I watched someone deteriorate from mental illness up close and personal one time. Our neighbors in Lake Elsinore, Barb and Randy, were a young couple in their 30s trying to have their first child. Barb had a number of miscarriages and understandably, they threw her into debilitating depressions, but she'd snap out of it eventually and try again. Finally, they became pregnant with Amanda and bedrest was ordered throughout most of the pregnancy to prevent another miscarriage. Barb successfully brought Amanda to full term and they were supremely happy for a brief period after their baby girl was born.
However, it wasn't long before my next door neighbor Lynn and I began noticing some disturbing changes in Barb. She would hole up in her house for days at a time, leaving the shades drawn and not even coming to the door when the mailman rang the doorbell. Randy would come home from work and would hang outside for awhile talking to us but Barb rarely joined him. He confided to Lynn and I that he thought Barb was going through severe postpartum depression. He said that he'd often enter the house after work and Amanda would be crying in her crib in a wet diaper while Barb was lying in bed. Every once in awhile, though, Barb would surprise us and emerge from the house bright and happy with Amanda in her arms, chattering non-stop. I remember having a garage sale and Barb came over, bought a lot of my stuff and stayed for a couple of hours, talking incessantly. We all began seriously wondering if she was becoming manic-depressive.
One scary night things went haywire at their house across the street. Barb was screaming and literally chasing Randy down the sidewalk with a rake. There was a huge commotion and nobody could seem to get her calmed down, including her mother Sharon who was visiting. The police were called, and Barb claimed that Randy had shoved her down and hurt her. Somehow, she got her mother to confirm her false claim (I think Sharon was afraid of Barb at that point). Randy was handcuffed and taken to jail. After he was released and came back home the next day, things quickly began falling apart. Barb would disappear for days at a time, leaving Sharon to take care of Amanda while Randy was working. Nobody knew where she was or what she was doing while she was gone. When she'd show up back at home, Sharon begged her to go to a doctor and get diagnosed, and perhaps get some medication to help her. She refused.
One day she came careening up the street in her car, brakes squealing as she screeched to a halt in their driveway. Wild-eyed, she told us that one of Randy's friends had been tailing her and had tried to kill her. Another night she went over to Lynn's house and asked Lynn's husband Clark to check out the phones in their house. She was just sure that Randy was bugging their phones.
Barb began occasionally showing up at the house during the day while Randy was gone with a boyfriend in tow. One night I happened to be outside when she and the boyfriend snuck up to the house, opened the garage door with a crow bar, and began hot-wiring Randy's car. Randy heard noises in the garage, opened the door and began yelling, and they ran away. Later when court proceedings began for Randy to get full custody of Amanda, a lawyer came to my house to get a statement from me about what I had witnessed that night.
One day I saw Barb pull up in front of the house in their RV, which Randy had already agreed she could take. She entered the house and began to frantically ransack it, loading whatever possessions she could carry into the RV. All sort of things were coming out of that house, including Amanda's toys and even the curtains from Amanda's bedroom. Half empty paint cans were carted out of the garage into the RV. There was no "rhyme or reason" to the things she was taking. I didn't want Randy to come home with Amanda that night not knowing what had happened and facing a half-empty house. I didn't have Randy's phone number at work, so I called another neighbor who knew how to reach him. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to get in touch with Randy until after Barb had finished what she was doing and had driven away.
She later parked the RV on the street in front of the house for several days. She didn't do any damage or threaten anyone, but we were all sure worried! We could hear her inside, bizarrely strumming a guitar and singing. It was during this time that she stabbed herself in the forearm with a pair of scissors and claimed that Randy had done it. This time the police didn't believe her. She was descending into pure madness at a fast pace, and it seemed that nobody could do anything about it.
A few weeks later, on New Year's Eve night when Randy and Amanda were gone, Barb and her new boyfriend drove by the house and threw rocks through all the front windows of the home, hollering as they did it. Later, I heard that she pulled up in front of the office building where Randy worked and threw a brick through the plate glass window of the building.
Randy eventually gained full custody of Amanda and the judge ruled that Barb could only see her daughter if the visits were supervised and she passed drug tests beforehand. Most of the time, she refused to comply with these conditions, so she rarely saw her baby. Eventually, Barb simply faded away and disappeared. Her mother stayed close to Amanda, often babysitting for Randy. Neither of them knew what happened to Barb or where she was living, and Amanda, who is now in her early 20s, grew up never seeing her mother again. The last I heard, none of them knew if Barb was dead or alive.
I think that's really my only contact with mental illness, and quite a scary and sad story it is.
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