Hi everybody

We are doing something a little different today.  One of our members, Donna-1, has written to me to ask that I attempt to answer some questions she has about mental illness and relationships based upon my personal life experiences.  I will do my best to try to answer.  Donna was comfortable with posting this publicly so that we can get some community discussion going on this topic.

Donna-1 asks:

"Did your mother have much depression along with her schizophrenia? How do these illnesses affect her ability to relate to you? Is she often "in her own world?" What has she done that hurt you most? I am convinced that depression and sz are making all of my relationships more difficult...but no one I relate to understands this. It is so tempting to withdraw, even from the people I love. Moving is challenging in part because I thrive on consistency...everything being much the same from day to day. I am thrown into mental disarray, anxiety, insomnia. Last night I never slept a wink -- was up all night. Is this a harbinger of things to come?"

A little background:

My mother, who is now in her seventies, has had paranoid schizophrenia for decades.  I wrote about my experience as a daughter of a mom who has this mental illness on our schizophrenia site some years ago.

Donna asks if my mother had/has depression in addition to her schizophrenia.  Although I don't know of any formal diagnosis I would say a definite yes.  One of the problems, as I see it, when you have a major diagnosis of something like schizophrenia or autism is that mood disorders take a back seat.  The original diagnosis seems to color everything that person does so something like depression tends to get ignored.

I definitely saw depresssion symptoms in my mother that may have been both biological and situational.  She had an extremely difficult life.   She suffered from domestic abuse from her first husband.  She had little to no family support.  My father died when I was four and so she had to raise me on her own in poverty.  Her stressors were enormous.  And then you add schizophrenia.  Yes...she was definitely depressed at times, so much so that she didn't want to get out of bed.  But on other days she was very happy, dancing to music, laughing and singing. 

How did my mother's mental illness affect her ability to relate to me?

I would say it affected every aspect of connecting with me and anyone else she came into contact with.  When she was stable she was a great mother, baking cookies, going to school, working, was sociable and happy.  But unfortunately there would always be the great crash when she would become more fearful, paranoid, and even violent.  I always had to be on guard for which mother I was dealing with on any given day...one who was stable and one who was not.

Was my mother in her own world?

Yes, when my mother's mental illness became severe she would barely recognize my existence.  She would talk to herself, chain smoke, and lose her connection to me and others.  It was as though she lost awareness of the real world and turned inward.