When did you watch someone’s sanity slowly deteriorate?
My younger brother died from a drug overdose last month.
He used for the first time in march.
In 7 short months I watched my best friend become someone I didn't recognize, someone I couldn't even hold a conversation with anymore.
It wasn't a slow deterioration, it was a meteoric descent into a drug fuelled madness.
He lied about anything and everything, even things that made zero sense to lie about, used nicknames from our childhood that we hadn't used in years, would forget what we were talking about mid-conversation.
It was like he was replaced with a near identical but slightly off version of my brother.
It was and still is heart breaking.
I mourn him but at the end I didn't
know him anymore.
Edit: so first and foremost I want to thank everyone for the kind words.
It means a lot.
This is the hardest time of my life and I know what loss is.
To answer some questions he was using fentanyl, not heroin or meth.
We did not understand the severity of it until it was too late.
In a lucid moment he told me he knew he was addicted by the 3rd time he used.
He came from a loving home but we lost our father in our teenage years and I believe he never dealt with it.
It hung over him.
Edit2: seriously i wasnt expecting this response.
I'm overwhelmed by the kindness.
To put peoples minds at ease I have a very strong support network around me and plenty of people to talk to.
I appreciate everything.
I will be ok. As with all things I just need time.
Thank you.
I worked in a care facility for people who suffer from dementia.
This was a very rewarding and enjoyable job but at times it could be confronting and sad, as you'd expect.
One story that stuck with me was this lady who'd write in her booklet and always left it open.
She didn't care to keep it a secret or anything but I would make sure to keep personal posessions private as much as I could while cleaning the rooms.
So I'd close the little book and put it in her desk where she could find it.
It's something I could relate to.
I have my own little books and enjoy writing as well and appreciate it when people respect my privacy.
I wouldn't read the contents but I saw the phrases go from sentences, to repeated words, to scribbles.
Eventually, she became too confused to put pen to paper.
Opening and closing the booklet, carefully touching the paper, but she couldn't quite figure it out anymore.
Eventually giving up.
This really hit home to me, as I knew how therapeutic it could be to organise your thoughts on paper.
I write when I'm sad or overwhelmed.
The thought of her being unable to when she might have needed the outlet still stings.
My sister passed away earlier this year and she was sick for a long time.
During the last few months you could tell that it was becoming harder for her to think and respond.
Paradoxically it actually made her a lot nicer to me.
We had never had a great relationship and I always believed she hated me but during those last few months she said very few unkind things to me.
It was hard to know that the only time we ever really got along was right before she passed away.
Watched my grandfather slowly sink into Alzheimer's.
By the end he didn't know my name or his own.
He was sad and angry and confused.
I watched every week as he forgot a little more.
Got a little more belligerent.
A little more lost.
Until one day I walked in and he started screaming that someone was there to rob him.
It was the saddest beep thing I've ever seen.
I have such vivid memories of watching him and my uncles have such animated debates about politics and movies and sports.
They used to play Risk until the sun came up listening to Sinatra.
He would sit and explain every single play in a baseball game to me as a kid.
He was sharp as beep and the saddest and hardest
part was watching the struggle on his face to remember.
The frustration he felt.
Like he was letting us down.
I miss him a lot.
I was living elsewhere at the time but I heard about what happened to my friend.
He was fairly normal.
A little exceptional actually as he was being scouted to get sponsored for skateboarding, something he was very good at.
He started acting really weird though.
Things like opening his door just a bit when people came over and laughing at them.
Throwing chairs and such around when at people's houses.
Lying about things that were really obvious.
Reading loudly from the bible while wearing almost nothing outside in the middle of winter.
Turns out he was schizophrenic.
Last time I saw him was after I moved back and was living in a bad neighbourhood.
He was homeless as was his Dad who was with him.
He didn't even recognize me, just acted really scared that I was trying to talk to him.
No one has seen or heard from him since then, I'm the last person to have seen him.
That was 10 years ago.
A long-time friend of mine started talking to me about some metaphysical theories he had.
