WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- She disappeared this time last year without a word. Packing a suitcase, she left behind a closet of clothes, all her papers, furniture, plants, pots and pans -- a household. The year before she did exactly the same when she lived farther south.
Yes, I understand some of what the Russell and Andrea Yates family has been through.
My sister suffers from psychosis. In her delusional state, I believe she is not dangerous to others, though I worry about how she might hurt herself. She can often function for months at a time without medication. She seems strange to others, but she is extremely intelligent and can hold a job and take care of herself.
My family suffers also. The problem is that most of the time, she refuses to see a doctor or take medication. And for privacy reasons, no psychiatrist has ever confirmed to us that she has schizophrenia.
Last year, after we desperately searched for her more than a month, she finally called my brother. She wanted money. He told her to call me.
The call came while I was working. She said she was on a cell phone in a Burger King, and had no more money. I asked her how she had ended up in Massachusetts when she left Northern Virginia. Her answer: "I traveled until the end of the train line." I told her I would send her a plane ticket so that she could come back to Virginia and we would go to a doctor together. She still had an apartment here.
"You're no help," she yelled, and hung up.
The police found her walking on the interstate on her way to Rhode Island. They called my brother.
"She needs to be institutionalized," he said. And so she was -- in Massachusetts.
The next time I spoke with her, she called from the hospital. Her psychiatrist also spoke with me.
She told me that she didn't need medication, but still had agreed to it. Later, her psychiatrist said that she had told him the exact opposite.
She was telling him what he wanted to hear. She's smart; she wanted out and on her conditions.
I asked her what she wanted us to do with her apartment (which we, her family, had set up for her, buying or giving her almost everything she needed).
"Take what you want, I don't want anything," was the response.
We packed up her apartment and summer clothes, and put them in storage.
The next time she called, the psychiatrist got on the line. She wants to live with you, he said. I can't keep her any longer.
I explained to him that I knew she would not take medication, and this was not the solution. I could not force her to.
Then a spasm of family guilt followed. My brother was staying with a friend. That was out. My husband flatly refused to consider the idea because my sister is a fundamentalist Christian and adamantly disapproves of our lifestyle.
My other sister in Massachusetts had a 2-year-old son and worried about how a psychotic long-term houseguest would affect him.
In the end, another sister, a Lesbian who has extended more help to her than anyone else in the family, but whom she really disapproved of, offered temporary shelter. No. That was not to happen.
We tried to coordinate some sort of halfway house with social workers at the hospital. We received almost no help. She was deemed not a danger to herself or others. The doctor was being pressured to release her -- government funding for these hospitals has been drying up. And none of us was in a financial position to pay for a private hospital -- even assuming that she would agree to such an idea.
Facing the same problem that thousands of other family's confront, we were sickened when she was discharged to a shelter. But the shelter had a psychiatrist, who would insist on monitoring her as a condition for her stay, and would exert more authority than her family could.
My Lesbian sister and her partner drove up to New England and brought her the professional clothes she had left behind.
She now has her own room at the shelter and a job. She's back where she was born -- that's now home to her. Where she will go next is anybody's guess.
But what I do know is that the services for the mentally ill in this country are woefully inadequate. The situation is terrible for those who suffer from illness and their families who struggle with few resources. My sister was lucky she ended up in Massachusetts, not a more conservative state with less funding for the mentally ill.
I don't approve of Russell Yates, but I understood when he told CNN's Larry King Monday night: "I called my mom and said, 'mom I think Andrea needs to be in the hospital.' Then we said, we, we couldn't do it because we'd just seen the doctor and it's the doctor who decides whether she's -- she needs to go to the hospital. He is the one that signs the admission form. And if he didn't think she needs to go to the hospital, then we're just going to have to make do at home."
Later he said: "I will tell you, both times she was released from the hospital she was the sickest patient in the hospital both times. I was shocked both times they let her go. But again, what do you do? I'm like, well, they let her go. I guess we'll have to make do."
Yes, what do you do?
