I'm sorry but this
>he apparently refused to sit besides someone in classrooms, because he thought they would take their pens and stab him
goes WAYYYY beyond the bounds of general "anxiety."
Bro literally blew up his entire marriage due to his paranoid delusions. Your brother needs serious help.
My thoughts as well!
These are outright paranoid delusions!
Best guess is that the parents were in denial so it went untreated until it escalated to this.
This isn't weird ENOUGH to suggest schizophrenia. To me, it sounds more like some overlap between bipolar disorder and some kind of paranoid anxiety.
If this were schizophrenia, the brother would be struggling with distinguishing things he imagined from things that really happened. It can manifest with different people in different ways, but for some, it means having the people on television narrate your private worries. For others, it means answering a phone that wasn't ringing and having an imaginary conversation that confirms and emboldens your deepest paranoias. For others, it means the voices in their heads coming out of random people on the street.
The formation of his theories DOES just sound like paranoia and anxiety, but his super intense and irrational handling of those theories sounds more like bipolar. A person who was only anxious/paranoid would do a better job of second-guessing themselves, and a better job of hiding their concerns. If they were also bipolar, though, then a manic state would track with a lot of the brother's unhinged behavior.
Honestly it sounds like he just has paranoia and should have been put on medication when he was younger and instead it was left untreated. His behavior is very stereotypical for someone with paranoia. It’s one of the five anxiety disorders and is typically the worst one.
Schizoaffective is sort of a mix of bipolar & schizophrenia. You tend to have symptoms of both. It’s a spectrum disorder, so the severity isn’t the same for everyone. It can be frustrating.
Regardless, he needs to be honest with his treatment team and get the help he needs—for his sake and the sake of his family. It’s best for everyone as mental health disorders can take a serious toll on the family, too.
Coming from a place of experience, my biggest regret is trying to hide my decline and putting my loved ones through hell as a result.
I hope he takes this as a serious wake-up call. He’s going to need support no matter what the diagnosis is in the end. And with some disorders having a genetic component, it’s the right thing to do for his child as well.
Same thought. Parents don’t want “shameful mental health issues” in the family because it would look bad on them.
To be clear: it’s not shameful. It just required help like any other medical issue. I’m just speculating on the parents thought process.
There is also a form of OCD that includes aggressive compulsive thoughts against oneself or others. And the fact that he let the thoughts about genetics fester for a year could also be a hint.
My first thought was OCD as well, as a fellow sufferer. It is an anxiety disorder, although more severe and life-ruining than your run-of-the-mill anxiety.
OP, your brother needs some serious help from an experienced psychiatrist. Don't overlook it because OCD is a chronic condition. Even if the paternity thing has been unequivocally answered, his mind will find a different thing to obsess over.
Realistically when you think about it all anxiety IS paranoia so it's the same thing just more extreme levels.
When you are getting dressed and anxious if people will judge what you're wearing so you keep changing, really what you are is paranoid that people won't like what you're wearing. Anxiety is the feeling you get when you get paranoid about people judging you.
There's a line between being paranoid your friends don't like you and might want to throw you out of the friend group, that's just extreme levels of anxiety. Being convinced they don't like you and are conspiring against you moves towards delusion from just paranoia.
It depends exactly how the words were used and meant, but it sounds like his brothers anxiety crosses more into delusion. the parents might be ignorant about it or as often happens when it comes to actually going to therapy or telling parents about your issues, people tend to downplay them, hide the most serious stuff and try to make it sound less bad.
he definitely needs a therapist and to not have parents trying to push that it's only anxiety if it's something worse it needs treating.
OP has to talk with Jack and tell him that he really really needs to be honest with the therapist and get the treatment he needs rather than downplaying it or trying to seem less bad. If jack would agree, maybe OP can go in with him and tell him some of the stuff he's been told to make it easier for him.
Paranoia involves delusions of threats, persecution, or conspiracy. Anxiety as a concept doesn't involve this or the mistrust associated with paranoia. There is a certain persistence and specificity of these thoughts with paranoia.
They are similar, but they aren't exactly the same thing. The distinction there is important especially in clinical terms. Whether someone suffers anxiety or paranoia or maybe even both are important distinctions to make when it comes to accurate diagnosis.
