I know there are better places to go to in order to get this sort of stuff off your chest, but honestly, I just want to share it somewhere else than just my immediate family. We’re all already traumatized to an extent by the events and I don’t want to get my parents dwelling on the experiences again. I shared this story with some other places and a few people and besides the condolences which I much appreciated, they said that I was a good storyteller, and so the first place I thought of was here. I hope this story can help provide some more awareness of mental illnesses:
My sister went through a horrible mix of schizophrenia and an eating disorder.
The first time she mentioned her illness, my mother was immediately concerned and nursed her all day. She became convinced that the basement might be giving bad energy, and so she temporarily moved my affected sister’s bedroom into mine which is on the top floor. My mom stayed beside her all day, encouraging and helping my sister with everything. But I remember feeling quite bitter, to be honest. The first day I thought she was just doing it for attention, and it made me unbelievably angry that she was inconsiderate enough to directly affect me on the behalf of herself. The reason I thought that was because she was smiling the entire time, grinning to herself as she rocked herself on the floor of my bedroom. Passing by the threshold of my room, I remember seeing her there, rocking on the hardwood floor with a giddy smile. I thought to myself something along the lines of, “stupid acting.” I would learn soon enough that it wasn’t exactly acting.
She kept up the giddy smile for a bit longer, and eventually, it began to escalate. Like some ghoul, it mutated and contorted itself into something so much worse, morphing something which would and will haunt my family for a long time.
The things she began to believe and do were quite strange, to say the least. She prayed on her knees all day and all night in front of the couch in the living room. She’d mumble and pray, constantly bowing and occasionally moaning in anguish. When my mother convinced her to go to her room to sleep, if you peeked through the cracks in the almost closed door you could hear her… mumbling… praying… to something. And if you peered through, you could see her figure, bowing on her knees on her bed. One time I got her to explain what she was praying about, and she explained it was because spirits in heaven were starving as grudges left on earth continued to manifest. I tried my best to convince her that this isn’t true, theologically and logically, and I tried my very best to comfort her. I thought it worked and that it would resolve her restless praying, but in time my family got used to the faint mumbling she would whisper to herself, constantly trying to implore whatever she was trying to connect to.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any resources at the time for our family to get her to the hospital as she was in her twenties and hadn’t acted abnormally enough to be forced to get help. My parents spent probably hundreds of dollars providing pills after she received a diagnosis, but strangely she was so reluctant to accept she had schizophrenia, and one night it came to my father’s notice that she was spitting out all the medicine into the toilet. There was a big confrontation, but not much came out of it. Therefore, since she was an adult and was still non-threatening, without her consent to admit her illness and go to the hospital, our family couldn’t do much. That would eventually change.
She then became obsessed with becoming skinny. Horribly skinny. She believed she was fat no matter how gaunt she got and starved herself to the point that she became unbelievably weak and her hair was starting to shed at an increasingly worrying rate. (Thankfully, she didn’t go bald or anything, but from what I saw it was definitely thinning.) It would take her maybe one or two minutes to go down a short flight of stairs. Her figure is still ingrained in my mind. It’s like those photos of starving children laying on their beds, with no energy left to spare. The gaunt faces, sunken eyes, and arms are so thin all that’s left was skin and bone. There was a horrible amount of resemblance between them to my older sister, but yet any place on her body with enough flesh was constantly harassed as she became more extreme with her diet.
I remember one night walking into the kitchen, and there she was, stirring tea illuminated by our ghostly white lights as if in a literal spotlight. Tea was the only thing with a flavour she could ingest. As the spoon clattered about in the teapot as she mixed around the powder, past her frail, failing figure I could see her hand - weakly gripping the spoon. I was maybe 13 at the time, tall and lanky, but her arm was half the width of mine. I didn’t know an arm could be so skinny, it made me sick to my stomach. I carefully brought this up with her, and all that quivered out of her struggling body was:
“You’re getting so big!”
I felt horrible for her, I could feel the agonizing pain she must’ve felt. I’d recall all the times we’d laughed together, all the times I remembered her smiling in joy. And now here we were, in a gloomy, dark kitchen as she literally wasted away in the most horrific fashion I could imagine.
Eventually, there was a large ordeal, and with strong permission from a doctor, we were able to send her to the hospital. I remember my mom texting me later that day that the nurses couldn’t find her vein to examine her blood or something. They tried several times, poking her with needles to find an opening for the IV fluid, but the search was hopelessly futile. My mom stayed beside her during the entire process and eventually returned home once she was processed. Sadly, this was during Covid, and with something to do with not enough room in the hospital and an unwilling patient, she was sent back home prematurely treated. (I’m not 100% why they sent her back, this is what my other sister told me though.) However, she eventually broke her diet and fluctuated in weight back in forth, ultimately getting a bit better.
