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Warning: Long


My brother is a paranoid schizophrenic.
His name is Todd, he is thirty-three years old. At the time of the story I'm about to tell, he was about 6'2" and 180lbs. He was skeletal thin, pale as a ghost. He usually is, as he is one of those red haired, freckled fellas - but this was different.
Todd has been arrested at least five or six times and actually imprisioned at least three of these times. The last time Todd was caught, being in the wrong time at the wrong place and being schizophrenic (which is a good way to phrase someone seeming vulgar, disoriented or 'high') he was imprisoned for five months.

When Todd got out of jail, my mother had finished moving to Tennessee (we live in Michigan). Todd no longer had a home. When all of this started, I was 18 and had just bore to the world my daughter. I was living with my fiance's parents at the time. My father is not Todd's father, and considering their history Todd wanted nothing to do with him.
Being thirty-three years old, everyone else finally having their own lives, my relatives seemed to have forgotten all about Todd. In about seven months I was out of my fiance's parent's home and into my apartment.

That's when I learned that Todd was living outside. At the 'dump.' You know, that grand place where everyone's garbage goes. He had built himself a shack (as the place was surrounded by a slightly thick wood) and lived outside. He surrounded his shack with booby traps and caught most of his food, or stole it.

Todd, for as long as I have ever known, has been out of his mind schizophrenic. He suffers from the same symptoms as your friend, Kukushka, only on a slightly... stranger level. Schizophrenics are notorious for being delusional with more than just conversations. Todd can "see" lasers coming out of televisions that try to penetrate his mind. Todd can "see" the satellites in space that circle the globe and watch him on a camera. Todd can "feel/see/touch" chips that doctors have implemented into his head to read his thoughts. If you cough around Todd, he will run away with his shirt over his mouth because the "evil in you in trying to take me." Evil transfers by cough, apparently.

I worked my a** to the bone and helped my brother. My mother was gone and my father not his own, my elder sister had her own family now and couldn't be bothered with it. It was typical of Todd to vanish for a week at a time and disappear into a forest. He's an outdoorsmen. He loves to hunt, trap, build, sculpt, draw, track, sleep outside.. everything. He's always done it. But when winter started to come, and Todd was still outside living on skunks and rabbits, I had had enough. My [dangerous] hikes out to his otherwise top-secret shack to pull him from his little hermit-dom weren't working. Todd was beginning to starve.

As I said, I was eighteen, a mother, in my own apartment, going to work and trying my best to care for an ill child. I was broke constantly and most of the time, couldn't make ends meet myself. I told Todd that if he went down to my father's (whom Todd lived with for 14 years) and helped work in his yard, that my father would pay him. All through the fall season my brother would wake up and walk (unless I showed up to pick him up, but it wasn't even a quarter mile away) to my father's house to work. I would take him to the grocery store, then I'd make him dinner.

Winter hit and yard work was scarce. My father continued to try to help Todd, but he belived that my father tried to poison him with his chili mac. Todd shortly thereafter vanished for two weeks. He wasn't at his shack and no where to be found. His shack had been demolished and he had turned it into a hole in the ground. How he managed this, I will never know; Todd dug a nest in the ground. It was at least seven feet deep and teen feet wide. Most of his old belongings were inside and he had made a door that laid overtop of it which looked as if he had covered it up with snow and branchs most of the time for secrecy. Just as I was about to give up hope, assuming that he had been picked up by the police, I found him. On a bike that he had stolen from the dump, Todd was peddling his heart out down the high way with what seemed like a hundred pounds of stuff strapped to his back. I pulled over, yanked him into the car and brought him home.
His fingers were dark blue, almost black. It looked official that he had frostbite. He was so hungry that he let me bring him to my home (which he had previously always refused) and there I kept him for, on and off, the rest of the winter. I made him his own spot to call his own and babied him like a little child. I think in all of his life, I am the only person that has never hurt or abandoned him. He trusted me, mostly, and when he did have his attacks and episodes, they were minimal.

