Why him, why me?

feel sorry for my dad bc his dad which is my grandad was put in an insane asylum when dad was still young and my dad had to fend for himself, i think my granddad had a lot of bad luck but somehow he managed to get out of there in the eighties and he got a certificate of sanity but he had nowhere to go when he was let out as he had lost everything and my dad had recently married and had my my sister and i so he couldn’t stay with us :frowning: he died of throat cancer a few years later,

then 20 yrs later his son is locked away (me) and diagnosed with the same thing, i didn’t know anything about my grandad before that except that he had cut his own throat. so my dad had to deal with a sz father who got his sanity back and a son who has recently been discharged from care, i am lucky that they have a lot more help for me these days than they did back then for him, i mean what use is a stupid bit of paper when you have nowhere to stay? apparently he was seen walking about with a crash helmet on and my dad would say he was touring the country on his motor bike :frowning:
its tragic really when i think about it.

A lot of people on this web site have tragic stories. Mental illness is devastating. I’m sorry about your grandfather. That’s a bitter legacy.

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i thought i would just talk about this because i was watching a ‘who do you think you are’ tv programme about family histories about mental illness and it got me thinking about it, funny thing is that our family on the male line didn’t have any history of mental illness documented before my grand father so it makes me think something must have changed in society for that to happen, my granddads line were all farmers and church folk and i was thinking maybe that had a bearing on it.

I had a great aunt who lived her adult life in a state hospital. She was a secret in out family. I think she was a person.