I Am Writing A Novel With An Important Character Who Has Suffered A Spinal Cord Injury, novelist looking to interview people re SCI experiences Options

[DaveP]

Homdel,

Funny story saying you cannot really say how your brother will react to your story: I have a brother who is an alcoholic schizophrenic. Oh yeah, plenty paranoid. I once told my Dad that my brother came into the family to make the rest of us look good, and much to my fearful surprise my Dad told this to my brother. i thought that wa horrible. But my Dad knows him better and says Rob thought it was really funny.

I can relate. When my brother is not symptomatic, he has a great sense of humor and great sense of humility about things...and he'd laugh at a comment like the one your Dad relayed to your brother. But when he is symptomatic, paranoid, delusional, suddenly everythhing that was said before gets re-interpreted, he sees new connections, new conspiracies, realizes threats and provocations that he had naively missed before. And then he'd be wondering, hmmm, I wonder just how I'm being manipulated in order to make the rest of the family "look good"...

Wow... this has given me a whole new slant on my relationship with my brother! He's a heavy drinker, aggressive, abbusive, etc and then blames every one else. He's lead a life of heavy drinking and often excessive drug abuse, so I was never sure if he was "naturally this way" or the excessive lifestyle made him this way.

Mmmm - fuel for thought... I wonder how he'll react to the suggestion that he was put on this planet to make us look better! lol He's certainly overly sensitive to being the youngest, something which I never understood. I was always lead to believe that the middle child was the one that was most likely to be f...ked up, and that's me - and I'm perfect! "I'm not crazy, but my brother is and he says I'm OK!" lol

This thread has certainly been thought provoking.