Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I have not been to my house to see my mom. Or the store for more lemonade. I haven’t picked up the rent from one of my tenants. They even called to see if I was okay. Yes, I said…just catching up with things and getting adjusted to a new schedule and feeling rather unmotivated for anything. I didn’t say that last part.

But I have rather enjoyed doing nothing after work the last two mornings. I mixed a cocktail and watched comedy bits online. My IOP is over and I’m still lingering in my newly minted IOP graduate status. Not everyone makes it through. Some of us don’t survive at all.

My brother’s alcoholism is out of control. I’ve been telling him how much he sucks at drinking. All that Irish blood and he just gets belligerent and sometimes violent when he drinks. But while on probation, he can’t smoke weed. He wouldn’t drink if he could have weed. So he’s been hiding it from his probation officer and the department of corrections and mental health court that he’s been drinking. He insists he can’t be totally sober. He can’t do it.

I can’t really be overly critical. I’m not totally sober. I wouldn’t want to be and when I had to be for the DUI I got in 2018 I ended up needing inpatient psych to stabilize.

He was in jail, then rehab, while I was in the mental hospital last summer. Last summer was one of the worst summers ever. He’s now telling me he wants to nip the alcohol in the bud but afraid of life threatening withdrawal. I didn’t think his drinking was that bad but apparently it is. He’s got a stash of clean piss for his UAs, even. Hand warmers to rapidly bring them to body temp after they’re pulled from the fridge. Unbelievable. Funny though.

He wants me to help him do an at home detox. He told his roommates about it. He wants to load up on the necessary ativan and ideally sleep through it. I don’t know much about detox. They took my vitals every four hours in INBH when I was first locked up in there because I was initially brought to the ER pretty drunk. Unlike my brother, I take after my father and can actually handle a large amount of alcohol without destroying stuff. But the whole thing seems risky. Maybe there’s a wiki-how about this. Of course I’d be the one monitoring the ativan. But there’s no plan B if shit goes south. I don’t even have a thermometer, let alone a blood pressure cuff.

But if he’ll quit fucking drinking I’ll do it. My mother and I are in full agreement on this one thing at least – he sucks at drinking and he’s gonna go back to jail eventually. His PO is kind of a hard ass. My brother is convinced he wants to see him fail. I am not convinced of that, but it is true his PO is a real young kid who has never had to struggle a day in his life and that is frustrating.

He has made many poor choices, but some of it really is the universe just being a dick. The drug and alcohol abuse led to the assault charge that sent him to mental health court. He got kicked out of his sober living house for a bottle of Nyquil. Ended up at a crack house and lost most of what he owned while in jail. Finally got a job, a room, things were looking better which is less stress for the whole family…only to lose the job and break his foot. I don’t know what he did to lose the job and he hasn’t been forthcoming about what happened. Same with the broken foot. But I am dealing with the ramifications. If he doesn’t get back on his feet, literally, with a new job quickly, then I just don’t know what he’s going to do. And my house is out of the question. I can deal with mom, he can’t. That’s a horrible toxic situation and there isn’t any room for him besides.

My family is so fucked up but my father is dead and they’re kind of all I have. I wish Sam would move back to Washington, he’s an hour and a half away in Idaho. That’s my first younger brother, George is the baby, and Shane is my older brother. I wish we were a stronger family, less traumatized and better at communicating. I wish a lot of things.