Family also suffers when a relative has mental illness

With tears streaming down my face, I craned my neck and tried to find, from the inside of a public transportation vehicle driving along a busy Jakarta street, the familiar, beloved figure of my brother.

For the umpteenth time, he had gone missing, and I was scouring roads and alleys hoping I might find him and bring him home.

It was a futile exercise and I went home, still weeping. The family spent another sleepless night praying and begging Allah for his safe delivery home.

Several days later, we received a phone call from a stranger, a caretaker at a mosque some 60 km away from where we lived.

He had found my brother, cowering for hours inside the cabinet where they stored prayer veils, weak from hunger and thirst. Dried blood caked his face. Somebody cruel had given my quiet, lovable brother a severe beating.

God only knew how he ended up in that place. We could only imagine that it was from fear of another beating that had driven him to hide inside the small cabinet for so long.

We drove like hell to pick him up, fed him, cleaned his cuts and showered him with kisses. We prostrated in gratitude to Allah that he was safe, despite his torn lips and some facial wounds.

Hours later, we managed to draw out of this silent brother of ours, who always mixes reality with imagination and often delusions, the story of his days of wandering. He had escaped our watch, hopping onto a bus to Bogor at the behest of the voice inside his head that told him he must go there.

People threw him out of the bus and pummeled him because, of course, he did not have the bus fare.

My brother walked many kilometers and entered a food stall when he was hungry. He got another beating from the stall owner when once again he could not pay. Somehow, something in his head, told him to seek refuge in the nearby mosque where a kindly old man managed to learn from him how to contact us.

My brother is mentally ill and has been under psychiatric treatment for the past 30 years. I remember him as a serious child and teenager, who kept to his room and read the Koran and various books that I thought were boring because they had lots of Arabic script.

Because he was so different from the boisterous bunch of teens in our kampong -- many of them victims of drug abuse -- one day a group of local thugs tried to make him take drugs. When he refused, they beat his head with a gun "borrowed" by one of them from his police officer father.

My brother changed after that, withdrawing into himself and creating a barrier that enveloped him from the outside world, even his own family.

Life changed for us, too. We began to struggle to cope with his bleak moods, and learned to weather his spells of rage and bursts of violence while always striving to show him that we loved him no matter what.

We struggled to somehow find a way to lure him back into our ordinary, "normal" world, to make him be really here rather than miles away in a dreamland that no one else could enter, confused by his babble that we think "nonsensical".

We had to cope with verbal and even physical abuse directed toward him and our family. There are so many heartless people out there, always ready to taunt him and us for having a "crazy" brother. My mother and father are the best of people, kindly and loving, and seeing them in tears over our brother has broke my heart time and again.

One day, when my brother was again missing and I was again searching for him, I was suddenly awash with feelings of helplessness. I wept again, and whispered, "O, Allah, all this time, we been doing our best to accept Your will on us and my brother. We are exhausted. O, Allah, please have mercy on us and give us a rest."

I found my brother again that time, and shortly after, somebody informed us about a good psychiatrist in Cipinang, East Jakarta, who built a safe house for drug abusers.

Instead of his office, Dr. Fuadi Yatim took us to his mushola (prayer room), a comfortable environment for my brother who spent his childhood in the local mosque and at an Islamic boarding school.

The doctor spoke in a chatty, friendly manner. My brother opened up. We went home with a new prescription, and the doctor's advice, "As long as he sleeps well, insya Allah (God willing), he will be all right during daytime."

It happened as the doctor said it would. My brother now smiles and has loving words to say for us. There are times when he once again becomes "dark" or flies off the handle, but those incidents are now, thankfully, rare. The abuse and taunts from other people have also slowly diminished.

My brother has returned home.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Depok. She can be reached at santi_soekanto2001@yahoo.com