My brother has schizophrenia -- The details

I posted a brief blog entry a week and a half ago saying that my brother had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and I promised to give details. I'm finally doing that... This is mostly taken from my mother's point of view from what she's told me since I don't see my brother often.

My brother is 24 (almost 25) years old, and for most of his life he's battled with depression. A few years ago, we started to suspect that he was suffering from bipolar disorder because he'd have ups and downs. He'd have a few down weeks, then an up week, then a few down weeks, another up week, and so forth.

I had some suspicions that something else was wrong because he said he heard voices sometimes. I thought maybe he had some of the same borderline personality disorder symptoms as me, but he never fit enough of BPD's criteria to be diagnosed as borderline.

Then came the week of his "episode." I'm going to give more details than he'd ever be comfortable knowing that I'm sharing, but I need to get it all out because I can't hold in my emotions/thoughts about it.

Apparently in the early early morning hours of Monday Oct. 10th, he went walking into my mom's bedroom telling her that he couldn't sleep because he had to pee but he couldn't pee. My mom thought he might have a urinary tract infection or something, but he was determined that part of his penis had "disappeared" thus making him not be able to pee. My mom says he was completely hysterical, freaking out. She convinced him to go to the emergency room. After a few hours in the E.R., the doctor said there was nothing wrong physically, so they went home. My brother spent the rest of the night pacing around the house and not sleeping.

Later in the morning, my mom told him that he should call his boss and tell him he was sick if he was going to stay home sick. My brother was pretty much in a catatonic state. She got him to say he'd call in sick. She went to work. When she got home from work, he didn't appear to have moved all day. She checked his cellphone and he had not called his boss.

That evening when my mom was cooking dinner, she heard a loud bang. She went running out of the kitchen and discovered that a big four-feet-wide mirror had fallen in the hall bathroom and it shattered into a million pieces. She couldn't tell what had caused it to fall. She doesn't know if he was in the bathroom or not. She doesn't know if it just fell or if he hit it. But suddenly my brother started yelling that there was something evil in the house and they had to get out of the house right away.

That night, once again my brother just paced around the house all night and didn't sleep. He had a terrified look on his face the entire time. Each time he'd start to walk into a new room, he'd look around the room before stepping in like he was looking for whatever "evil" thing he claimed was in the house.

Tuesday morning as my mom was about to leave for work, she once again told him to call his boss if he wasn't going to go to work, and once again he never called.

All this time, he was still claiming he could not pee. My mom decided to take him back to the emergency room in the middle of that night because she had no idea what to do. That night he saw a different doctor who for some reason decided to test him for strep throat, and it came out positive. My brother claims his throat never hurt. Once again, they could not find any physical reason my brother could not pee.

Wednesday morning around 4:30 a.m., my mom's dogs woke her up so she got up to take them outside. She thought my brother was asleep in his bedroom, but when she got outside my brother was wandering around in nothing but shorts (no shoes even). That's completely uncharacteristic for him. He never ever goes outside without shoes, and never just in shorts. He was mumbling and making no sense. She couldn't figure out how long he was outside or what he was doing or where he had went.

About 11 a.m. while my mom was at work, my brother called her and was once again hysterical demanding that she tell him what had happened. She couldn't figure out what he was talking about. It turns out that he then called my aunt and made the same types of demands, followed by his boss who was totally clueless about it all.

Wednesday evening my mom convinced my brother to call me, but once we were on the phone, he wouldn't say anything to me. I then called my mom's phone to ask her what was going on. She spilled all of this information all at once. She hadn't told me anything until that point.

As soon as she started talking about the whole not-peeing thing, I started thinking schizophrenia, but I didn't say anything yet. Each thing else she told me ... from the mirror falling due to something "evil" in the house to him mumbling and not making any sense to him roaming around outside in shorts ... just added to my feeling it was schizophrenia. She asked me for my advice, and I told her that I thought it was schizophrenia, but I could've been wrong because I'm not formally trained in psychiatry.

We started talking about trying to see about getting him admitted into a hospital, which we knew he wouldn't go into willingly. I called a 24-hour crisis phone line for the counseling center in their town, and I talked to a registered nurse. She said that we needed to get him a mental health evaluation, and if a doctor said he was a danger to himself or others, then we could get him admitted without him signing himself in.

The next morning my mom took him to the emergency room yet again and she told the doctor everything that had happened and said that the nurse told me to have him evaluated. They did a CT scan, blood tests, urine tests, and all sorts of questionnaires to rule out other things. After more than four hours, the doctor came in and said he had consulted with the town's new psychiatrist and they thought it was probably schizophrenia. The doctor prescribed him Thorazine hoping that it would "snap" him out of the episode quickly. After the second dose of the medicine, my mom said she started to see a change, so it did kick in very quickly. Two doses and he was actually making sense and wasn't acting so crazy.

My mom called my brother's boss that day and explained a little of what happened, and luckily his boss was very understanding and said he had been really worried, especially after my brother called and just kept saying things like "What happened? Tell me what happened." His boss said that no matter what, my brother would not lose his job.

The psychiatrist met with my brother and my mom that Friday afternoon. She was a military psychiatrist for many years and worked overseas treating soldiers in the field for post-traumatic stress and other things. My mom says she seems like a great doctor, and my brother really likes her so far.

Since then my brother has been able to work some and has seemed to get a little bit better each day. He can't remember anything from the time of that Sunday night to Friday morning. That's sad. It's like those days are just gone for him. I know what that's like. It sucks.

So that's where we are right now. I'm scared that he won't stick to his treatment plan because he hates medicine and therapy. I'm scared that people will treat him differently if he tells anyone that he's got schizophrenia. I'm scared for my mom having to deal with this when she has her own depression/borderline to deal with. I'm mostly just scared overall. My mom keeps wanting him to be his "old self" but I keep telling her that we need to just hope for little steps and take things one day at a time. We just have to be there to support him...