Lately I've been struggling with extreme temptation to abandon my meds, but then I received a call updating me about my father, and it puts everything back into dreary perspective.

My father has a psychotic/anxiety illness, but he's never been properly diagnosed. He self-medicated with alcohol, and we lived in a very hyper-religious, Children of the Corn, hush-hush environment. So he didn't start to get any professional attention until he developed dementia from the alcoholism.

My father's refusal to accept medical help has cost him pretty much everything. He lost his family because he was so abusive, then he lost his job due to paranoid delusions, alcoholism and hostility, then he lost his house. He's been in and out of rehab and homelessness, but always regresses every time the family scrambles to rescue him, because he refuses psychiatric care.

Recently he was staying in a group home setting, and they helped him get a job. All he had to do was not drink and comply with the rules, and then they were going to gently try to get him on medication. But once again he was too proud and stupid, refused medication and instead starting sneaking alcohol.

So then I get a call letting me know that he was kicked out of the group home and arrested at a grocery store for being drunk and combative in public. The police just held him overnight but then let him go, and his car wasn't towed but is now gone from the parking lot, so presumably he came back and drove away in it.

Now nobody knows where he is, only that he is surely living out of his car somewhere, he might come back when he runs out of cash for alcohol and gas. His parents (my grandparents) are a complete mental mess worrying about him. He can only live on nothing but wine for so long before he dies.

I'm beyond the point by now of having much emotional reaction. He's been doing this to us for over a decade now. Doing it to himself. We can't save him, and he just acts like a major asshole when anyone tries to get close. I wish I could heal him and make him a better, healthier person, but I can't. I couldn't when I was 10, and I still can't do it now that I'm 27.

I guess it's up to me be stronger than he was. To take these medications even though it ****ing sucks, so that I don't become a crazy asshole and stress everyone out. Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder have hit every generation in this bloodline, and I guess it's up to me to be the first one to put a stop to it.