Have you seen this person?

Thoughts on mentally ill missing loved ones

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

This past weekend I had a nice phone chat with my relative—who I’ll call “R,” and who has struggled with a serious mental illness and addiction, but who has been doing better recently.

R has been clean for over six months now, working with a mental health counselor, seeing a therapist, and rebuilding communications with his family members. Over the years, I’ve talked with him in persona and on the phone when he’s been under the influence of narcotics, and when he’s experiencing paranoia, hallucinations, and even full psychosis, so I can tell immediately just from the sound of his voice and speech patterns when he’s clean and his mental health is more stable.

During our chat, R talked about goals and steps he needs to take to get and stay on a positive path forward (a conversation that brought so much joy and pride to my heart). But we also talked a lot about his time in college when he first started to experience instability with his mental health, and a particularly frightening incident when he left Iowa in his car and drove to California while in full psychosis. Before leaving, he deleted most of his social media accounts, destroyed his mobile phone, and angrily cut off all communication with family and friends. I remember this incident well, how worried his parents and extended family were, and how no one had any idea where he might have gone or what he was doing.

Weeks went by before his father was finally contacted by their insurance company about a minor accident involving R’s car in California. But by the time the insurance notification came, it was many days after the accident, and so there was no way of knowing if R was even still in the area where the accident occurred. More waiting. More worry.

He finally returned home after several weeks when he’d run out of money, and the state of his mental health had completely deteriorated. It was the first or the last time he’d gone missing because of a mental health episode or crisis, but fortunately he was found alive each time.

In discussing the California incident with me, R made a really interesting observation, which brought to mind a famous case for me: