Schizophrenia

I talk with several friends today, Colby's friends and mine, about the realities of his schizophrenia. While he acknowledged that the panic attacks, anxiety and depression were not normal, he never validated the schizophrenia. Colby would go months without bathing and he was often paranoid. Occasionally, he misread social cues and misinterpreted friendly words and gestures as threatening. These are classic schizophrenic behaviors.

Like a lot of people, Colby was not comfortable with the stigma of mental illness. To me, mental illness is just like heart failure or liver disease in that the brain, an organ, is not functioning properly. And just like asthma or poor eyesight, there are different degrees of schizophrenia. To my knowledge, Colby did not hear voices, and there were not multiple personalities rattling around in his brain. But, there was a nice, sweet, loving, smart, intelligent, funny, talented Colby; and at times there was also an anti-social Colby with degrees of paranoia, depression, aggression, anxiety, and delusion. Complicating things, because mental illness affects a person's behavior, rather than their breathing, gait, or hearing, many people think the illness is the fault of the person who has it. Colby often felt ostracized, shunned, just because he had an illness that he could not help.

These thoughts make me sad and I ache for my son. How tough life was for him. I go through some of his notebooks and read his poems and song lyrics. How unhappy he was. How he ached for those treated unfairly, unjustly, inconsiderately. How disappointed he was in most of the human race. Hopefully Colby's death will make all of us more attuned to the feelings of those around us, those we love the most. Hopefully his story will make all of us more comfortable in sharing our feelings, and letting our loved ones help us through hard times. And hopefully, through this, we can all learn to communicate better.