Hi there! Thank you for being there! This journey with a loved one with Schizophrenia can be quite tricky…
My son was born in 1989, diagnosed for the first time in 2010 and since then it has been a rollercoaster of medication, no- medication, jail, hospitalizations, etc. You know the drill! He flatly refuses to take medications and self-medicates his anxiety with Marihuana. His viewpoint is that all of us are sick. He is fine. (“I am not sick, I do not need help” from Xavier Amador, to a T!!)
He has a good Health support team and a Non Profit offers him some home support too. Still, of course he manages to get in trouble, we take turns and intervene, etc.
His main delusion became more and more complex with the years but basically he met a girl in North America, fell in love, and developed an erotomanic delusion. Today (7 years later) he believes that girl had twin kids and hid the fact from him and put them in closed adoption. He keeps seeing them all over the city (in Europe) because they were adopted into Austrian families. The nannies (that is always it is a different face!) keep taunting him and showing the kids to him, appearing with the kid wherever he goes… He sees them frequently and they look at him knowingly: he is their dad! And “a father knows”, no one can tell him those kids are not his!!
Now, this story is heartbreaking for all of us in the family not least because it has the sideline that we knew all that and never helped him in his immense pain of being parted from his kids, never defended him, etc. although we have financial resources to do so… We are cruel, heartless and do not love him.
Once in a while he denounces one of us to the police, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary for this disease.
I learned SO MUCH through this journey, and the main take home for me was understanding and acknowledging my own disease of codependence: how I want to control him, manage him and his life, etc… But he is on his own journey and I need to accept that!
Today, we meet up and have civilized conversations in which I do not deny his reality and acknowledge the pain he is feeling. That works until he goes on a rant but usually we can have some peace when we met (I live in another country, so I do not see him all the time)
I am writing today with a question, because in the spirit of supporting him whenever and wherever I can I try to answer always his emails and be empathetic, but today he sent me a form for Canada to find out whether there is a birth certificate for the kids this poor girl supposedly gave birth to…(poor girl because the harassment never stopped ).
I am not sure how to follow up to that… My selfish interest is to keep the relationship! I want to hear from him! My rational thoughts and learnings tell me: do not feed the delusion.
And one totally irrational part of me thinks that it would be a good thing to get papers that says “these kids never existed” so he can move in another direction, but since I know he will explain it away (they paid the judge, look how deep the conspiracy goes, etc.), I am pretty sure I am deluding myself…
Anyone has any suggestion for this? I look forward to reading you and helping you in any way I can with the stuff I have been learning myself through the years since this nightmare started…
Thank you so much!
Maria from Toronto