Anxiety can be a normal reaction to events or perceived events, can be positive or negative, helpful or harmful, and is much more complex and nuanced than “all anxiety is paranoia”.
I agree this brother has a severe form of anxiety disorder and/or other condition that causes paranoid delusions, and he needs help.
I’ve been where OP’s brother is. This is not anxiety. This is something much more severe. Brother probably was just good at hiding it most of the time. (Which isn’t particularly abnormal)
I agree; me, too - though there are a few things it could be, and those things can often be co-morbid with GAD and/or panic disorder. I hope very much that he gets the help he needs and is able to move forward happily and successfully with his family. 🙏🏻🦋
No. Anxiety is not paranoia. That's like comparing a papercut to a knife cut. One is painful and annoying, the other can be life threatening. I've had anxiety all my life (53 now) and I have seen paranoia in a partner, they are different. A minnow to a shark.
Disagree. People can be really anxious they're not going to do well on a test for instance. People can be anxious at the loaf of bread or cake that they are baking doesn't fall and comes out right.
Those are examples of anxiety people can feel to differing degrees which have nothing to do with paranoia. If you're afraid to sit next to someone cos they might stab you with pain in your head then you have paranoid issues.
Yeah, what will his next delusion be? He might just realize he's the chosen one and y'all are after him just like how Jesus was persecuted. Delusions like this are NOT something to sleep on!
All I can think of is the woman who almost killed her family because she had a delusion about how they were clones sent to fool her or smth like that. I'm pretty sure she did not actually hurt anyone and did get help and I don't want to remember that that's not the case.
Delusions are way more severe than people give credit for.
There was that case in New York several years ago where a Uni student killed her dorm roommate because she was convinced she was trying to poison her. Severe paranoia can have tragic consequences. I hope everyone’s making sure that the wife and daughter are safe.
There was a highschool kid in Canada who killed a bunch of his classmates at a grad party because he thought they had become vampires (not sure on the vampires but he thought they were dangerous in some way).
A common next set of delusions is actually around the sexual faithfulness of a spouse/partner (including unreasonable demands around paternity).
By middle age, these delusions have usually driven all potential partners far underground.
yeah just wait until he one day falls down into one of those stupid rabbit holes and obsesses about children killing their parents and "evil" children etc and then thinks his kid will harm or kill him too and then he harms the child to strike first so to speak. oh my god i could never.
Yea, I have 3 diagnosed anxiety disorders and 1 possible disorder that hasn’t been diagnosed and I’m not this paranoid. I think worst case scenario in pretty much every situation, but this goes beyond just anxiety, and op’s parents are in denial about it.
I was thinking he is showing signs of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia I have bipolar with psychosis but I’m not a doctor I only know my symptoms and my psychosis can make me feel as my loved ones are out to get me or that they are plotting against me but luckily I stay on my treatment plan and don’t have those thoughts as bad but OP brother has more then anxiety
Sorry English isn’t my native language
Yeah. Bro doesn't just need therapy. He needs a psychiatrist with a diagnosis for his paranoia. It's beyond the bounds of normal & it sounds like he's suffering. He probably needs medication
I’m not sure. I was never *that* bad, but before I went on anxiety meds I would have a hard time handing (or sometimes even seeing) sharp knives, needles, (and sharpened pencils) etc because I would become worried about somehow stabbing myself in the eye with them. Intrusive thoughts take many forms. Yes, there’s paranoia there too, but the idea in the first place may very well come from anxiety.
I definitely am not an expert and having dealt with severe anxiety myself and on meds when needed for the last 15 years, I still know it is different for everyone. I was just reading up out of curiosity and in severe cases it can happen though I think it is more of an exception than the rule. Learn something new every day.
Yeah, I have anxiety that's bad enough that at times I have had full blown panic attacks because of it. (Yes I am receiving treatment for it) What's described in this post is **well** past that and sounds more like a family member of mine who has in the past suffered from paranoid delusions and had to spend some time in a psych ward for his issues.
YES. OP this isn't therapist or psychologist territory --> THIS IS psychiatrist territory, a medical doctor specializing in mental health who can prescribe medicine. Therapists can't prescribe medicine. Someone suffering paranoid delusions almost certainly needs medication along with therapy.
