[wdcbooks]

My twin brother is a schizophrenic. I seem to remember his IQ having been tested at 140 earlier in life, but he was a perfect student and graduated from one of the best universities in the country with highest honors. He was a perfectly normal teen and in college everything was fine until about his senior year, when he would go off on somewhat odd conversational tangents and was drinking heavily. From there it was a quick and rather shocking decline involving stints in jail and several psychiatric hospitals.

He has not been functioning in the sense of interacting with the world for quite a while now and suffers from terribly disordered thinking and auditory hallucinations. What may be the most devastating affect of his illness is the irreversible damage the psychoactive drugs have done to his intellect. If he were to recover entirely, I would guess his IQ would be no higher than 100 at this point. He sleeps about fifteen hours a day and has gained an alarming amount of weight and his personal hygiene has deteriorated.

Despite all this it is far far better than seeing him on the street or back in jail or the psych ward. The truth is that I am sympathetic with those who stress that the mentally ill are not dangerous, but unmedicated schizophrenics certainly can be, and often are. Should he not take medication his mind looks for an enemy, basically someone he can blame for his current condition. That makes it extremely difficult for family members.

If anyone has any questions about how schizophrenics fare in jail and in psych wards I am happy to answer them. The more people who understand what families need to deal with and what some of the warning signs are, the better. I kind of left out the middle of the story, but the decline itself was a real disaster.