My Homeless Brother Asked For $4,500 And I Said No…
Here’s why.
My 29-year-old brother has paranoid schizophrenia. He’s suffered with it since he was in his late teens, and it’s progressively gotten worse.
If you’re curious about some of his symptoms or want to learn more about his particular brand of schizophrenia, you can later check out an article I wrote here:
That article was only written a few months ago, and in it I speculated whether he would end up homeless like so many others with schizophrenia.
Sadly my fears came true.
My brother was living (not very happily) at his father’s house in Texas. He had his own room, well a series of rooms actually, so lots of space to spread out and ignore his family and the world at large.
Note: He was unhappy because he was sick, not because of where he was living, but good luck convincing him of that.
About a month ago he started tongue-ing his meds.
Don’t blame his dad for not checking under his tongue…. after months and months of happily taking a pill every day, his dad probably got complacent and didn’t see the subtle signs Kyle’s sickness was spiraling.
During times when my brother is particularly sick, we reeeeeeally make sure he is getting his pill in him every day and we do check under his tongue. The reason is, after skipping only a couple of pills the voices and delusions get out of control.
Anti-psychotics have a short half-life, often ranging from 9 hours to 24, which means that the meds quickly leave the person’s system.
Fun with math: If a drug’s half life is exactly 24hrs then after 1 day the body will have only 50% of the full dose, a day later will have 25% of the full dose, 12.5% on day 3, 6.25% on day 4 etc etc. This means it is IMPERATIVE that a person with schizophrenia take his or her meds every. single. day.
But it’s not so easy to do that.
Along with the lovely symptoms of hearing voices and having super weird delusions (a secret society is transmitting messages on the radio!), the pre-frontal cortex of a schizophrenic leads to the wonderful propensity of not being particularly good at self-care, such as daily tooth brushing or showering or…. yes… taking medicines.
On top of that many people with paranoid schizophrenia have voices that are telling them not to take their medicine because it might be poisoned, or gasp!, contains a government tracking device. THEN, on top of that, these wonderful antipsychotics have fun side-affects such as horrible shaking hands, enormous weight gain, and excessive sweating.
Who wants to take a med and be plagued by all of that?
SO the bottom line is: the relapse rate for going off meds is pretty darn high in people with schizophrenia. Cue my brother tongue-ing his meds for a week, or even taking them, then later changing his mind and throwing them up.
And once those bat-shit-crazy-stabilizing chemicals are out of his system, my brother goes, well, bat-shit-crazy.
This time? The voices said if he moved to Salt Lake City that he would be happy (finally). And they promised they wouldn’t plague him as much. Those voices are a bunch of liars, but my brother believed them anyways and snuck off in the middle of the night, eventually finding himself in SLC.
His brilliant plan? Be Homeless!
When he got there and called us I gave him an earful, to which he responded with:
“This is going to be so fun! It’s an adventure sis!” and…
“Most people in their 20’s fantasize about living homeless, it’s a totally normal decision to make” and…
“Don’t worry, life will be easy… I’ll sleep in a shelter and eat at a food kitchen and beg for cigarette money”
Sadly, the longer he was off his meds the crazier he got and now he can’t sleep at the shelter because, ‘the voices won’t let him’, and he doesn’t want to go to the soup kitchen because ‘they’re poisoning him with rotten food’ (instead he’s dumpster diving, which I’m so totally sure is not rotten, right?).
So cue today’s phone conversation. (He charges his phone at McDonald’s if you’re curious.) I decided to record the conversation partly to have proof of how sick he is, in case we need it for legal stuff such as getting guardianship, or protecting his inheritance money from himself (our mom just died a year ago).
If I get his permission to upload the audio file here I will, so follow me if you want to be informed of my future articles.
In the conversation I explain to him it’s simply not safe him having so much money on the streets... If someone found out they could hurt him, or steal it, or who knows what else?
His response to that was, “obviously I’m not going to tell people,” but I reminded him that only 48 hours ago he met a couple on the street who gave him drugs, which he willingly consumed, with no way of knowing what chemicals were actually present in said drugs.
He said he was completely sure it was a weed edible gummy thing, and he took it in hopes the voices might be alleviated, if even for only a few hours. It still seems dicey to me to accept drugs from a stranger on the streets.
And two weeks prior to that, he was approached by a man in the middle of the night in a white van who claimed he was going to ‘cure his schizophrenia’ if he just went with him, and he thought it was a brilliant idea to get into the van ‘just in case he was telling the truth’.
The ending to the above story, if you’re curious, was that the man brought him to a cult where they prayed the crazy away and called each other “brother” and “sister” and locked his phone away in a drawer so he’d stay. Luckily after a week he realized they were crazier than he was, so he broke into the drawer, retrieved said phone, and went back to sleeping in the park.
He might not have been so lucky.
Human traffickers sometimes take advantage of sick people living on the streets, and funnel them into forced labor situations, (keeping them controlled with drugs and coercion), or even forced sex work.
OR the man could have been one of the 3,000 currently active serial killers in the world. Oh joy, I could have been crying on an episode of 2020
So am I going to trust my brother with $4,500 while he’s been making healthy, rational decisions like accepting drugs from strangers, getting in random vans, or going off to live homeless in SLC to begin with?
HECK NO
Am I wrong and cruel and keeping him in a super unsafe situation by denying him money? No idea. But that’s a lot of money for me and I’m not going to let him squander huge sums of cash because the voices ‘don’t want him to live in Texas’.
Since he’s been homeless I have refused to even send him $20 for cigarette or food money, because I don’t want him living homeless in SLC to begin with, and I am not going to further his being able to stay there.
If he can easily get food/cig money from me then he might be more willing to continue this homeless stint. I am not okay with that. He says he is embarrassed to beg for money. I lovingly replied that begging is part of the homeless-life-gig he’s just signed up for, and reminded him this is a choice he is making.
Note: I say he is making a choice, but remember without the antipsychotics it’s less of a choice…. the voices and his beautiful, broken brain are really the ones putting him in this situation
Another Note: When I see homeless people on the street, I absolutely DO give them money and I suggest you do the same. If you see a young, sick person walking around SLC it might be my brother, please help him eat that day. What I am suggesting is the person’s family of origin do everything they can go get their family member into a hospital or back into a family member’s home and back on meds….
For anyone out there judging me, I did break down today and gave in and sent him $40, mainly because I felt bad for turning him down consistently over a month…
Is this wrong too? Am I creating a precedent with a slippery slope? Probably. But I am pretty darn stubborn and know I can go back to my “no money” pledge like before.
So how is my brother? Not doing well. I am not sure how this will end up, but hopefully it will be by him going back to Texas and getting back on his medication.
I would appreciate your prayers for him and for my family. Even more I would appreciate your vote though, so that tax dollars get to important, yet not sexy, programs for mental illness and homeless populations.
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Further reading! A poem inspired by my brother & his schizophrenia, what it’s like having family members with mental illness, and how my writer’s block morphed into my husband’s ‘physician’s block’.