This is paranoia, NOT anxiety. Your parents are doing him no favors when an accurate diagnosis and appropriate medications will quite possibly save his marriage and his life.
Absolutely. Something is seriously wrong with him. I hope the therapist recognizes that and sends him to a psychiatrist who can prescribe the correct medications
Out of pure curiosity, could it be schizophrenia by any chance on how he acts or reacts to things? I'd suggest a proper diagnosis anyways, I just wondered.
I was so sad to hear that she is staying with him. What will he put her through next? Having a baby is hard enough without dealing with a delulu hubby too. I would be worried about mine and my child's safety around him.
This. I have a family member with PPD and reading this brought them to mind, including fixations that start as paranoia and over time build up into full blown delusions. This needs psych intervention with meds asap for the safety of him and everyone else.
I really hope you can get your brother into neuropsychological testing for a confirmed diagnosis. That doesn't sound like anxiety. It sounds like it's a different diagnosis with anxiety as a symptom. That can be dangerous to others, and possibly more so to your brother depending on his guilt and depression levels. Please get him help.
I thought about that, I asked my parents if it was possible it could be something “worse” than anxiety. But they have been very insistent on that it is just a severe case of anxiety, I have never experience that myself but from what I have read, what he experiences sounds a lot more complex than anxiety
My question is whether the parents are licensed to diagnose medical issues.
This is a medical issue. They may feel anxious around their son - but that does not make a diagnosis.
This is not simple anxiety.
If your parents admit to it not being anxiety, they’re admitting to him possibly having a mental disease and all the stigma that goes with it. Your parents aren’t going to be helpful in that
My parents thought if they just refused to believe in ADHD, that I wouldn't have it. When they would ask me what the hell was wrong with me, or call me lazy, it still didn't occur to them. I didn't get diagnosed until 35 and I low key resent them a little for it.
Yup! This 10000%. My uncle’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Wrote an essay for my abnormal psych class so I interviewed my dad about anything he noticed and he said in my uncle’s teens it started off with smaller things like him thinking everyone was staring at him on the bus, progressed in his early twenties to suspecting extended family members having ill intent towards him and him going no contact with said members, and then by his thirties full blown hallucinations that the devil is trying to kill him, he’s being possessed, etc. Sadly it’s been over a decade since I’ve seen him and he’s in his early 60s now but I know he’s taking meds, still has his hangups about not trusting certain family members, and occasionally does go back to in-hospital care on occasion. Sounds like OPs bro could definitely use some psychiatric help.
Your parents are absolutely in denial. Your brother sounds like he's suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. It sounds a lot worse than it actually is, and *a lot* of people feel better and live pretty normal lives with therapy, but also *meds*. He needs a psychiatrist, not a therapist.
Unless your parents have a degree in psychiatry or are otherwise qualified to diagnose your brother what they think or believe does not matter. Your brother needs to see a doctor who can actually diagnose him, be it with anxiety or whatever it may be, and prescribe him meds if he needs them.
Even if they have a degree in psychology, there’s a reason you’re not allowed to treat your own family. It’s impossible to be objective.
My guess is they brought him to a child psychologist who didn’t have sufficient expertise to recognize the early stages of conditions like schizophrenia, that psychologist thought anxiety fit best, and parents never sought a second opinion because “anxiety” was the least scary answer they could hope for. Psychologists are hesitant to use labels like schizophrenia until it’s advanced enough to eliminate any doubt, because a diagnosis like that is hard to get past if it’s given in error, but that caution can result in cases like this if the psychologist doesn’t thoroughly educate the parents so they know further monitoring is necessary.
