I was always really good about keeping it together, keeping it hidden, every time she'd say' "Roger, I'm having a nervous breakdown!  It's time to lock me up again!".  And then she would cry frantically in that wailing voice, crying over and over, "I'm no good, Roger, I'm just no good!  I want to die, Roger!"   It was at those points, guilt would surface in me because then I'd want her locked up too, as her torment was ours as well.   I was just a kid.    I know it wasn't right, but it was another way of coping, dealing with that pain inside me. ---- from "A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLOSET: THE STRUGGLES OF MENTAL ILLNESS.  

Mental Illness is a disease of the mind, the brain and it robs its victims of their sanity.   This was so true in my mother's case.  How I wished and longed for just a normal mother/son conversation or even being able to discuss anything with her of any reason.  She was childlike in her manners, with a smile though, that made you laugh inside because you knew that her heart was pure, but it was the ridiculousness of the whole situation, yet you still tried to reach her.  You tried, with the hope and prayer, that someday, somehow, she would miraculously emerge from this hellish nightmare and become a normal person, a normal mother.    But, I always carried the guilt inside me that I selfishly wanted something for myself, that she just could not be, forgetting what it was like for her, to be this way.     It was never to be.    - from A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLOSET: THE STRUGGLES OF MENTAL ILLNESS