LOST SONS

2. THE LOST SONS

How and why does suicide occur? Does it come out of nowhere? Is it the result of bad brain chemistry? Is it the challenges of everyday life? For Andrew, I guess the trouble may be rooted in events much older than his first episode of schizophrenia.   As a little girl, people told me about sons who died young. My mother lost a brother in a car accident when he was four and she was eight.  My mother’s sister, Aunt Colene, told me of my great uncles, her mother’s bothers, who died young. My brother Mike, also tortured by painful daemons, died when he was 32 and I was 34. The cause of death was pneumonia, but he had been a serial drug and alcohol abuser for many years, starting in high school.

I wonder how many generations had lost sons. I read now that the DNA we are born with contains the impact of old traumas and transforms during life as we respond to our environment.  I wonder how all this works. My husband, John, experienced serious depression and delusions when he was younger. John’s father and my mother both suffered from clinical depression.  John’s grandfather was depressed. Therefore, we know there is a lot of mental illness in the family. In addition, there was a fair amount of alcoholism, which may have been self-treatment for depression or anxiety. 

            I asked John if the fact that we had a son who committed suicide surprised him. He said, “No, look at his gene pool.”  I guess my reaction was somewhat different. Different, in that, I see mental illness everywhere. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications are blockbuster drugs. Mental illness is also often masquerading as drug abuse, antisocial acting out, and poor performance in school or on the job. It just did not seem like our family was very unusual in terms of incidence of mental illness.  However, as far as I know this was our family’s first case actually labeled suicide and the first case diagnosed as schizophrenia in either John’s or my family.

More tommorrow