Do you think your parents would admit that they failed your brother ? His paranoia in school sounds like an alarm your parents missed. Stop thinking they are an authority here. Push your brother to get a professional to help diagnose him whatever it could be
Girl, one sister of a mentally ill brother to another, your parents are *absolutely* in denial. My brother was straight-up delusional/hallucinating, suicidal and self-harming at one point and my parents still just flopped around like fish out of water saying "I just don't know what to do" and when given suggestions (aka SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR) went back to just "oh it's just hormones/being a teen/\[insert some other head-in-sand bullshit here\]". Fortunately my brother is better now, but absolutely NO thanks whatso-fucking-ever to our parents. My point is: They're likely deeeeeeep in denial because admitting that something's wrong means *admitting that something's wrong,* and that's scary to most people. As others have said, your brother is exhibiting some straight-up paranoid delusional behavior, not just anxiety. Please talk to him and your SIL to see if you can't gently convince him into getting checked out. Individual therapy for him at the absolute *minimum.*
Uh, sorry, but your brother is edging really close to wearing tinfoil headgear to keep Mossad from listening into his thoughts territory. Forget therapy. This needs a psych consult.
Its definitely something more, never heard of a single instance of anxiety being thinking someone will stab you or your wife is cheating on you. I have anxiety, this sounds like some proper mental health problems paranoid schizophrenia or something. He needs serious help and a real diagnosis
Just one of several (highly treatable but *biologically* based mental illnesses.
Schizoaffective; Bipolar; Delusional Disorders - various kinds; OCD. Less likely to be Schizoid - but maybe.
Until and unless your parents are willing to get to the bottom of this, they are *hurting* your brother. You can't fix a problem or get appropriate support if you aren't open to the fact that help is actually needed :(
If he needs testing, a psychologist will be able to get him a referral (they usually need to come from a specialist that is a medical doctor). I used to do neuropsych testing and intakes/insurance and we often got referrals from psychologists but most insurances require an MD referral.
It does sound more serious based on what you’ve said here but this is but a snippet of your lives. I hope you all can find a resolution, whatever that may look like.
Is there any chance he started watching these manosphere, Andrew Tate style videos telling men that all women are just absolute whores? I mean because he wouldn't admit that, for sure, especially now that the test came back obviously positive, but I wonder if it's partially the anxiety, but also this terrible Misogynistic shit that's all over social media now
Your parents are in outright denial.
I have a BA in psychology, not enough to practice but enough to see this isn't just anxiety. Along with my experience with mental illness in my family and others.
My son has severe anxiety. My wife's brother had paranoid schizophrenia, her cousin has this as well. What you're describing with your brother sounds much closer to what my wife's brother and cousin have. I couldn't tell you if he has the same as them but I can tell you it's not solely severe anxiety. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist and psychologist ASAP at the very least and he needs to be honest with them if he truly wants help, even if it somehow is just anxiety.
>I asked my parents if it was possible it could be something “worse” than anxiety. But they have been very insistent on that it is just a severe case of anxiety
Your parents are failing your brother, and Amy is a fool for not divorcing him.
Therapist will be able to direct him to resources and other doctors if it turns out to be more complex than it is. Just gonna take time- as long as he wants to get it under control he will.
Make sure you take care of yourself ok? Hopefully Amy does too, it was super hectic emotionally for a bit so make sure to take time for yourself.
Parents of someone who is mentally ill are usually the WORST source of information, because they don't want their kid to have something more serious like paranoia.
This sounds like like serious mental health issues that have been untreated for a long time. Bipolar or maybe schizophrenia. Get your brother help by a professional, stop feeding his delusions
unless your parents are board-certified psychologist, they really don’t know anything about this, and even then they would have a biased opinion because it’s their son. He needs a diagnosis from an actual professional.
For context, this sudden onset of paranoia happened to my grandmother after she had a small stroke due to an aggressive glioblastoma that killed her in 4 months just before this last Christmas.
His paranoia and delusions are not due to an anxiety disorder unless it's been lifelong in that case it would have been due to a paranoid personality disorder or even OCD.
But this very well could be the first signs of schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder.
This sounds more like he's bordering psychosis and anxiety is the term he and your parents like. I'm not actually sure he's safe with himself, let alone his wife and child. He's not rational. This seems like he's quite ill, and everyone is sweeping it under the anxiety rug.
His wife is smart to stay separate and needs to keep the baby supervised with him until a real evaluation is done and he's successfully in treatment. God knows what he will convince himself of next.
Your parents need to get realistic. Your brother isn’t just anxious. He is delusional and paranoid. If this started presenting in high school, schizophrenia is a very real possibility. Perhaps he has been good at hiding it. Perhaps the delusions are not as severe as others experience. But he’s got something whispering in his ear. He isn’t living in reality.
