The Call That Everyone Dreads
On August 31, 2012 my family received the call that everyone dreads. My brother Patrick had taken his own life. We had known it was a possibility, but it still came as a shock – he seemed so full of hope and so determined to fight his illness, right up until the end. However, we didn’t know that the conversation my dad and brother had with him on August 31 would be the last time we heard from him. When Patrick was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2004, we dedicated ourselves, as a family, to getting the help he needed to live a normal life. But all of those years, watching him suffer from mental illness – it rocked my foundation. The solid family unit that I thought would always be there, was suddenly gone. In hindsight, I know that this experience has made me more compassionate and resilient, but I wish it hadn’t come at the cost of my brother’s life.
“We didn’t know that the conversation we had with him on August 31 would be our last.”
Patrick had such a bright future – he was smart, athletic, creative and popular, beloved by our family, the community, his friends. My brother Ryan and I looked up to Patrick our whole lives. I wanted to be just like him, and considered him my closest friend. When he entered college at Texas Tech, he was excited to be there, calling us to talk about his classes, the football games he was attending, the cute girls on campus. But about midway through college, when he was 20, he called my dad on Father’s Day and asked him how long my dad had been in the mafia and why he had put a chip in Patrick’s head. At first, we thought he was joking, but after a while, it was clear that something was wrong. When my dad drove to see him at school, he was shocked by what he saw. Patrick’s apartment was a disaster, with food wrappers everywhere and Patrick lying in the middle of the floor, accusing my father of having a camera installed in the TV. We realized Patrick was having a psychotic episode.
After we took him home, we brought him to the East Texas Medical Center’s Behavioral Health Center. We battled to get the correct diagnosis, find the right treatment and then get Patrick to stick to his treatment plan and take his medication. After he first threated suicide, he spent time at Rusk State Hospital, but then we drove all over the country to get him the best treatment possible – we traveled as far as Maryland, North Carolina and Ohio. For about three years, Patrick took his medication regularly and was stable. Even though he suffered terrible side effects from the medication, he knew it was his best chance at living a normal, healthy life. We call those his “golden years.” But then he stopped, and we saw it in his eyes.
Getting a diagnosis wasn’t our biggest problem – it was finding and sustaining treatment for Patrick. In Texas, there are only 8.5 beds per 100,000 people, making his chances of getting a public inpatient bed extremely low. We didn’t have many other options, and those we did have were expensive. Texas is the only large state that doesn’t have an organized infrastructure for coordinating resources to manage behavioral health services. So when Patrick was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2004, we had no idea what the treatment options were in East Texas, and our community in Tyler, through no fault of its own, had no idea how to support us. Because of Patrick, my family is advocating to change this. Since 2014, we’ve been hosting the Peace of Mind Tyler Conference to talk about mental health in our community, but more needs to be done, not only in Texas, but at the national level. Our experience proves that treatment – and access to those desperately needed inpatient beds – is vital not only to living a normal, healthy life, but to staying alive.