How Paranoid Personality Disorder Took Over My Brother’s Life

My favorite thing about my brother was always his ability to laugh at everything. We joked and teased each other constantly growing up. It was how we related to each other. What really got weird for me was when he couldn’t joke anymore.

Jim became hypersensitive, which if it had only happened with other people, I might not have thought much of it. But we always teased and made fun of each other, and then we didn’t. First, I just didn’t get a laugh out of him. Instead, he would glare at me and walk away.

Eventually he actually started to get hostile toward me. He accused me of thinking he was stupid, or ugly, or whatever I was joking about. He lashed out and yelled at me. He was so angry. This turned into a distance we had never had before. I could barely talk to him about anything at all, and our parents couldn’t get much more out of him.

For his last year of high school, my brother became more isolated. He stopped doing anything other than going to school. He nearly failed his last semester and barely passed and graduated. He would have some better days here and there when he would actually talk to me.

But even then, he talked about teachers being out to get him. He said his grades were fine but that they all wanted him to fail. It seemed so strange to me. A girl Jim dated the year before tried to reconnect with him, and he told me that he thought that she was trying to track him through his phone.

After graduating, Jim insisted on moving out and getting a job. We tried to convince him to work but stay home. He said he needed to be alone. For a couple of years, it actually worked out well. He earned enough to rent an apartment, but my parents were worried he had no real future working at a warehouse.

I lost touch with Jim when I went to college, but at home one summer I found out from my parents that things had gotten worse. After not hearing from him for a month, I went to his apartment to find it in complete disarray. He had put up light-blocking curtains and sat in the dark not even watching TV.

This was when Jim agreed to get some kind of mental health help. He didn’t know that he had a mental illness. He only knew he couldn’t cope. He had stopped going to work and was living on meager savings for a few months. His landlord was on the verge of evicting him. He told me about his former co-workers who he believed spied on him regularly. He thought his boss had fired him illegally when really Jim just stopped showing up at the job.

I brought him home, and together as a family we convinced Jim to see the pediatrician he’d always liked. He was an adult now, but it was the best we could do. He had some lingering trust from childhood experiences with a good doctor. She was able to get him to see a psychiatrist, although it took a lot of convincing. The diagnosis was paranoid personality disorder, or PPD.

One thing we learned about PPD as my brother received his diagnosis is that it can be related to childhood experiences. This made sense. He unfortunately experienced some abuse by a babysitter that my parents didn’t find out about until it had gone on for a few months.

While it’s not really possible to say that the experience definitely caused his paranoia, it seems likely it played a role. That babysitter violated his trust and made him question adults and authority figures. The physical and emotional trauma stuck with him, and I’m sorry to say my parents preferred to sweep it under the rug rather than deal with it at the time.

An important factor in choosing a facility for my brother was a facility that understood the impact of trauma. He needed to learn to process his past experiences. This would begin to help him realize that his thoughts of paranoia were often irrational. He benefited from a plan that addressed both his trauma and his PPD symptoms.

My parents and I have learned from this experience that, unfortunately, Jim will always live with PPD. He can’t truly escape it, and there will never be a cure. That was a tough pill to swallow, because I just wanted my brother back.

Honestly, Jim has handled it better than I have. He settled into the mental health facility grudgingly, but pretty well in the long run. Because trust is such a big issue with him, he got one dedicated therapist to work with all of the time. It has taken a while, but they established a good bond and Jim trusts him now.

This distrust and paranoia have also meant that Jim needed to spend several months at the facility. Once he got established there, it worked out well. In fact, it took a lot of convincing to get him to leave. We had to transition him to living back at home and working with his therapist daily.