MAD HOUSE: GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW OF

MENTALLY ILL SIBLINGSby: Clea simon

Sandra Eguia

MAD HOUSE

•Clea was the youngest of three.

•Her oldest sibling is Daniel and Katherine was the middle child.

•Her family was an Upper-middle class family.

•Baby boom

•They had everything they could possibly want also had a nice home and a boat.

•Her life was normal until her brother and sister were both diagnosed with schizophrenia. From that point on her life was not ‘normal.’

SO HAPPY TOGETHER

•Schizophrenia is a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation term mental disorder.

• Clea first pet was a turtle and had

several turtles after.

• Clea always went into her sisters room

to listen to music with her.

• They both use to listen to pop music

together, this was 1964 and The

Beatles just came out with “A Hard

Day’s Night.”

• She then started noticing changes in

her brother.

• Daniel was diagnosed with

schizophrenia.

EVERYTHING FALLS APART

•Clea seen a change in her family and noted them as being weird.

•She then started separating herself at home by making herself caves in different places:• In her mothers studio

• Back of her closet

• Alcove base of stairwell

•At the age of 7 or 8 she began having nightmares.

•Cleas mother always tried to blame herself for what was going on with her family.

•Clea wanted someone to suggest her mother a type of family therapy that included lea, to help her cope with things if it was possible.

•At one point her mother began to hid all the knives.

•Her parents then decided Daniel shouldn’t be living in the house.

•At the age of eleven Clea noticed Katherine was also had a sickness (schizophrenia).

INVENTING MYSELF

•For Cleas twelve birthday she received many presents but her diary was the one she loved the most. She also loved the fact that she could lock it and keep it private.

•She than made her an imaginary friend she named her sue because she thought that name was normal.

•She approached her teen years with no sense of them being fun.

•Every example Cleas siblings left her were dangerous and all she remembered is wanting to not crazy as her siblings did.

•Which Clea defined crazy as losing the ability to tell fantasy from reality.

•She than started to think she would never be normal.

•In her diary entries she began to be paranoid of being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND

•Once Katherine was out of the house permanently and into a halfway house the house was quieter and became more peaceful.

•Then Cleas brothers comes back into her life, the last time she seen him was when she was nine.

•When they agreed to see him she didn’t know what to expect or say.

•He was doing good because of his medication he was given.

•Daniel also had a family.

•After a while he stopped going to his appointments and the paranoia came back.

•Ellen his girlfriend started to fear for her life.

•She than left Daniel for the safety of her daughter.

OUT OF SIGHT

•She had a sweet 16 like every ‘normal’ girl would and was so happy about it.

•After a while Clea decided to write a letter to Katherine, her mother warned her she might not respond to her letter.

•After the second letter Clea did not respond because Katherine's letter was full of warning and damnation.

GETTING PAST DANIEL

•After achieving what her siblings couldn’t she went to Harvard.

•Her parents were both trilled about her achievement and didn’t want scare her by introducing failures of Daniel.

•Clea seen Daniels breakdown as a reality event and made her feel like every nightmare comes true.

DRAGGED DOWN BY GHOST

•Clea graduated from Harvard a month before he twenty-second birthday.

•She than felt free

•She than got her own place close to school away from her home.

•After graduating she started having dreams, she didn’t consider them as nightmares because they were to calm.

•She eventually confronted her parents about hiding her brothers death.

•Clea started talking to her school therapist.

•Her new boyfriend did not interest her sexually and she didn’t know why and wanted to know why.

SEEKING HELP

•Clea than began to seek for help and decided to start talking to a therapist, while deciding to pick which therapist she wanted to go through she looked and the first name had thought of him and picked the second name.

•Clea was scheduled to go twice a week, and felt like she lived for those appointment.

•Clea said she felt like every session was like a vine in the jungle, and she swung from one vine to another always looking for another vine as a lifeline to grab.

•Clea was still having dreams and many of them were of transformation of something that might seem solid would melt away.

•Eventually Clea began taking medication.

LEARNING NORMAL

•Clea sometimes imagined how her family would be if her two siblings weren’t diagnosed with schizophrenia.

•Also says her brother would also be a Harvard graduate, married, with his three kids happier than ever.

•When her father was in the hospital for his last time it brought her a lot of sadness more than she could bear.

•Her mother cried after every visit.

SCHIZOPHRENIA

• is public health issue that affects approximately one percent of the U.S.

•This illness usually happens between the late teens and mid-thirties

•Schizophrenia is known to be a severe form of mental illness which is broadly characterized by three domains of psychopathology, including negative symptoms: • social withdrawal

• lack of motivation

• lack of emotional reactivity

REFERENCES:•Daniel C. Javitt, MD, PhD (2014) Balancing Therapeutic Safety and Efficacy to Improve Clinical and Economic Outcomes in Schizophrenia: A Clinical Overview, VOL. 20, NO. 8.

•D Goldberg, G Ivbijaro, L Kolkiewicz etal (2013) Schizophrenia in primary care

•https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define:+schizophrenia+

•Kathryn F, Kosuke I, Kathleen F. Villa (2014) Resource Utilization and Cost in a Commercially Insured Population with Schizophrenia, Vol 7, No 1.

•A Negota, S Mashegoane (2012) Mothering Children with Schizophrenia in a Village Setting: A Multiple Case Study, Journal of Psychology in Africa 2012, 22(2), 259–262.

•S Sarkar, S (2013) Grover Antipsychotics in children and adolescents with schizophrenia: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Vol 45 | Issue 5