Living With Schizophrenia: My Father’s Perfect Family

My father said on numerous occasions when I was growing up that he would see other families that had problems like divorce and drug use, and he would thank God that his family was so perfect.

Things would change, though. They always do. And that perfect family would face just as much struggle as any other.

Growing up in the mountains above Boulder, Colo., our life was good.

When I went away to college, I began smoking weed pretty regularly and doing other drugs, and slowly I started to lose my grip on reality. Coincidences turned into connections, connections into paranoia, and paranoia into delusions. Seeing the change, my mom and dad were at a loss. When I mentioned a few times that I thought I was going crazy and told them that I’d like to see a doctor, they would say it was just the pot, just please stop.

Months went by like this, as I grew increasingly paranoid and delusional, until, thinking I was a prophet who was meant to save the world, I left on a “mission” to the United Nations in New York. I spent nights sleeping on the streets and in metro trains, from Boston to Woods Hole, Mass. The experience culminated in a bittersweet homecoming, where I spent the next week in the psych ward of my local hospital – one of the hardest weeks of my life. I was, in the truest sense of the word, broken.

Read the full story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/well/live/living-with-schizophrenia-my-fathers-perfect-family.html

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