Oh, yeah. The frostbite thing.
As I said before, doctors implement mind reading and tracking devices. No welfare or social security, the government has been watching him. They're out to get him. Eventually the skin on three of his fingers peeled off. At the time, I was a reporter for a newspaper in the area. I worked on articles that hit close to home; poverty, abortion, teen pregnancy, homeless, schizophrenia and single mothers. I went to every homeless shelter in my county - all were full and all told me that he didn't have frosbite completely and how to properly take care of him. What most people don't realize is that a large percentage, if not the majority, of homeless people have severe mental disorders. Schizophrenia being one of them. They cannot hold a job, they cannot interact well with people, they cannot follow rules as well as they 'should' and they don't understand time as well as most people do. The "severe" schizophrenics are the ones that I'm talking about.
So I bandaged Todd and kept him healthy. My doctor, after hearing from me about my brother, prescribed ointment under my name to give to him. Eventually his skin grew back, but he'll never feel his fingertips again.

When winter was over, Todd seemed to be doing great. I took him to scrap metal at the local scrapyards a lot and he had some money. We got him into a motel nearby that he trusted and he stayed there for a while as we searched for jobs. Finally, he was sick of living outside. I brought him over for dinner and movies a few nights a week, but he was never comfortable enough with his eighteen year old sister babying him and left more nights than not. Eventually he was opening cans of beans, chili and chicken noodle soup with a rusty knife he had found to survive. He fell right back into his rut.

My then fiance and myself stalked out to his little hole in the ground, sat down and lectured. Lecturing a severely sick schizophrenic is a little different than a teenager. It's more like a sweet, hopeful scolding to get them to see your point. The point was that for over a year Todd had been living at the dump or in a motel. He was starving, sick, breaking laws constantly, thirty-four years old and had nothing to show for it. He lost the feeling in his fingertips and constantly wept (or as close as possible) about how he hated how the people in the supermarkets looked at him when he came in. He knew he smelt absolutely awful. He was ready to find a real job.

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For the last two years my brother has been employed at a tire company, unloading semi trucks. He works over eighty hours a week and brings home over $2000 each week. He's driving my old car, which I gave to him, opened a bank account (!!!. You guys just don't know what a big step to getting better that was) and even made a few friends that he goes hunting with. All of his fines, court fees, car insurance, license and other 'regular people' things have been paid in full. Todd is now a law biding, tax paying citizen. He even lives with my older sister, her husband and my neice with an entire floor just to himself. This gives him privacy but lets him feel comfortable and keeps him from being alone all of the time, which makes him worse.
He won't take medicine for his problems and he won't go to a doctor unless his job forces him to (he's smashed those fingers quite a few times at work and other accidents), and he definitely still has attacks, slip ups and a few characteristics that he'll never shake, but he's overcome more than I could ever imagine. He flashes his middle finger to the 'sattelites in the sky,' doesn't believe the television is controlling his mind (but agrees it isn't good for you), hasn't touched caffeine (pop or any equivilent) or ciggarettes since he was homeless and even comes to family functions with his shoulder length red hair back in a pony tail. Which he has never done, no matter how hard we begged him.

I know this is ridiculously long, but I love this story. It's a success tale that I think needs it's own book for there is pleeenty I cut out. He'll never be one hundred percent normal and never been completely in control of himself, but he's made so many steps toward it that I can't help but to be in awe. I work as a transitional specialist and respite worker at a mental health authority now and meet a lot of people just like my brother. Schizophrenia, for some reason, warms my heart. It's an awful problem, but I will never be able to not correlate it to my wonderful brother.

Here he is, the first ever picture of him looking at a camera (now that they no longer seem to capture part of his soul):

Notice he's not skin and bones anymore, and he's even preparing home made jerky that he dedicates himself to and sells to his friends at work. ^_^

I cannot help but to be amused that you are so giddy that your friend is such a nice and sweet person. xD
I'm glad that she is, but you should be aware that having schizophrenia does not mean that someone will be mean or hateful. It simply means that their mind works in an entirely different way than most people's. Don't point out the things she does differently, just accept and nurture them. <3