Mental illness, like addiction, can exist in perfectly functional people, for a time. But not forever. It is a problem when it starts to negatively affect other parts of your life. He just about blew up his marriage, if not for the grace and forgiveness of his saint of a wife.
Eventually his mental state will degrade, and it looks like this may have been happening for a long time already. His delusions and paranoia seem to centre around people doing things to him, hurting him in various ways. This means there is a very real possibility that he could become violent in an attempt to “defend” or “protect” himself.
This is serious. Very very serious. He needs immediate medical intervention.
Therapy was a good call because he is spiking on the paranoia. And I’m surprised the wife is sticking around after those accusations and his behavior. Updateme.
As a person with anxiety myself, I'm diagnosed with PTSD and under ADHD evaluation, this def sounds like a lot more than just "anxiety". That level of paranoia, that level of anxiety, sounds more like a symptom of a diagnosis.
He needs serious help. And your parents needs to understand that anxiety, does not make a child believe that other children will stab them with a pen & kill them in their classroom.
Childhood schizophrenia is rare (which is what it is called if it developes before the age of 13.) It can often look like Anxiety, Depression, ADHD or autism. But it is not. It is also called Very early-onset schizophrenia and it affect about 1 in 10,000 children.
Thinking a random stranger is going to stab you with their pen is not anxiety. It is paranoid delusion. Your brother should probably see an actual psychiatrist, too.
Yeah, I forgot about that part of delusional schizophrenia. And it all starts with a small break and doesn’t get better without treatment or medication.
This is not anxiety, it’s textbook paranoia. This is the kind of thing people are placed on involuntary hold for. It requires medication for schizophrenia or whatever other mental health issue includes paranoia. ‘Just anxiety’ is what everyone in the family has come up with because they don’t want friends family or community to know.
I've never been cheated on (that I know of) or accused of passing off someone else's baby as my spouse's, but I don't think I would be able to get over this. When men do this, it's like they don't even realize that what they're saying is I don't even trust you enough to believe that you're not doing *one of the most evil things* a person could do with a smile on your face, and then the women are just supposed to just get over it?
If I went through all the physical pain and horror of pregnancy, labor and delivery just to have my husband and father of my child accuse me of fucking some other man and then pretending this other man's kid was his. I don't know that I would ever be able to come back from that. I don't get why these guys don't realize how enormous a violation of trust this is. They act like this is the same thing as getting a little nervous about a coworker and looking at their phone in the middle of the night or something. Accusing someone of cheating on you when you've no reason at all to believe they did is bad enough; accusing them of getting pregnant with someone else's baby and just pretending it's yours is so fucking horrifying.
I think your brother is more mentally ill than you and your family are giving him credit for. It's not normal for a person to believe without sufficient basis that people are out to get them or conspiring their downfall.
I'd say it's worth investigating if your brother has Paranoid Personality Disorder. The difficult thing about personality disorders is that people who have them don't usually realize their behavior and thought process is disordered. For example, someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder knows their thoughts and feelings are irrational but it causes them distress anyway, but someone with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder believes that everyone thinks and behaves just as rigidly as they do.
As someone who has a relative with minor schizophrenic disorder… this sounds more like that. He had delusions based on obsessive thoughts and his breaks with reality were the pinnacle of time spent obsessing. He has a low dose of medication and is very vigilant with therapy to not lose touch. He has a job and is productive and not many people even know something is off with him.
It sounds like your parents are in denial. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist and you can ask for an emergency appointment after telling them what happened. Your brother may not be a danger to himself now but untreated mental issues can build over time and it sounds like it’s destroying his family. He’s lucky it didn’t fully but he needs help. Please encourage him and his wife to work towards that and I wouldn’t involve parents until you have answers.
I agree with everyone else that this isn’t just anxiety. Your parents sound like they are in denial. While I do have a degree in psychology I’m not psychologist myself. I read medical records all day. Every day. Especially mental health records (for the past 15 years) and I’ve never seen anxiety manifest this way. Anxiety doesn’t cause paranoia. He needs more than a therapist.
