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The story Fred tells me about his forty-year-old son living with schizophrenia is a story of hospitalizations, drugs, encounters with law enforcement, and steadfast parents. It reveals the disruption and heartbreak mental illness creates for the whole family of the person who lives with it.
Tell me about Jamie.
I wasn’t married to Jamie’s mother, and wasn’t living with her at the time Jamie was born. For one reason and another, I wasn’t part of Jamie’s life from the time he was two till he was four. After that we had a relationship. Both his grandmothers were part of his life. He doesn’t have brothers or sisters.
Jamie was around 16 when he started getting in trouble. He was into nitrous oxide. He stole it, he used it, he sold it. He dropped out of high school in his junior year. He had inherited $5000, which he used to go off with two friends. He was staying with his uncle, but he didn’t follow the rules his uncle laid down, so he had to leave. I drove after him and brought him home. He went back to his studies and managed to get his high school equivalency diploma right at the time he would have graduated if he had stayed in school. Then he applied to join the Coast Guard. It’s hard to get into, but he did, and went down to Cape May for basic training. They sent him home after six days because of his history of using nitrous oxide.
When did you realize that Jamie had some kind of mental illness?
Around then I began to see that something was wrong. He did very crazy things. He stole a car from the sheriff’s parking lot, broke into a dentist’s office and took off with a lot of nitrous and a chain saw. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew his mind wasn’t ok.
Sometimes he lived with me. He worked in a supermarket for a while. Later he headed out of state again. He ended up in a shelter, so I sent him a ticket home. He looked bad when he got here.
For a short time, just a month, he was married to a young Canadian woman. She did drugs too. Later he stalked a young woman in a town near us. He phoned her a lot, he sent her a sixty-page letter. He dug up a big plant from the front of a business and put it on her car. He broke into her house. So he was in trouble with the law again.
Another time, he was driving on I 95 to a concert and his car broke down. He pulled over and the state trooper stopped to see what was wrong and found him stoned with sixteen tanks of nitrous oxide in his car. The first thing Jamie said was, “I ordered a mushroom growing kit, but it didn’t come yet.” Just that told him that Jamie wasn’t in his right mind. The trooper called me and said, “Your son needs help more than he needs jail.” There were other incidents like that. Several.
When was he first hospitalized?
In his early twenties. He was arrested in Massachusetts, taken from jail to a mental hospital, then sent back here, where the police chief and the judges know he has a mental illness. I don’t know how many times we’ve been in court for him. The district attorney even complimented me and his mother on the support we give Jamie. I’ve stood up for him; we’ve hired lawyers, met with the forensic psychiatrist. They recognize that he needs to be in a mental hospital and he does his time there.
It sounds like the police and the courts are pretty humane. I think that’s one of the advantages of living in a small town.
He’s been treated fairly, except maybe when he was out of state. He doesn’t act out, he doesn’t get in fights, he sits there staring.
That must be hard.
It’s a treadmill. He’s been in the hospital this time for a year. At his last evaluation they said he wasn’t ready to leave. Once the doctors think he’s ok, he’ll be taken to court for the judge to agree he can be released. I hope they don’t let him out without a plan this time. He’s been talking about a new medication he’s on. If only he stays on it after he’s released. He needs supervision for that to happen. Actually the chief of police gets it that Jamie needs supervision. His mother hopes he’ll go to a group home near us. He likes to hang around his own turf.
What is he like? What are his interests?
He knows a lot about nutrition—so much that he could be a nutritionist if he didn’t have to deal with schizophrenia. One of the doctors at one of the hospital where he was liked to chat with him. It wasn’t therapy, he wasn’t a psychiatrist, he just liked to talk with Jamie.
He’s adaptable, and he’s a con artist. He has a delusion that he’s rich. From the mental hospital he’ll call real estate agents about $20 million houses. Once he ordered an expensive car and had it delivered to the institution where he was staying.
That’s funny.
I guess it has its humorous side.
What’s all this like for you?
He hasn’t spoken to me since January 2009. Sometimes I cry when I think of him. But he talks to his mother now. There were years when he wouldn’t. I’m friends with a man about his age, a guy who thinks of me as his father. Maybe that’s part of how I deal with it, maybe it’s comforting, I don’t know.
I’ve done my best to help him. I’ve become closer to his mother because of needing to help him out.
Is there anything you want people to know about mental illness? It’s hard when people tell me he’s going to be all right. They don’t understand there’s no cure for mental illness.
