[mmmelanierose]

Hi all. although i have looked at pysch central forums many times before, this is the first time i have ever felt inclined to sign up for an account. i've had a history of eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and (undiagnosed) ptsd. but nothing was ever as severe as what i can see is going on with my brother right now. i don't know if i am posting this thread in the wrong forum so if you have any recommedations on where i should move it, let me know!

so... to give a little back story i am 22 and my younger brother recently turned 20. we are pretty close (we got pretty close within recent years) and he moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of this year. when he moved there he was addicted to adderall and abusing it which i knew, and i thought it was ridiculous that anyone in our family even supported his decision to move because i did not think he was quite mature enough to live on his own. he was attending school there and passed 0 of his courses in the half year he was there. he was also meeting with random doctors and convincing them to give him more adderall. Ughhh

right around halloween this year, my parents flew to LA to basically rescue my brother. my mom didn't tell me anything was going on with him until a few days before they left for LA and my brother and i were not in regular contact during this time. right around this time he landed a part time job at a restaurant, which my mom was not even sure he had a job because apparently all he was doing around this time was lying to her. he also told her the only reason he thinks he was hired for this job was because he is "retarded" and the person hiring him felt bad for him (my brother is actually a very smart person and is in no way mentally retarded). i would occasionally get random facebook messages from him and i would send messages back, and then around the time my parents went to get him i would really cryptic messages saying stuff like "i'm sorry for being a bad brother" and then he would say stuff like "i need to come home" then the next day say "i am staying in LA and pursuing my dreams". apparently for the two weeks leading up to my parents "getting" him from LA he was going to the ER every night with fears that he was dying. he would call my mom and tell her he thought he did permanent damage to his health with drug abuse. i know he smoked weed sometimes and has taken acid a couple times (or possibly more times than i know of) and was abusing adderall but he had no drugs in his system when given tests at the hospital. so, the hospital admitted him to a psych ward where he stayed for three days because they would not let him leave, even though my parents were trying to get him out to bring him home.

the days leading up to his first psych ward visit he was barely sleeping at all so my parents thought that getting regular sleep would help him with his delusional thoughts. he would call my mom at various hours of the night while at the hospital and tell her he knows the hospital is trying to poison and kill him. after the 3 days he was required to stay my parents brought him home. according to my parents he was still not acting normal but he was not as psychotic as he was acting in the hospital.

my parents made him get a job about a week after he returned home (which i thought was a bit too early for someone who was clearly mentally fragile). it was a factory job and apparently he messed up a lot of the tasks he had to do his second week there and they fired him which made him sad. the same day he got fired i went home because it was thanksgiving time. i spent 3 days home and although he seemed depressed / emotionally vacant i hung out with him and told him he could vent to me if he needed. my brother and i have always talked to each other about our emotions and what not but he decided not to really talk to me about anything, which was out of character for him but of course i accepted that.

i went back to school and visited home again this past weekend and the entire weekend home was extremely exhausting and sad, and that is what i will mostly describe for the rest of my post (i'm sorry this is so long already!) also, my brother is currently on an anti psychotic although i don't know the name of it.

my mother picked me up from school and she had my brother in the car with her. he was laying on the backseat and he didn't acknowledge really when i got in the car. i started talking to my mom, as you do in the car, and he asked us not to talk, that it was bothering him. i played music very quietly and he told me we could not listen to music right now either. i was convinced he was being quite dramatic and was just in a bad mood so i told him to stop being selfish and he barely spoke at all the whole way home. once we got to my parents house he went straight to bed and was saying how he just needs sleep and he went to bed. i asked my mom what was up with him and she told me he was up most night's that week with delusional thoughts about his health / others. she told me he basically cut off ties with his long time best friend because he thinks his best friend is gay and likes him? (i don't know where he got this and it seems delusional to me as well) he landed another job as a cashier/stocker at a grocery store (he worked at a similar store doing the same job in high school so my parents thought this would be an easy job for him). it was supposed to be his first day of work the next day.

so, the next day i was getting ready upstairs and i heard someone come home around 11 am (my brother was supposed to be at his first day of work from 9-2) i thought it was my dad. but it was my brother and i heard him crying to my mom and i heard my mom sounding quite concerned and comforting him. this really scared me but i eventually went downstairs once my mom had ran to the store and i talked to my brother. he was just standing in the living room and he looked at me with tears in his eyes. i don't remember exactly but i think he first mentioned how he cannot work. then he just looked at me and said "i don't want to die" and started balling his eyes out and hugged me and we stood there for a while hugging, both crying. i told him we should sit down and he just sat there staring at me with constant tears in his eyes. i told him he can tell me whatever he wants, or he doesn't have to say anything and i will just sit here with him. he told me he is so depressed and i held his hand and we just sat there a while. he told me that i once called him a psycopath when we were kids and that it stuck with him ever since and that it turned out to be true (to which i responded to him that he is absolutely not a psychopath). he told me he cannot control his thoughts and kept stressing how he does not want to die. he told me that he has no friends and no one cares about him (i told him he does have friends and family who love him). he told me he has so much to tell me. and then he wouldn't really say anything. then he told me that he once "drugged" his girlfriend when they were dating by slipping adderall into her coffee which could have killed her when mixed with the medication she was taking at the time (although i do think that's very wrong i assured him it doesn't make him a psycopath, and even at this point i'm not sure that he even actually did that, and if he did that it probably would not have had any chance of killing her anyways). i kept telling him that whatever he is going through we are going to get through and that i have had friends who have had mental breakdowns before who returned to normal life. throughout our talk he would just keep bursting in to tears (i have maybe seen my brother cry once before but this was a different, uncontrollable cry) and he would say things that make no sense to me but i just let him try to talk anything out. i kept stressing he is not dying as well because that seems to be one of his greatest delusions. once my mom got home i told her not to force my brother to go to work tomorrow and she agreed.

