The Mad House. I need help, I'm completely drowning here.

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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/TheArcher1980 on 2024-03-02 18:00:23.

I am not the OOP, OOP is

Notice: This was originally posted in r/de, and was written in german. I used ChatGPT to translate the post and proofread to look for any wrong translations.Only word I am not sure about is"Caregiver". Originally translated as Supervisor, but that does not fit a medical profession.

Trigger Warnings: Dead animals, psychotic behavior, mentions of rape, mentions of spousal abuse

Original Post Oct. 6, 2023

The Mad House. I need help, I’m completely drowning here.

Das Haus der Verrückten. Ich brauche Hilfe, ich gehe hier völlig ein.

Hey guys!

I’m reaching out here on a trash account because I’d like to do this anonymously.

I (27) live with my sister (33) and my younger brother (24) in my mother’s house. My mother lives farther away, together with her boyfriend. I live with my brother on the upper floor, my sister lives alone on the lower floor.

My sister couldn’t handle my parents’ divorce about 12 years ago. Lots of psychological terror, a crazy father who threatened to decapitate my mother, who used to rape my mother often back then, the list goes on.

There’s a theory that we still see as the main culprit for the actual problem to this day - during her school days at the vocational school, my sister met a new friend. More and more often her friend came to us, and then it turned out that the father of said new friend was apparently my mother’s first boyfriend back then, around 18/19 years old. As a result, Mother and the old first boyfriend met again, something was going on, and my mother felt “safe” again. My father noticed it, and from then on the drama started, a lot of chaos, horror, leading to divorce.

From that time on, my sister became quieter, more distant, hardly went out anymore. Probably because she felt guilty. Friends were lost, acquaintances, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want help, no psychologist, absolutely nothing. It all went well, for years, she lived her life on the lower floor, full of silence, loneliness, just with a TV and laptop. During that time, however, she still went completely crazy. She started smashing stove plates, here and there something always broke, she slammed doors, she really started behaving like a… gorilla. Really like an animal, but only when no one was with her. When you’re downstairs in her apartment, she’s just quiet, and she walks away if you’re there too long. She doesn’t talk, says nothing, nods at most, or says “yes” or “no” at best. She walks around like a ninja, with a masked face, in black clothes. Completely crazy. Yet she can write shopping lists, cook, clean, everything. She’s theoretically completely normal, but also completely crazy.

This went on for years and years, she was still human, but didn’t go out anymore, and hasn’t set foot outside for over 10 years. She has a caregiver who only comes rarely, rejects any psychological help, and gets some form of welfare/disability benefits. She doesn’t have an ID because she doesn’t allow pictures to be taken, it’s just all chaotic and hard to explain.

Now let’s talk about the last 3-4 months. It’s getting crazier and crazier with all of this, and I’m suffering from it daily now. She’s gone completely MAD. Really, consistently creepy. She started talking to herself, in a creepy witch-like voice. Like a grandma, somehow. Very strange emphasis, light, but in the first few weeks still quite quiet, you could hear it occasionally in the stairwell. But as soon as you enter her apartment, it’s quiet. Then she just stands there, cleaning, or tidying up, or making food. As if nothing. As soon as you leave her apartment, it starts again. This loud talking, constantly to herself.

And that has intensified by now, to outright “madness”. She screams like a monkey, really like a monkey, no joke. Almost like barking. She throws chairs through the apartment, glasses, cups, hits walls, runs through the apartment as if she’s a wild animal gone mad & being chased. She talks louder and louder, sometimes screams so loud you can hear it outside. She does this for hours, every day. I hear it upstairs in the apartment. I can’t find peace once I’m home, because my gut feeling tells me that at some point she’ll break the door with a knife and stab everyone, or set the house on fire or something. I hardly see her as human anymore, simply because it’s impossible to interact with her. If I do something wrong downstairs, look in the wrong shelf in the kitchen, she comes running, asks “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE??”, and then smashes half the apartment. In the end, she cleans up, but I can’t help because she’ll freak out again.

