Schizophrenia: Mental Illness from a Mom's Perspective

There is no way to ever prepare for the entrance of Schizophrenia, or any form of mental illness, into your life. As a parent, when the target of its arrival is your child - your life, as you know it and will ever remember it, is changed instantly and forever. The darkness preceding its arrival creeps up so slowly that you barely notice. Or perhaps you do sense a presence but denial kicks in so you continue on. Either way, it comes. And when it does, it makes a grand entrance indeed - loud, ugly, horrifying, and surrounded in a cloud of unbearable sadness. You feel confused, angry, violated, and guilty - as if this day had been marked on your life calendar and somehow, someway, in some fleeting irresponsible moment you simply missed your appointment. If you had only seen it coming. Could you have steered it off course? Could you have changed history? I mean, what if you had known? The sad truth is that yes, you probably could have done something because yes, you did see it coming. Everyone did. Mental Illness, however, enjoys lurking in the bushes for as long as it can - not unlike a mountain lion stalking its prey. So, to relieve the guilt, one must remember that even if this predator had flashed itself here and there, the chances of you recognizing its face - so out of place in your comfortable life - would have been very slim. Nonetheless, with that appointment being missed, the punishment of everyone's grave error becomes the horrible suffering of your child at the hands of an insidious disease called Schizophrenia.