We used to smoke weed and talk about philosophy when we were younger, so it wasn’t a shock to me.
Then he wrote a paper that was dozens of pages long on his new theory of reality.
He sent it to me and when I said it gave me a headache to try and read it, he assumed that meant I was understanding it.
Every time I saw him after that his behavior was more and more manic.
I don’t know if everyone gets these feelings, but one can tell when talking to some people that they’re just slightly... off?
Anyhow, he was apparently harassing some of his old flames and
acting strangely enough that his family had him taken to the hospital, where he had visited a few times in the past few weeks.
The hospital held him overnight and released him because he wasn’t a threat.
A few days later he started acting out in his mother’s house and broke a window.
She called the cops, and they arrested him.
The window was worth more than the amount required to make it a felony and he went to jail for six months.
Two days inside jail and he’s back to normal.
Why?!
Well, he has a degenerative disease that puts him in CONSTANT pain.
He couldn’t afford his pain meds and when he went to the hospital, they refused to
give him any because they assumed he was a junkie.
(He had prior drug issues, if you can imagine.)
He had lost his job, was living in a cold, damp apartment without electricity and couldn’t get the meds he needed; so he descended over the course of a month into someone that LITERALLY thought Neil Degrasse Tyson was talking to him personally through the internet.
Once he had his meds again (again, pain meds not anti-psychotics) he leveled out and spent 6 mos trying to piece together what the beep had happened to him.
Super nice guy.
He’s been fine for a couple years.
Had to make some very elaborate apologies.
It was... uncomfortable to watch.
I watched my ex wife slowly spiral down and I didn't even realize it.
She was never really "stable" and had a family history of mental illness.
Apparently she started cheating on me and never had the strength to tell me or get a divorce and the constant lying and being on edge that I would find out at any minute really got to her(this was over the course of a year).
Towards the end she would "rock" every time she sat and bit her nails till they bled.
Currently she is maxed out on a host of meds and it takes everything she has to got to work as a janitor and come home.
Her father is her "guardian" and helps her pay bills and stuff.
She often denies past events or alters them if they were
unpleasant(she is very adamant that they are real).
Her father broke down and told me this a month ago and actually recommend that I not encourage our kids to visit her(I would never prevent them from seeing their mother).
So in the course of a of 5 years she went from a fit dental hygienist with a promising career and host of friends to an overweight janitor with no friends who can't even pay her own rent or buy groceries.
I do admire her for going to work every day and trying.
My own.
A few years ago I started acting erratically.
Quit my good job out of nowhere, started drinking constantly, blacking out and doing strange and dangerous things.
The reason was I had begun hearing and seeing things that did not exist.
At first it was sounds like a crash from the other room, thinking my partner had said something he didn’t, thinking I’d heard the doorbell.
Then it changed to constantly hearing what was like a radio being played right behind my head, the stations constantly being switched- static, talk shows, music, strange foreign language conversations, commercials, sound effects that would come in louder than the others and make me jump out of
my skin.
Those were so loud it felt like my head was literally exploding.
I started drinking to kill the sounds but it only made things worse.
I began to see human figures everywhere always coming closer to me when I’d glance away then look back at them.
Sitting in my car, peeking out at me from behind trees, squatting beside my porch, peering in my windows.
Everywhere I’d look The People were there.
I began staying up for days on end to watch them.
I needed medical attention, but could not seek it because I quit my job, lost my insurance and cashflow.
I had always been able to rely on my mind.
If I could trust nothing else, my brain was the thing that would never lie to me.
I felt betrayed by my own body.
It was just the most terrible feeling.
The tipping point was when I started barricading myself in the bathroom with my handgun because I kept seeing The People on my security cameras trying to break in to the house.
They’d stopped simply hiding ominously and begun to attack my house violently and crawl in windows.
I’d just hide in my bathtub all day and keep my eyes glued to the security camera app on my phone, weeping, terrified, and slugging down liquor, with the
gun pointed at the door waiting for The People to bust in.
