Alarming Realities of Mental Illness

Anyone who loves someone with a serious mental illness, as Dolli Albert does, lives with a certain amount of fear. It’s the fear of knowing that the loved one’s behavior depends on taking medication and knowing that if he doesn’t, you can’t be sure what he’ll do.

At the benign end of that unpredictability scale are odd behaviors. At the other end are things like what happened a week ago when a 30-year-old man brandishing a sword walked into an Albertsons in Irvine and killed two people and wounded three others before police shot him dead. Police later found bottles of pills at his home used to treat manic depression and schizophrenia.

With a crime that bizarre, Albert could have filled in the blanks without hearing the news: delusional assailant, probably not on his meds, not in treatment, hearing voices.

She knew because her 28-year-old son has battled mental illness for the last several years. And while he’s never exhibited lethal impulses, his erratic behavior over the years caused Albert many a sleepless night before he settled into a successful medication treatment.

“My son never heard voices, but he was out of touch with reality and he was delusional,” Albert says.

She remembers her son’s first episode in 1995, when he was a junior in college. A brother found him sitting on his bed, staring into the mirror and not moving. “He wasn’t scary,” Albert says of her son, “and I wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t have any consciousness of what was going on around him.”

He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and has spent parts of the last several years in occasional jousts with demons. Once, while driving with his mother, he looked into the mirror behind the visor and said they were being followed. On another occasion, he decided to saw off the door to his bedroom at 2 a.m. and put on a new one. On yet another frightening early morning occasion, Albert was standing outside her house and begging Irvine police not to shoot her son, who had shown up in her driveway with them in pursuit.

Albert can talk about these situations -- with her son’s permission -- because he has pulled things together by staying on his medication and because she decided to become an advocate for the mentally ill.

Then something like the Albertsons killings comes along, and advocates realize all over again how great the stakes are.

After expressing sympathy for the victims of the attack and its societal ripple effects, Albert says she laments Joseph Parker, the deranged killer. “He was tormented by demons in his head,” she says. “He had said he heard voices. The thing you have to know is that there is medicine out there. The prescriptions and the meds are so good now that they almost always work.”

But there’s the haunting fear that mentally ill adults won’t stay on the medications. Until they find one they like, it isn’t uncommon for them to quit taking them. Part of the problem is they don’t know they’re sick; part of the problem is they often don’t like the side effects that come with the drugs.

“They’re adults,” Albert says, “so they do what they want and nobody can really tell them what to do.”

That apparently is the chasm into which Parker fell, never to escape. And even though Albert never felt her son was a violent threat, it was impossible to know for sure. For months on end, he wouldn’t be in touch with her. Or, as he did during one extended absence, he’d call in the middle of the night and tell her to be wary of the colors green, red and black.

Albert never feared her son would kill anyone.

But to feel fear in ways that most of us would never think about? That’s a kind of fear that used to wake up with her every day.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.