as a family we went and got a christmas tree that day and ran errands and my brother was acting very quiet but he was not being delusional or acting psychotic while we were out. my parents made my brother call in to work the next day because he said he wouldn't be able to go to work again. we ended up going to a family party where we met with my two other siblings. i stayed by my brother for some of the party but was also off doing my own thing. then that night i went to a friends house. my parents ended picking me up the next morning, with my brother in the car. as soon as i got in the car i knew something was extremely off. my mom was sitting in the back seat of my dad's car with my brother and my brother was breathing pretty loudly and randomly. i didn't say much because honestly i just had a really bad feeling about the whole thing and i didn't talk the ride home.

once we got home i was upstairs with my mom. she let me know my brother was extremely agitated that night and she barely slept and he kept asking her to bring him to the ER. when we were upstairs my brother came up to us and demanded we take him to the ER again. she said no and that tomorrow they are going to a psychologist. he was absolutely psychotic and the worst i have ever seen him. i sat in the kitchen with my brother and mom. he went from laying down on his bed, then would get up and pace back and forth in front of us. he told us that all of his organs were failing him. we told him that it is not possible that his organs were all failing and that he wouldn't be able to be standing right now if that were true. he would try to talk about what he was feeling and again, break down into loud tears and occasionally spout out random things he was feeling. he said that he can feel something going on in his brain. he said he cannot tell the truth anymore. he is not in control of his thoughts and doesn't know how to process them. he said he is schizophrenic. i didn't know exactly what to say except that he is going to get better and that i know we'll get through it. i also have noticed that his breath kind of smells and he has never had any issues keeping up with personal hygiene before. i have never been close to anyone or seen anyone right in front of me being completely psychotic like this. but he ended up calming down and my dad gave him his current medication and i think he fell asleep around 10 pm.

i woke up at 4 am to let our dog out and my brother woke up around that time. he woke my mom up at that time with basically his same delusional thoughts + more. a new delusion/possible hallucination he told my mom about is that he apparently saw our dad looking in his bedroom door in the early hours (although my dad doesn't necessarily remember doing that) and my brother is convinced that our dad was going to smother him with a pillow and kill him. i fell back asleep and around 8 am woke up and heard my parents were on the phone with doctors. my dad was telling them how my brother's mental health is deteriorating. they were trying to get him to a psychologist but he could not get in anywhere so my dad took him to the ER. i took a bus back to where i go to school that morning and could barely keep it together on the bus because i am so worried about my brother.

to sum this all up, (and if anyone is even still reading, bless u), my brother is currently at a mental health facility about an hour from where my parents live. he has been there for a little over a day now and has called our mom saying that she cannot let our dad visit him as he thinks dad is going to kill him (he is also warning my mom to stay away from my dad). my dad was in prison for a lot of my life but there is no reason my brother should think he is going to kill him. he was never abusive to any of us and my parents have a great relationship and i have a good relationship with my dad as well. a nurse at the facility told my mom that my brother has taken a liking to one of the nurses and trusts her, but is convinced everyone else who works there is trying to poison and kill him. i just cannot handle hearing this about my younger brother. i love him so much and i want to take all the pain he is experiencing away. i can't even wrap my head around it.

basically, i just wrote this to see if anyone has experienced something similar or has seen people act similarly. my parents had the hospital give him a blood test to check if he could possibly have anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, which is a physical issue and not a mental health problem although that disease can appear as a mental health problem. i hope that he does not have that disease however, because it can be fatal. but, i think my brother's symptoms and signs match schizophrenia much more closely... and he is around the age when schizophrenia starts to really show for many people. we also have a 2nd cousin, a woman, who is schizophrenic. please, if anyone might have an idea of what my brother is suffering from, let me know. i am extremely scared and stressed about this. i love him so much and just want to see him get better soon, if possible. thank you for reading.

[Skeezyks]

Hello mmmelanierose: I'm sorry, I do not have any idea what is going on with your brother. But it sounds to me as though, given his struggles, he is in the right place. And they will figure this out, to the extent that it is possible to figure it out. I mostly just wanted to leave a reply letting you know I read your post & I wish you, your brother & your parents the best.

By the way, one thing I think is important based on my own previous experience is, before your brother is released from the hospital, arrangements ought to be made for him to attend some sort of partial hospital program. Those first few days & weeks after having been in the hospital can feel really disorienting. I think it is important to have somewhere to go & something to do. Even if the program itself isn't all that spectacular, just being involved in it can, I believe, be important as a bridge between being in the hospital & returning to whatever level of "normal" life a person is able to resume.

[leejosepho]

Yes, he is safe where he is and his trusting a nurse shows he is wanting to be able to connect with someone somewhere. One of my own brothers had once become so troubled that the docs could only put him into ZombieVille and then slowly reduce the med while watching for the first sign of mental life that might appear. When/If you might visit him, just let him be himself while allowing him to enjoy not be compelled to be anything or anyone else for you.