now the diagnosis is 'bipolar'. But she doesn't have a giddy phase and a depressed phase - she has two phases, angry and angrier. She's forty-two, no steady job, no friends any more, no lovers, an alcoholic chain-smoking foul-mouthed woman, angry about what's on the news and things that happened a quarter of a century ago, who would be homeless if it weren't for my mother. And she's my sister.
Of course she refuses treatment, won't take the meds that are prescribed, won't acknowledge that she's ill. If you don't like the term mental illness, for Christ's sake give me a term that works better. Her mind is like a festering sore, getting worse as the years go by. And this is what the whole family is wrapped around - we're frightened to have her living with my mom for fear some day she'll lose it and hurt her, and we have no option to that to offer at all. If she were your sister, if she were your daughter, would you force her out into a world where she'd die under a bridge somewhere? And if not, would you take her into your home, live with the the screaming and the threats and the tears and the certain knowledge that this will all end very badly?
There are no good answers here at all. My heart goes out to this woman, who at least tried to understand what her sister had lived, the interior space behind the destruction that these sort of illnesses cause.