Hi! I come to this website in times of distress so thank you for being a shoulder to cry on.
Every two weeks I visit my brother in the mental hospital. He’s getting better, thank God. We talked half an hour and hugged and held hands and it finally felt like real human contact. I’m happy and grateful and have some hope. He’s been there almost 2 months
But what unsettled me was a man in the corridor of the hospital. He had this hollow, empty look in his eyes. His eyes looked almost like an animal’s. I’m sure he couldn’t have black eyes (not widespread where I am) but for a second of our eye contact it looked like two black holes on a snow white face. And for some reason I’m still thinking about it. Maybe I see my brother in that person, maybe I saw what mental illness looked like when manifested in a form of a facial expression? My brother has something similar but it’s mostly just eyes of a person who’s not there, who’s in his own reality
Some weeks ago I saw a man with the same hollow eyes in a library. He had longish greasy hair. Unkempt. I immediately thought he wasn’t mentally okay. He was wearing a nice set of clothes and I thought someone was caring about him…
I don’t know, my perception of people around me has changed … I see more brokenness than I ever had? Maybe it’s just growing up (I’m 23), I don’t know…
sorry for the rumbling, would be cool to read your thoughts
Thank you for sharing this ,
Im so glad there has been a time that you have felt that connection with your brother and that he has been staying in the hospital!
After visiting my sibling many times in the hospital I can definitely relate to what you call the hollow eyes,
And yes I do things notice things quite differently than I did in the past ,so I guess I should say I am more aware
One experience comes to mind
At one point the apartment I lived in had a bus stop right outside my bedroom window I would often hear shouting and cussing when I would peek out the window I would see a man just screaming and using his hands he would scream at the cars going by people walking or even no one around.
After this happened repeatedly I realized he had tourette’s or maybe some other form of mental illness.
Once the man came into my place of retail work I noticed that our security department was following him I was able to connect with our security team and let them know that he had a mental illness.
They were then able to let the mall security team know as well.
Over the years I’ve run into many things like this now ,and to be honest some of my best conversations have been with people who are mentally ill.
Thanks for the space
When visiting my daughter in the hospital, I saw a young woman probably in her twenties, who was catatonic. A relative was visiting her, holding her hand, and she didn’t move even to blink her eyes. Definitely hollow eyes. I felt so ashamed to catch myself staring and thinking I was so lucky that my daughter wasn’t like that. I wonder if she recovered, I never saw her again.
My daughter is one of the lucky ones, who fully rejoined the world with a new life. I can’t remember if her eyes ever looked hollow to me when she was very ill.