I was 7 years old when I learned of my Father’s illness. My brother and I were dining at his house when he abruptly began to cry, complaining that the military were seeking to persecute him, that his house was bugged and that soon he would be trialed before the public. He explained that a guilty verdict would mean that the general public, including us, could pelt him with rotten fruit and vegetables at a local football stadium. Through our tears we promised that we would never do such a thing, but we did not oblige his unreasonable request for us to keep what he had told us a secret. Returning home, we recounted the episode to our mother. She desperately contacted her sister—an experienced psychiatrist—who promptly explained that my Father was suffering from a psychotic disorder. The news rippled through both sides of the family, causing concern for his health, but also for the wellbeing of myself and my brother during our time spent with him. A consensus was reached that we were no longer to visit him alone, and would instead see him regularly at our grandmother’s house at times of congregation.
For the remainder of our primary school years we held to this arrangement, meeting at our grandmother’s on Sundays for lunch with the family, spending time with Dad playing chess, watching television and drawing pictures, mostly of dolphins and coconut trees. As children we were blind to the family politics and the wider circumstance, but looking back on these years, I see how they witnessed his losing struggle to manage and maintain his family relationships, fulfill his role as a father and reason through his psychotic thought processes. There was the time when he childishly flicked a spoonful of sugar at a family member during a heated exchange at the dinner table; when his face sank into sadness and disappointment after I mistakenly referred to my stepfather as “Dad”; and when he claimed he was hypnotized to move his queen into the path of my bishop during a game of chess. Such scenes I remember for their poignancy, but only now do I understand their significance.
My father walked out from his job as a telecommunications engineer and eventually took permanent leave on the grounds of ill-health. Family were able to secure his medical discharge with some persistence, but this was especially difficult given the manner of his departure, without a medical diagnosis or a sick note. Despite efforts on both sides of the family to convince my father of his illness and need for medical attention, he always resisted, insisting that there was nothing wrong with him, yet holding fast to an increasingly complex web of paranoid delusions. The informal opinions of several experts who had listened to a description of his symptoms and circumstance converged: my father was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. But he never received this diagnosis. Instead he became self-sufficient and isolated, avoiding contact with anyone who would challenge him about his need for medical help. Throughout my teenage years he faded almost completely from my life. He would show up randomly on the doorstep after long periods without contact in a distressed state, with the same old complaints of surveillance and abduction; or I would see him passing at the local shop, clearly occupied with troubling thoughts, and he would hardly recognize me. He still resides in our childhood home, in a state that most would describe as squalor (but that I know to be very well organized), paranoid of his neighbors and deeply suspicious of the most normal and mundane things.
Around 10 years ago, when I began to develop a mature perspective on the situation surrounding my Father’s condition, I started contacting him of my own volition and have managed to keep in fairly regular contact since—typically a text every week, or less frequently, a phone call, coffee-shop rendezvous or house visit. It has been emotionally and psychologically challenging. Sometimes, following meetings where his conversation seemed completely “normal,” I would find myself feeling hopeful for his full recovery. But the psychosis would always resurface, seemingly worse every time. Most recently, the Duke of Edinburgh is waging war on our family, alien shapeshifters inhabit the bodies of neighbors, and things are “coming to a head.” There is much more he could tell me if, like him, I had been made to sign the Official Secrets Act. Thankfully I have not. I’ve expended a great deal of emotional energy in branching out to my father and rationalizing his condition. It has brought me insight and a sense of dutiful wellbeing, but also a measure of depression.
Many times I have asked what caused my father’s illness. In a broad sense, this question is easy to answer, as it can be linked to adversities and circumstances that are so often associated with a risk of psychosis. Foremost, my father suffered a traumatic closed-head injury in his mid-twenties. He was riding as a passenger in a 3-wheel “Reliant Robin” when the driver lost control and the vehicle flipped. The insult left him unconscious for days, hospitalized for weeks and unable to work for around 6-months. Doing my detective work, I also learned that he sustained a lesser bang to the back of the head falling backwards when climbing a drain pipe around the age of 12, which put him to sleep for 13 hours. Then there were the 2 young children, the night-time burglary, the stressful marriage, the tumultuous break-up and the gradual breakdown in communication between 2 large families. Combine this with the naivety of family members during the prelude to my father’s first psychotic episode and the picture is one that I imagine would be familiar to most experienced mental health professionals. So, that is the broad context, and to my mind it is adequate explanation of his circumstance; but why any of it should lead to the formulation of such bizarre convictions has always eluded me, and experience has taught me that there is little reward to this line of thought.
There will always be a sense of sadness linked to thoughts of my father. He is a man who has suffered from tragedy, misfortune, and a terrible illness of a kind for which there is no cure. Yet I remain optimistic. Despite his illness, he has retained his intellect, and beneath the surface of his character there lies a special kind of virtue that to my mind is lacking in the world. He loves wildlife, minds his own business, uses hardly any energy and wastes next to nothing. If more people were more like this, the world would not be worse for it! Looking to the future, my aims are simple: to maintain a meaningful relationship, support his independent living for as long as possible and help maximize his recovery insofar as it does not become a destructive force in my own life or the lives of others. There are some wounds that time cannot heal, but hope and good intent can help with the rest.