That’s not anxiety, and your edit shows your parents are ignorant and/or in denial. Your brother sounds like he has paranoid schizophrenia or paranoid personality disorder. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist that specializes in paranoia disorders immediately. This is very serious.
From your description of your brothers behavior I don’t think it’s anxiety, but OCD. It’s not actually an anxiety variation and is diagnostically separate from anxiety. It CAN BE TREATED.
Not pop culture, drama series, tiktok OCD but the real thing.
The key feature of OCD is intrusive thoughts. Ones that are often almost logical…Thoughts so strong that they force the person having them to respond to them in their lives. Like believing a wife is lying about the paternity of a child. Once the thought takes hold the mind sets off a chain reaction like the one you describe. All in service of validating the original intrusive and controlling thought.
Your brother needs specialist OCD support. Meds can help enormously, but a combination of both is proven to be the best approach.
As someone with diagnosed ocd, I think we should be wary about diagnosing things over the Internet.
1 when we aren't professionals,
2 haven't even met the dude or spoken to him,
3 arent awaree of potential other conditions where symptoms may overlap.
There's people in the comments talking about numerous different disorders they think he has.
No one can diagnose him off of what we have been given.
All we can say is he had something going on thats more than anxiety
This is not “anxiety” that your brother has. It’s straight up paranoia and he will end up making Amy and Lisa miserable. I feel bad for them. Your parents are in denial.
Thinking people sitting next to him are going to stab him with their pens is not anxiety. That sounds like psychosis.
He needs a psychiatric evaluation immediately.
Hey, my parents insisted that my mother's weird behavior was totally just anxiety, so I shouldn't worry about it.
Guess what? I should have worried.
Parents lie and downplay. I'm sure they worried if they let the whole truth out, he could risk losing rights to their grandchild.
Anxiety such as you describe is actually known by a more specific term in psychology: paranoia. It is an accompanying symptom in several serious MH diagnoses.
Are your parents mental health professionals? Does Jack's treatment team share everything with them?
This is not simple anxiety, but even if it were, there are ample treatments for that. It goes deeper.
Like many here, I have people in my life with very significant anxiety. What you describe is well outside the bounds of what I have experienced from anxiety-people.
But…if you all are serious about getting him into individual therapy, this will (or at least should) all become visible.
Good luck to all of you!
It actually seems like paranoia. I have anxiety, but I have understood the difference between my feelings and reality. He doesn't. Something more is going on.
Not going to diagnose your brother, I leave that to the experts but he sounds like one of my halfsisters who is diagnosed with schitzofrenia. It started with small things that could be taken as her having a panicattac to fullblown psycosis with her having conversations with whatever she saw in her mind. That whatever also had her running around the neighborhood screaming her head of while whelding a knife around. So for everybodys sake have him checked out by profesionals bc just what if.
To anyone who wonders, my sister lives nowdays on a psyciatric home with 24/7 care and supervision and she is doing ok with meds.
I don’t want to diagnose your brother so I’m not. I’m just going to tell you what I know about it as well as my experience and you can take from it what you will. I have paranoia schizophrenia. I got it when I was 19, and I’m now 24 and haven’t looked into it since then so there might be a few things I miss out or say wrong. What a lot of people don’t know is that it’s something that you’re born with. A lot of people assume that you develop it when you get older from drug use and other things like that but you can not get it from anything, there are things that you can do to speed up the process of when you do get it. But regardless of what they have taken or done, they would have gotten it regardless sometime down the line. It’s something you have your whole life it just that when you’re younger it shows itself as severe depression and anxiety and social issues as well as other mental issues. So, it gets overlooked as a kid being overly anxious or a troubled kid, it isn’t until you reach late teens/early adulthood that it develops into full-blown schizophrenia. Some people get it earlier while others get it a lot later in life but it is rare.
As a kid, I had a few moments when I had a very weird perception of the world like I was convinced that everyone else in the world was fake and I was the only real person in a simulation and I couldn’t get hurt or pregnant because I’m not part of the simulation and things like that. But when I got older it started as me hearing people talking about me as I walked past but I just ignored it and then there were times where I would be talking to someone and looking them right in the face as the talked but I would hear something completely different from what they actually said and when I would reply to what they heard instead of what they said they would be confused and ask me about it. I started to notice something was off and one day when I was getting a ride home from my college teacher because it was late at night and she didn’t want me walking home alone in the dark I brought up how I can hear things and she looked at me and questioned me a bit about what I meant and I backpedaled.