The auditory hallucinations were so loud at this point, I would just scream-cry and crank music to try and drown it out.
It got so bad one day, I held the barrel of the gun to my temple and just sat there for a very long time deciding what to do.
When I tried to pull the trigger, the gun was jammed.
That day, I relinquished my guns to my mother and sought psychiatric help.
I am now thoroughly medicated, in regular therapy, and could not be happier I did get help.
Any time I think back to that day, I get sick to my stomach knowing that I almost ended the life I love living so much.
The fall into insanity was terrifying.
My mom started going to online blogs and web-radio shows about ghosts, aliens, conspiracies and took it all at face value.
I saw my normal mom turn into a complete, gullible ignoramus in a matter of months.
Nobody could talk to her without her bringing up FEMA death camps, potential economic collapse, aliens, antivax or Obama signing more executive orders than any president in history.
Her friends thought she might have a brain tumor.
she didn't.
She did have cancer she was hiding/ignoring that ended up killing her bc she thought cancer wasn't real.
This is what happens to lonely people that are looking for a connection...they'll believe anything just to feel that they are a
part of something.
It was very sad that she was so unbearable the last couple years of her life.
My grandmother was brilliant and so dedicated to educating herself.
She had a library of probably a thousand books, but regularly circulated and bought new ones, and sold ones she didn't need any more.
She read the paper every day, and when a topic interested her, she would cut out the article and summarize what caught her attention.
Then she would file it in one of her enormous filing cabinets with other articles about it, and make notes of how the new article related to what was already there.
She lived in a college town for decades and was friends with
many of the professors.
They would often come to discuss things of interest to her or them.
Including music, art and history professors.
Every month she would create a mini-museum exhibition on her dining room table.
"Wood Carvings from around the world" or "Different things made from Lead" with little catalog cards for every item.
I have a 3 page discussion she researched and wrote about the proper times to used "baptised" and "baptized".
The first sign was that we were watching a documentary about
Apollo 13 and she didn't remember it happening.
She didn't know that it happened at all.
There is zero chance that she didn't follow it as it was happening in her life, (not only was she well informed, but had a collection of LIFE magazines about the space program) and zero chance that she didn't hear about it afterward.
She just didn't remember it at all.
A little later, she was trying to play with Lego Duplo blocks with my daughter and couldn't figure out how they worked.
She tried putting the same colors together, the same sizes, sliding the smooth sides against each other, putting the pegs against each other.
She was so methodical in her trial and error and just
couldn't get it.
In her later years, she just sat in bed, measuring her sheets with her arms, trying to decide if there was enough fabric to make a dress, or an apron.
At the end she remembered that reading was a good thing, even though she couldn't, and didn't have the attention to listen.
And she hated my dad, (her son-in-law) she never forgot that.
Forgot my mom, but not how much she hated my dad.
I was in high school and my best friend went from a normal guy who we would smoke weed occasionally, listen to music and have fun.
It went to this obsession with a girl that clearly has no interest in him.
He would literally stalk her, try to win her over.
At the same time, he wasn't keeping up with hygiene and went from a decent student to a poor performer.
One day, he mentioned that he wanted to commit suicide so I told my parents everything that was going on.
His parents were extremely well educated but weren't doing anything about his behaviors.
My parents talked to his and they took it serious after hearing about the thoughts of suicide.
He was diagnosed with
schizophrenia.
Nearly 40 years later, he still doesn't look the same.
Really sad situation.
I still miss him.
It was not really all that slow but I watched my mother slip from genius-level intelligence into a drooling braindead shell within 6 months when she died from CJD.
It was the worst thing I have ever seen, and I have seen the terrors and atrocities of war.
It's hard when the person you are watching deteriorate is yourself.
Source: i was psychotic depression and severe anxiety with panic attacks and OCD tendencies 2 years ago
My grandmother has dementia and I’m her caregiver.
So...the past few years.
Once you get to your 30's, you have more likely than not witnessed a friend or family member succumb to substance abuse.
It's sad to say the least.
May your day be filled with joy and happiness.
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