Would your life be different if half your the family was Schizophrenic?

Tweet

I was raised by a woman that was a Schizophrenic. And my half brother was a Schizophrenic. Our Father was OK except his wife liked to beat him up sometimes when she drank too much. By the time I was 10, I could out run her so I did a lot of running. In fact, I was great in track all through school and as an adult I ran a few marathons. My brother was the one who actually suffered the most, even though she never laid a hand on him. He lived in his own hell inside his head. When he was a kid, he was brilliant. He built a color TV from bits and pieces he found in trash by the side of the road. We built it in his room. I did all the soldering under his expert direction. He built a hand held synthesizer in the form of a wooden ball with little metal pins sticking out of it. This was before synthesizers were really on the market. He could roll this little ball around in his hand and play music with it. He could play any musical instrument you put in front of him even if he had never seen it before, But he never learned to read music. He wrote music by playing it and recording it on various types of recording devices and then I had to transcribe it for him. He was a wizz at math and science too. In school, he went to all the State Fairs. I did too but he always came in 1st. I rarely did that. As he got older, the Schizophrenia took away his ability to think. He still wrote music almost until the end but he deteriorated healthwise so much that he couldn't play music anymore. He became more and more dificult to deal with because his thought processes were so odd. He became violent for no reason, but I knew the reasons. I grew up with him. The reasons were deep inside. They were there even if he could not name them. David was 49 when he died. I would be very different if I had not known him. I miss him.