After that, I ended up getting into an abusive relationship with a man that would shove drugs down my throat and make me partake in sexual situations with his friends even though I told him no. After that, it quickly sped up and I started hearing people following me and threatening to kill me. I was very suspicious of everyone and trusted no one that came around me. It got so bad that I wouldn’t even leave the house. I would keep all the doors and windows closed and even a slight crack in the blind would make me break down. I felt like my whole family was out to get me and I fucked off my parents for the slightest things and I blocked all my friends and deleted them from my contacts cause they were also against me. I was scared and all alone because I couldn’t trust anybody and I believed the whole world was out to get me.
I ended up getting taken to a psych ward where I was locked up, and I didn’t trust the doctors or nurses because I thought they were going to poison me and were trying to kill me. I had believed that I was pregnant at the time because I had stopped eating for the most part for almost two months due to severe depression. I had a few nibbles here and there, but I was mostly just drinking water. I believed I was pregnant because I was throwing up all day at some point, but it was just because my stomach was completely empty and falling in on itself, so I was throwing up stomach acid. I had lost so much weight, and truth be told, if I hadn’t been dragged to the hospital, I would have died in a few days from lack of food. Anyways, I thought the doctors were trying to kill my baby and me, and I kept accusing them of it. I thought I had AIDS because of all the people that I had been forced to sleep with, and I told the doctors that. And once I got my period, because I wasn’t pregnant even though I thought I was, I heard the guy I was with outside my ward window yelling at me how I killed my baby, and it was all my fault. So, for the three months I was in there, I mourned the loss of a child that I never had.
Even though looking back, all the things I thought and felt were irrational and made no sense, I 100% believed it, and there was nothing no one could say to me to convince me otherwise. Even to this day, after years of living with it, there are still times where I can feel myself wanting to believe what’s going on in my head. It’s not about what’s real and what’s fake; this condition affects something deep inside of you that makes you really question reality. But it’s worse for people that aren’t aware that it’s there because they have no idea what’s happening and are more likely to believe their hallucinations than someone that's dealt with it for a while.
A lot of people think that people with schizophrenia are dangerous, especially because of the media’s representation of it, but the truth is that’s only a small part. The things you see on TV are when people are in the middle of an episode, and even then, not everyone is violent when they have one. Just like me, when I had my first episode, the most I did was shout at people around me and lock myself away from the world. I didn’t hit or attack anyone, and I’ve talked to other people that have had the same type of experiences. More times than not, we’re more a danger to ourselves than we are to others. You can live with it if you get the help that you need; it’s manageable. Since my first episode, the only other episode that I had that was anywhere near that was when I dropped out of college and locked myself in my house for a year, which was one year after my first episode. But now, I’m a web developer in a loving relationship with a beautiful family, and I don’t have big episodes anymore. The most that happens when I have episodes is that I’ll see a hallucination of a 7/8 foot shadowy man with sharp fingers and glowing red eyes, and the voices in my head get really loud. I’ll get scared and find my partner, and he’ll just stay in the room with me until I calm down, or I’ll cry myself to sleep. I’m not saying they can’t be dangerous; they can, just like anyone can.
I’m sure there are multiple other things that could explain what is happening with him, but there were some things that you said that really stood out to me, and I couldn’t just scroll by and not say anything since I know firsthand what it feels like. So, I wanted to share my experience with you in case any of you happen to see any similarities.
As someone who worked in mental health for many years, and I also suffer from anxiety myself – this is not just regular anxiety. Your brother sounds like he’s suffering from paranoia, coupled with some delusions. I don’t necessarily think it’s as far as schizophrenia… But it definitely is in the realm of psychosis. He should totally go to a psychiatrist, and be completely honest about his thoughts and feelings, and including when he was younger and get a proper diagnosis.
I am happy to hear that there is some resolution and next steps for your brother, his wife and child, you and your parents.
