My Brother: A 30 year old Schizophrenic off Medicine




DOUG'S STORY

Sometimes, late at night, my brother sits in his darkened room watching television without any sound and laughing hysterically. His giggling is punctuated by one-sided, incoherent conversations that he holds with the voices he hears in his head.

 

Doug is 30 years old, and for the past 10 years, he has suffered from schizophrenia, a fact which he neither acknowledges nor accepts. Whenever I tell someone about him, the person invariably nods, even if he or she has no idea that schizophrenia isn't "multiple personalities" or the result of bad parenting. Almost always, the first thing they ask me is, "Does he take medication?"

 

It's not a bad question. In the past several years, there have been some real breakthroughs in drugs to treat schizophrenia. Scientists have come much closer to pinpointing the ways in which neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin go awry in the brains of schizophrenics, and they are creating better medications to adjust the balance of chemicals.

 

These drugs, which have names like risperidone and olanzapine and clozapine, are not a cure. Often they have miserable side effects, and they are only partially effective in combating the so-called "negative" symptoms of the disease, things like apathy, social awkwardness and emotional withdrawal.

 

But the drugs can make it possible to live independently, to work and to interact with people, and to banish the hallucinations and voices. The new drugs are one of the few causes for hope in an otherwise devastating affliction, but there is one problem - if your brain is sick, how is it able to recognize its own illness?

 

This is not a hypothetical question. Consider that if your stomach hurts, the nerves in your body pass the information on to your brain, and it figures out what to do. But what about when the problem originates in the brain? How can one little piece of the mind hold itself apart, like some island of sanity, in order to make a self-diagnosis?

 

Doug, like many other people who have schizophrenia, cannot or will not realize that something is wrong, and he refuses to take any medication. So for my family, it all becomes useless, all the groundbreaking research and fancy new drugs, because he will not help himself.




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