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Helping Families Cope With Mental Illness Part 3
by Norman Bales
All About Families


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The first two parts of this series of articles on mental illness were autobiographical. I told the story of my mother's long struggle with schizophrenia. Only recently have I taken the time to sit down and identify the obstacles a family faces. When you're dealing with the problem first hand, you never try to identify with stages or levels of difficulty. You simply try to cope with things as they come up. Thinking back through my own experience, I think I can identify some of the recurring difficulties faced by family members when a loved one is stricken with mental illness. They include the following.

• Loss of parental and spousal bonding. From my own perspective, my early relationship with my mother was normal and I felt reasonably close to her. Over the years, as she withdrew from reality, closeness evaporated. An emotional chasm was created which I did not seem to be able to bridge. I still feel a certain degree of sadness about that, although I was indeed blessed with an opportunity to mend fences during the last three years of her life.

• Social ostracism. She suffered from this more than my father and me. Prior to her episodes with mental illness, she helped sponsor school projects, had social involvement with other women in our neighborhood and was active in church life. While there were long periods of rationality in her life, most people didn't know when she was "normal" and when she was not, so they kept their distance. Some were even afraid of her (and for good cause on occasion. She sometimes displayed a tendency toward violence).

• Guilt. As a young boy I remember thinking she probably wouldn't have those problems if I had behaved more responsibly. I think the guilt is probably parallel to the guilt experienced by the members of an alcoholic's family.

• Fear. There is at least some evidence which, would suggest that schizophrenia recurs in families. I often wondered if I would suffer the same fate in life.

• Misunderstanding. I don't want this to sound like an indictment of the Christian faith. God has always sustained us and we owe a great debt of gratitude to people in the church for helping us get through this period of our lives. Although they mean well, most Christian people don't really understand what is going on. There were at least two areas where I felt the Christian community misunderstood our circumstances. (1) There were those who felt like we merely needed to read the right scripture verses, obey them and pray about the situation. God would then make everything right. I believe in answered prayer, but I'm here to tell you that anyone who thinks all you have to do is read the Bible and pray about a schizophrenic patient grossly misunderstands both scripture and the situation. (2). Sometimes we were the objects of pity. I suppose people looked upon us as proper subjects for mercy showing, which we were. But they didn't understand that the best way to show us mercy was to treat us like regular people. That's what we wanted more than anything.

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