One Family's Burden

By Christine Gorman and Wendy Cole/Howard

Schizophrenia is the most personally destructive and least understood of all the major mental illnesses. Its principal hallmark is extremely disordered thinking--the kind that robs many of its victims of the ability to keep a job, maintain a relationship or even hold a coherent conversation. The first serious symptoms typically begin sometime after puberty, in the late teens or 20s. Some but not all schizophrenics suffer hallucinations. Some but not all schizophrenics hear voices. The cause is undeniably physical--perhaps the unhappy combination of a genetic predisposition and an infection suffered in the womb. In any event, it's clear that the results can be heartbreaking.

In this way, schizophrenia affects far more than one person at a time. For a look at its extended impact, TIME visited one family to see how schizophrenia touched its members across four generations and how the family coped with the disease. In some ways, their story is uncommon--most schizophrenics don't have a family history of the disorder. In other ways, particularly in their struggle to deal with the stigma and isolation of a mental illness, the Beales of Howard, Ohio, are all too typical.

Ed Beale, 65, never knew his mother, Emma, a vivacious former schoolteacher with a knack for picking up foreign languages. When she was 30 and Ed was just 7 months old, she was committed to a psychiatric institution with what the family later recognized as schizophrenia. When Ed was 3, his dad told him that his mother had died soon after giving birth to him. Although she actually lived until 1973--when Ed was 36--he never met her, heard her voice or kissed her cheek.

Lying seemed easier than telling the truth. "His father wanted it to be a secret," says Ed's aunt Virginia Conrad, who eventually told Ed practically everything he knows about his mother. "There was a lot of embarrassment about it." For a while, Ed blamed himself for his mother's condition--he wondered if his birth had made her snap--but mostly he tried to banish her from his mind and go on with his life. He joined the Air Force and married his wife Velma. They had three children.

But the specter of schizophrenia returned with their third child, Peter. A happy, precocious youngster who learned to read in kindergarten, Peter focused less and less on school as he got older. It wasn't until after he joined the Air Force in 1985, however, that his life truly began to deteriorate. Peter remembers sitting next to another student in a training class and telling him about what seemed to him to be a wondrous, novel idea. "But then he just looked at me funny," Peter recalls. "He says to me, 'You aren't saying anything. You're just making noises.'"

Peter started having delusions that interfered with his military duties. "I often thought I was being followed or that people were hiding in the trees waiting to come after me." Eventually, he says, his thoughts were disjointed most of the time. "I couldn't focus on anything." Finally, the Air Force court-martialed him for dereliction of duty, and he was given a less than honorable discharge. Still, neither he nor his parents were ready to accept the idea that he had a mental illness--although by then his grandmother's history was no longer a secret. "Maybe we were trying so hard to forget," says Velma.

The next few years were a crazy quilt of college classes and part-time jobs from which Peter was invariably fired for erratic performance. He moved constantly, and his parents paid his overdue rent more than once to spare him from being evicted. Finally, during Christmas break in 1990, Peter's brother, James, confronted his parents and strongly suggested that Peter get a psychiatric evaluation. They were, James recalls, initially indignant--no doubt remembering the horrific treatment Emma Beale had suffered. But a few months later, the Beales brought Peter to a local hospital, where he signed himself into the psychiatric ward for observation. He stayed 10 days and started taking antipsychotic medications. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia with depression.

Although Peter was finally getting treatment, the future seemed scarier than ever. Velma recalls one particularly poignant and lucid conversation at the hospital, in which her son wondered, "Is this it? Does this mean my life's over and I'll never do anything again?" Because Peter was an adult--and hadn't signed away his right to privacy--the hospital staff didn't tell his parents much about his condition. They had little idea what they were dealing with or what was to come.

After his release, Peter moved back home with his parents, whose vision of a blissful retirement quickly evaporated. They focused all their energy on their son, who enrolled in a day treatment center that provided him with a social outlet as well as some coping skills. Ed worked to reverse the terms of his son's discharge so that he would be eligible for veterans' health benefits and monthly disability payments. (They finally came through in 2000.)

After a while, things started looking up. Ed and Velma began to see that Peter's prospects were not as bleak as they had feared. They learned to recognize the cyclical nature of schizophrenia; they noticed that Peter would have good days and bad days, and that his ups and downs were not necessarily related to how much medication he was taking. They became involved with mental-health groups, particularly the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Today Ed and Velma lead courses teaching other families how to cope when a loved one is found to have a mental illness.

Peter went on to earn a two-year degree in computer programming. He made friends, started dating, and in May 2000 his son, Dana, was born. It quickly became clear that neither Peter nor Dana's mother was able to take care of a child, and Velma and Ed once again stepped in and agreed to raise the boy. "One never knows when the next blessing will appear, does one?" Ed wrote in a Christmas letter that year to family and friends.

As for the future, the Beales are cautiously optimistic. Dana is thriving, and though he is at greater risk of developing schizophrenia at some point than a child without an afflicted parent, there is a better than 80% chance that he will not. The Beales have also learned to cast aside the feelings of shame and stigma that are still too often attached to schizophrenia. "My mother had cancer," Velma says. "I'm not ashamed to talk about that. Why should I be afraid to tell people about mental illness?" Peter's brother and sister also talk openly about his condition with their friends and co-workers.

For his part, Peter says he has come to terms with the fact that schizophrenia will always be a part of his life. He knows that others can easily take advantage of him and has learned to ask family members for a "reality check" every now and then when he's not sure what an appropriate response might be. "I used to think my goal was to become like I was before the illness," he says. "Then I realized that I was older, that I had experienced and learned a lot, even from my illness, and my goal became to discover who I am now and make the best future for myself that I can."

Right now, that means Peter helps his folks with chores around the house and reads bedtime stories to his son. Whatever happens, at least he knows he won't share his grandmother's fate, having his very existence denied by those who mean the most to him.