Schizophrenia Was Something I Was Not Qualified to Deal With

I was there to provide friendship, not therapy

It took me about two months to realize I was in way over my head.

As a trained Stephen Minister, my job was to be a nonjudgmental Christian friend to my assigned Care Receiver. I attended 56 hours of training to learn how to be a good listener, to provide resources without offering advice, to keep confidences, and to direct my Care Receivers toward finding their own way forward.

I had several successful Stephen Ministry relationships before I was assigned to a woman I’ll call Pam, although that isn’t her real name.

Pam approached our program seeking help because a breakup with her boyfriend was causing her severe anxiety.

When people agree to meet with a Stephen Minister, they are required to get approval from their therapists, counselors or psychologists. Stephen Ministry leaders emphasize during an initial evaluation that we aren’t trained to fill those roles. We work in conjunction with professionals, but we can’t replace them.

Stephen Ministers are a confidential “listening ear.” We don’t tell a person what they should or shouldn’t do. We provide resources when our “Care Receiver” wants them, and we are available for texts, phone calls and weekly visits.

I’ve become lifelong friends with a couple of my Care Receivers after they no longer needed Stephen Ministry.

I Sensed Something was Wrong

But with Pam, things were a little “off” from the start. At our first meeting, I listened for an hour and a half while she talked about the boyfriend who was stalking her. She said she had lost 20 pounds as a result, and she had become too anxious to drive to work. Fortunately, the company she worked for said she could work from home.

She was a thin, pretty woman, but her complexion was pasty, her expression guarded and wary. Sometimes she ate oatmeal or cereal the entire time we were meeting, shoveling food in without pleasure or enjoyment. She said she was trying to regain her lost weight and had to force herself to eat.

I thought the boyfriend and the stalking sounded awful enough, but she seemed to have a lot of other problems, too. She smelled gas in her apartment, which I wasn’t able to smell. She said she was going to sue the landlord to install new carpets to get rid of the gas fumes, even though the carpets weren’t even a year old.

At our meetings, she locked and bolted the door behind me after she had cracked it open enough for me to slip inside. She seemed to be extremely paranoid, which made me wonder how dangerous her boyfriend was.

She decided her landlord was in a conspiracy with her ex, feeding him information about her whereabouts, so instead of continuing to meet at her apartment, we started meeting at different public places each week.

Pam would designate the location, I would head in that direction, and she would update me with any changes. If she spotted a car that looked like her boyfriend’s, she would change our meeting place at the last minute.

For a long time, I believed her former boyfriend was stalking her. But when she pointed out the man with the leather jacket lurking outside the restaurant, or the white van parked near the building, I never saw anything.

There was no man with a leather jacket. I never saw the white van. As soon as I looked up, the ex boyfriend had vanished.

“He’s quick and smart. He knows how to avoid being seen,” she explained.

At one of our meetings, she startled me by asking if she could move into my house. Of course I said no, as this was totally beyond the boundaries of a Stephen Ministry relationship.

I was relieved the next week, when she told me she was breaking her apartment lease to move in with a friend she met at church. “She’s so wonderful and supportive. She said she won’t let my ex get to me.”

But the move was short-lived. After a few weeks, the church friend told her to leave.

Pam explained it this way: She wants me to start paying rent. She should know I don’t have any money. I didn’t get my security deposit back after breaking my lease. Can you believe she asked me to leave?

She had been fired from her job by this time, but she had gotten a generous severance package.

Over the next three months, there were two more moves to live with “friends,” but it never worked out. One friend wanted her to buy her own groceries. Another refused to buy her a new bed. “She expects me to sleep on a twin with me feet dangling over the edge,” Pam complained.

I Felt like a Spy

All this time, I was driving all over the county to meet her at the far flung places she selected. Sometimes I drove miles from my house and my job. I felt like a spy trying to elude some mysterious enemy. She started asking me to park out of sight, in case her ex knew what my car looked like.

She changed therapists three times while I was seeing her. The therapists always started off wonderful and understanding, but the relationship quickly deteriorated.

I wondered how long it would be before our Stephen Ministry relationship deteriorated to the point where she decided we didn’t need to meet.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

Signs of Schizophrenia

We scheduled a meeting at Wendy’s, and she was twenty minutes late. When she finally got there, something was different. It was as if a curtain had fallen across her face, changing her features.

Her face was somehow darker, like someone hiding in shadows. I still can’t explain the difference, but she did not seem to be the same person I had been meeting with for several months. Even the sound of her voice was different.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?” She shot back, glancing suspiciously around. When she looked at me, her eyes were dark orbs, expressionless.

“I just wondered. You were late, and you look worried.”

“I got stuck in traffic. What makes you think I look worried?”

Then she asked something that unsettled me. “Do you ever hear voices inside your head telling you what to do? Crazy things you know you’re not supposed to do?”

In Over my Head

I felt a shiver of uneasiness, and that’s when I said the thing that would end our Stephen Ministry relationship.

“Have you ever thought about seeing a psychiatrist?” I blurted. Her face darkened, like gathering storm clouds, and her eyes narrowed. “Are you turning against me, too? You don’t believe me, either?”

“Of course I believe you. It’s not that. I just thought you might need some help. To help you get over your ex,” I said lamely.

In the Stephen Ministry program, we have something called “Supervision.” We meet with other Stephen Ministers and leaders. Everything is confidential and names are never revealed, but situations and problems are described so that we can receive peer support and advice to help us with our care receivers.

When I mentioned my last conversation with my care receiver at our peer supervision meeting, one member of our group said, “She shows classic signs of schizophrenia and needs to be on medication. You are in way over your head.”

He was right. I researched schizophrenia, and realized the signs and symptoms had been there all along: delusions that she was being harmed or harassed; paranoia; hallucinations that involved hearing voices; moving suddenly from childlike silliness to extreme agitation; the way she spoke in a strange monotone from time to time.

I thought back over things that seemed bizarre, and realized I had attributed a lot of her behavior to the boyfriend.

Maybe he was the trigger that caused her to slip over the edge. I don’t know. The more I got to know her, the more inconsistent and convoluted her stories became. Sometimes I even wondered if there had been a stalker, and then I berated myself for doubting her.

The last time I met with her, she brought a new boyfriend along. It was completely against Stephen Ministry rules, but I was glad he was there. Being alone with her made me uneasy.

He kept looping an arm around her waist and saying, “Isn’t she a doll? Can you believe how beautiful this girl is?”

She preened under all the attention, and we never did have formal closure to the Stephen Ministry relationship. We didn’t discuss anything personal or confidential at that meeting. The boyfriend must have said to me four or five times, “Isn’t she a doll?” I always nodded and said, “Yes, she is.”

I never contacted her again after that meeting, and she never contacted me.

I hope the new boyfriend worked out, and I hope she got the help she needed. People with mental illness can improve with the right treatments and medication, but it was beyond my ability as a Stephen Minister to help her.

“Stephen Ministers are lay congregation members trained to provide one-to-one care to those experiencing a difficult time in life, such as grief, divorce, job loss, chronic or terminal illness, or relocation.”

“Care receivers are individuals in the congregation or community who are going through a crisis or life difficulty. Potential care receivers first meet with a pastor or Stephen Leader, who assesses their needs for care and matches them with a Stephen Minister. The caring relationship lasts for as long as the need persists.” (From Stephen Ministries training manual, 2013–2020).