Unfortunately, she was prematurely treated after all, and the illness was going to come back even harder.
She’s a really talented artist, having been drawing for as long as I could remember. She got selected to go to a couple of prestigious art schools, but due to our financial situation, we weren’t able to send her to any and she had to take classes locally.
After the whole eating disorder passed, her schizophrenia came back even stronger. She would wail and cry and all of a sudden burst into relentless laughter. Eventually, her mumbles developed into shouts and screams, and one night kept me up till around 2 hissing. (My bedroom was right next to hers.)
One of the things that are often overlooked when thinking about her state and maybe schizophrenia is really just the breakdown of the logic of the affected individual. It was perhaps one of the biggest things that stood out to me when I tried to communicate with her. Nothing she said made sense anymore. The things she did had no reason behind them. And so when I got her to speak to me about her episodes, (besides denying that she had schizophrenia and proclaiming that she was a chosen figure), she explained that angels, several heavenly entities that she constructed, Satan, and God would speak through her. So, she would often speak in a certain tone, and if you listened closely you could tell who she thought was speaking through her. A monotone robotic voice was perhaps an angel and a deep growling voice was the devil. My mother would of course try to explain that it’s not angels, it’s simply voices in her head, but my sister would screech and scream like a banshee, calling my mom a disappointment of creation. At that moment I was burning with rage, but what could I do? Yell and scream at my sister and cause her to descend into a worse state? Other psychologists we reached out to said just to ignore her, and so I had to contain my temper, and that I did.
My mother perhaps was the one suffering the most in my family from this nightmare. She descended into a depressed and desperate mood. My father recalled her crying and praying at night, unable to sleep from all that was happening. He, I, and my other sister all tried to help as much as we could, but there wasn’t a lot we could do. Without my affected sister admitting her illness, all we could do was hope or pray.
One night, I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep and basically passed out for most of the early day. I got up and the house was filled with an eerie silence. My father had left to work, my mother was gone, and both my sisters were gone. I decided it was nothing and went about my day.
Once my mother and my other sister returned, there was no sign of my affected sister. Mom fell to pieces and was terribly exhausted, refusing to talk about what happened as she was concerned it might scare me. So, my other sister took me downstairs to secretly discuss the event.
I don’t know how on earth I slept past this, but my sister was up early in the morning on the backyard deck. The door was flung open with the lights on, and insects took the opportunity to flood into the house. My mother got up, startled by the noises, and found my older sister trying to burn one of her paintings in a tray of fluid and a lighter, supposedly screaming and shouting to her ‘angels’ again during the process. (It was an interesting painting she drew called “Skin” before the illness came into effect. I don’t recall what it looked like, but I think it had something to do with the colour of skin and blood.) She screamed it was because the devil had possessed the painting, and with a command from heavenly angels, she had to burn it to rid the curse from the house. After more confrontation and struggle, later that morning my mother rushed into the washroom upon hearing gagging. She saw my sister bent over the toilet forcing her fingers down her throat in an attempt to make herself vomit. She claimed it was herself that was cursed with the devil, and that she needed to puke it out to rid the curse. With that, my mother begged and sobbed for the hundredth time and at last convinced my sister to consent to go to a hospital. Upon this, my mother abruptly woke up my other sister and brought her along for support, (she is the next oldest sibling and knew very well how to deal with these situations).
Honestly… so much has happened it would take me a day to recall all the events. I think I know how she got her schizophrenia. My sister and I discussed it one night and my mother told me some experiences and stories that may explain the reason, but I think that would be digging way too deep into my family issues that I think are a bit too personal.
She was once such an amazing person with amazing potential. She worked so hard all her life. Whenever I walk into her room I see a lot of remnants of who she was, and still kind of is. Decorated with cute stuff like toy stuffies, anime posters, and a decent amount of knowledgeable books.
She is doing decent now. She still believes that she didn’t have an eating disorder or schizophrenia and that our family was the one acting irrationally. But either way, she’s doing better now, and that’s all that matters. She may be set up for a good long-term career, she’s got some muscle and fat back on her bone, and she’s currently in a healthy relationship. Unfortunately, she’s occasionally speaking to herself again. Not to the same volume of her illness’ zenith, but perhaps just a leftover habit. We’re finally getting her to consistently take her medicine in the form of shots so we only have to worry about it once a month, and she seems like she’s gotten a lot better. Please pray for my family that she makes a full recovery and the medicine works out.
Thank you for reading this awfully long story of mine.
This was my account of my sister’s schizophrenia.