I am not glad for your situation, but I am glad to know that there is somebody else out there. My brother was diagnosed with "schizo-effective disorder." He, too, has been this way since his teens. We siblings have to step in when our parents get old and no longer can take care of themselves or our siblings. At one point, I was taking care of all three in separate locations. When my mother was well, in her fifties, still driving and practicing her favorite pass-time of shopping, I offered to take her to the local mental health center, approximately one mile from the house, come and bring security, and lawyers, and she refused the whole lot and basically would not allow me in the house.
When she became very ill, she had herself admitted to a nursing home and called me to take care of her, my father, who had dementia, I he and my brother, I went to an attorney who specialized in mental health law, and he told me that the N.J. law required him to be shown to be a "danger to self or others." He had to be arrested. before he could be forced into treatment. I told my mother in her hospital bed, and she asked me whether she could have him arrested. I told her too late, she wasn't even in the same building as he was. On what charge? A few days after she died, he got in my father's face, and bingo! I got the guns out of the house, hid them in the hedges, and drove my frail father down to the village police station. All this was due to my brother, teen member of the John Birch Society, who beat me up and destroyed my most precious possessions, a mobile handmade by my high-school boyfriend, and the posters and other stuff that I had hand-carried back from London, because they were "hippee." When I was a teenager, I heard a lot from him about "the Jews" and "Martin Luther Coon." Thank God that he never got his hands on my beautiful Gibson guitar. I told him a few years ago that I will happily put a bullet into the brain of the moron who introduced him to the right-wingers, and he said that this is why he will never tell me who it was. To this day I hate the right wing, who stole my life and my family.
