One Family’s Despair Recalls Another’s Nightmare

I sympathize with the plight of the family of the U.S. Capitol police murder suspect, Russell Eugene Weston Jr. Their story sounds hauntingly familiar. For years, my family has struggled with what to do about my brother who is mentally ill.

He refuses to be seen by a doctor; even a visit to the dentist fuels his paranoid delusions. Unlike “Rusty” Weston, my brother does not receive disability payments for his health condition; depending on his state of mind, he says he doesn’t want a government “handout” or he doesn’t believe he is sick or disabled. When he is well enough, he survives by doing odd gardening and construction jobs for family and friends. Unfortunately, my brother’s problems are complicated by alcohol abuse.

The first signs of my brother’s mental illness came soon after he graduated from college in the early 1970s, but his increasingly bizarre behavior was overlooked because of my parents’ divorce and geographically scattered siblings. He became worse after traveling on a night train in India, where he was robbed of his journals and passport. Once back in the States, he became increasingly paranoid about his possessions, sometimes carting them around with him. Over the next several years, his letters became rambling and confused. The external world seemed to close in. When a homeless man was murdered in a city park, he became convinced he was next.

Extremely bright, well-read, funny and literary in his youth, my brother held down a series of jobs in his 20s and 30s as a firefighter, manager of a seafood company, beekeeper, landscaper, baker and store clerk. As apparently happened with Rusty Weston, my brother’s jobs invariably ended abruptly when he had a fight with a supervisor that often included some perceived slight or threat against himself.

When my brother was about 30, my mother offered him a place to stay, imposing a kind of external routine that stabilized him somewhat for the next 15 years. Weston’s grandmother seems to have played this role as well.

However, when my mother was hospitalized with severe emphysema a few years ago, my brother’s situation deteriorated rapidly. In the month or two that she was in a rehabilitation facility, he trashed the house they shared, became increasingly distraught and then violent. He would show up at the hospital drunk or incredibly agitated. He frightened the nurses and made it impossible to hire anyone to help my mother continue her recovery at home.

After weeks of cross-country travel, attempted interventions with counselors and other failed strategies, I got a restraining order against my brother. Enlisting the help of state social services workers and a mental health counselor, I finally got my mother to evict her son so she could go home with a caretaker. It was a devil’s bargain: a brother made homeless so a mother could have some semblance of peace in the time left to her.

In the state where my brother lives--as in many other states--it is extremely difficult and costly to get an adult hospitalized against his or her will. The courts bend over backward to uphold the rights of the individual. This is all well and good. But in the reality that is mental illness, it is rarely helpful. In the 18 months since his eviction from my mother’s house, my brother has acquired a rap sheet a mile long, mostly for being drunk or disorderly in public or for violating the restraining order. While he was in jail, we asked various counselors to visit him. He refused to see any of them. Instead, he uses the phone in his jail cell to harass family members with dozens of delusional or abusive collect calls each day, until some of us finally have blocked our phones.

In one instance, my brother was kept in jail for less than 48 hours, even though the judge knew he had nowhere to go, and would not seek help at a residential shelter or an outpatient care facility. One jail doctor told me the facility could not hold him any longer because he was not gravely disabled; it seems that in interviews he persuaded doctors he was not an imminent threat to himself or others, even though at various times he had slashed my mother’s screen door, cut her phone lines and been verbally or physically threatening to anyone who got near him.

Another time, he was kept for a week or more for observation in a psychiatric lock-up. But the end result was the same: He was released to return and plague the family and community that could no longer help him.

I have talked to prosecutors numerous times about getting my brother help, telling them my husband and I would lend our financial support to any such effort. I have written judges begging them to order my brother to remain incarcerated unless, as a condition of his release, he submits to a psychiatric evaluation, agrees to take medication or enters a counseling center. No such order has been forthcoming. The judge typically says something like, “The state is not prepared to pay for treatment for someone who does not admit to being ill.” (This philosophy seems similar to the state of Montana’s, where authorities told Weston to go home to his family.)

It is hard to know what is more sick: the delusional paranoia, denial and shame that keeps my brother from accepting help, or our inadequate system for dealing with the mentally ill.

I am quite sure that with proper medication, diet and a structured, physically active daily routine, my brother and countless others like him could regain some measure of peace, productivity and self-respect.

But unless we as a society resolve our contradictory attitudes toward mental illness and offer needy families more help, it is only a matter of time before another unhinged individual staggers through a security checkpoint and brings down innocents in a rage of bullets.

Joan Mitric is a writer based in Washington who specializes in health issues.