Here’s a Vocaroo link to an audio recording. This is everyday life, this is what I have to endure, listen to, cope with for 10 hours every day.

[editors note: several links have been removed.]

I can’t take this shit anymore. It’s just burdening. I would rather call the police and have this beast forcibly restrained in a psychiatric ward. This is no longer my sister, as sad and shitty as it may sound. The problem is that I can’t do any of that. If I set anything in motion here, my mother will catapult me out of the family because she’s some crazy conspiracy theorist. “In the psychiatric ward, she’ll be locked up for profit”, something like that.Here’s a quote from WhatsApp from her: “Can’t reach (caregiver), sent him a message. He’ll call back. I think he also wants to avoid forced commitment. I would try to take her to a clinic next week. Voluntarily. If she refuses, (caregiver) will intervene and then it will only go through the judge. The bad thing about it is that we won’t have any influence anymore. They can just lock her up for as long as it’s profitable for an institution…”

She says all this without ever realizing what my sister actually does down there. She doesn’t live here anymore, she only comes by every few weeks for a day or two. During that time, my sister is quiet, fairly normal, simply because someone is downstairs. The problem is that these mental outbursts only intensify once my mother leaves again. When I’m downstairs, there’s peace, but chaos reigns later. My mother sometimes doesn’t even believe me, she just pretends. She tries to find excuses, this and that, “just talk to her”, “maybe she has some problem”, “are you sure she broke something”, yada yada yada. Yes, she smashed the laptop in two halves. Yes, she broke a stove plate. Where are all the cups? Oh yes, gone, certainly not because she throws all the cups against the walls and makes monkey noises. SHE DOESN’T NOTICE. And then I’m the stupid one.

Of course, you could say just be there for her, but that doesn’t help. She just walks away and locks herself in her room. Starts hammering on walls, throwing wooden blocks around her room, yeah, no joke, it sounds like a surreal goddamn horror movie. It DOESN’T help. She’s just completely crazy, really CRAZY. And my mother thinks she just "lacks something”.

I don’t know what to do anymore. My brother doesn’t really care much; he lives in his own world, which is fine for him. But I live right above the kitchen, where my sister screams almost 10 hours a day as if she’s possessed by the spirit of the millennium’s monkey. I could move out, sure, but then my sister would be completely alone with my brother, and he doesn’t care much because he hardly notices it since he lives on the other side of the house.

What should I do? I’m completely lost, speechless; I’m breaking down here. I feel like I’m in the house of the insane, as if it’s Halloween every day, like a horror movie. I live here with a brother who doesn’t care, a mother who’s also crazy and afraid for her completely unhinged daughter, and a sister who behaves like a chimpanzee on amphetamines, completely out of control.

I’m happy to add any important details. That was a lot of text, and I quickly lose track. Many details will be missing, many questions will remain unanswered, so please just ask directly!

Notable answers from OOP:

Good response, I’ll provide some details:

I’m from North Rhine-Westphalia, Paderborn district / surroundings. I’ve now classified my sister’s behavior as a profound psychosis, probably with multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia. Unfortunately, such conditions can be VERY dangerous when they escalate, and it has been escalating for… several weeks now. I’m not sure if that’s what it is, but I have many acquaintances with problems, and they confirmed this behavior as quite typical, some with confirmed psychoses/schizophrenia, etc., for whom the clinic is like a second home.

*Voluntarily admitting her is out of the question. She runs away as soon as her supervisor arrives, locks herself in her room. Even when a psychologist came, she locked herself in. When friends come up through the stairwell to our place, she locks herself in. It’s set up like a duplex, two floors with a stairwell. She covers laptop cameras, refuses to use a phone (she was gifted one, broke it and threw it away), refuses to take ID photos for a new ID/health insurance card, and this is all managed by the supervisor, who has to confirm that this person somehow “exists.” I’m not sure of the details, but that’s how I understood it. She occasionally watches TV in the living room downstairs, …

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