My 2 brothers and I apparently grew up with a BPD mother and didn't know it until recently. I guess we've all dealt with it in our own ways.

Last night my mother calls me and tells me that my older brother is in a dark place. She lives about 20 minutes from him. She told me things like him staying in bed all day on his off day or not showing up or calling when he is supposed to meet her. I asked bluntly if she thought he might hurt himself and she said yes. He is apparently off his antidepressants and has never seen a clinical psychologist or other counselor other than being prescribed meds by someone for many years.

I've already laid all my problems on our younger brother. He and his wife were happy to help me. But I don't feel they should bare the burden of two of us really.

One complications is that I don't know if my mom's perception of the situation is skewed. Sometimes she interprets things to the extreme(like when she thought her vet told her the dog was dying and she was all upset, when I talked to the vet he said "no, the dog just needed a new kind of medication")

Of course I want to help my older brother get help if he needs it. The advice I have given friends in the past was that they needed to take care of themselves in order to be in a position to take care of family. But here's the fact, I'm the toughest of us all. I've taken the beatings life has thrown at me and I keep going. So I can certainly handle going and taking care of my brother. But a way that I would react to that would be to clam up inside. I don't know that I'm making a lot of progress in therapy yet, but I feel like if I concentrate on helping my brother that I'll just go into tough guy mode and bury everything deep and go into survival mode. I'd have to put my own treatment on hold.

I'll definitely start by having an honest conversation with him about my mental health treatment. Maybe that would encourage him to go see someone, but I don't know.

I have encouraged my mom to go remove certain items from his house. I'm concerned that she isn't the right person to deal with that since she herself has had depression and a history of sui tendencies. I asked how she is doing. She said she's okay, but I can't really know for sure.

Any thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.