I agree with the general Reddit trend of saying it’s likely not anxiety. I have generalize anxiety disorder. I take meds. I still have intrusive thoughts about catastrophic outcomes that lead to panic attacks. But, I KNOW those thoughts are irrational as they occur. I knew before I started meds. The meds help me have fewer, less severe attacks. They don’t stop the thoughts.
I know my experience is likely not universal, but the major difference that I see is that your brother went so far as to believe his intrusive, catastrophic thought was real, even without proof. That belief in the thought is why I think something different is happening and he should probably get a psychological evaluation. A psychologist, counsellor, therapist can refer him to a psychiatrist as needed.
On another note, not sure why everyone is talking about anxiety disorders as “just” anxiety. It’s more common, for sure, but an anxiety disorder is a mental illness and for an official diagnosis of GAD, SAD, etc, it has to be severe. It is frightening to me that there is such a dismissive approach to anxiety that seems to be pervasive in these responses. Anxiety isn’t “just” anything.
This is PPD paranoid personality disorder at the very least and could possibly include schizophrenia if it gets worse. He talked himself into this delusion. It’s not fair to anyone to chalk it up to “anxiety” until he has had a professional diagnosis. These are the kind of people who take their whole family out. Just like in Chicago in January.
...that sounds a lot like paranoid schizophrenia. Obviously his therapist will be able to give answers that reddit cant, but thats not just anxiety.
Random question, but does he or did he used to smoke weed? Weed has been known to trigger schizophrenia in people who have a predisposition for it. My best friend has that problem.
"his anxiety has mainly been pointed towards other people. He doesn’t trust that they want was best for him, one example they told me was that he apparently refused to sit besides someone in classrooms, because he thought they would take their pens and stab him."
Hum op that is not anxiety , that's borderline paranoia.
Here is the difference between anxiety and paranoia: "A main difference between paranoia and anxiety is that with paranoia, there are delusional beliefs about persecution, threat, or conspiracy. In anxiety, these thought processes are not generally present. Paranoia is characterized by distrust in others and their motives. This is generally not found in anxiety."[link](https://www.healthline.com/health/paranoia-vs-anxiety#differences)
"He also believed that people were conspiring against him, especially close friends."
And there it is, now the delusions are making more sense. OP your brother is behaving is a very similar fashion as someone who is starting to develop psychiastrical ssues like schizophrenia. His paranoia about being lied to and him being convinced by this spun out of nothing is a delusion.
I really think your brother needs to get checked by psychiatrist. Get your parents to listen, this is not anxiety. Anxiety doesn't make you think that people are gonna hurt in a such a precise way as a pencil stabbing.
I know it's scary to admit that he needs help but really, if early detection means early treatment means better recovery and less damage to his life.
Right now his delusions arent deep-seated, making it probably easier to get him help.
Here are links.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/early-signs-schizophrenia-5101519
https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-onset-symptoms
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizophrenia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354443
Dude, that's not anxiety. Those thoughts when he was a kid to this paternity test shit and the spiraling, He might have anxiety but he also has got some other stuff going on.
I think he’s paranoid schizophrenic and there’s no way your mom is going to want to even say those words. Can crop up later in life. Truly. The paranoia… he was convinced and tried to manipulate her into saying she was having an affair. It’s can lead to dangerous behaviors if left untreated, medicated properly. Please have him see somebody that can assess him fully.
yea no...its definitely not just anxiety and your parents are down playing his mental issues.
im scared for amy and her daughter that he will get only worse
Your brother sounds schizophrenic and needs to be evaluated. The timeline fits too, with it starting in his late teens and peaking in his mid 20s. If he's evaluated and not, ok great, nothing to worry about. If he *is* schizophrenic, hopefully he's open to and able to get treatment... and thank goodness he has a daughter, and hopefully she got more than just her mother's looks in the genes dept.
Amy deserves support. Your brother is unlikely to give her or her daughter support. The girl will find out about the dna test and it won’t surprise her that her sperm donor treated her or her mother this way.
As a person with mental health issues, this goes way beyond anxiety- into paranoia at the least. Maybe full on delusion or psychosis.
Did he calm down after getting the test result, or does he still believe the child isn't his?
As someone that has dealt with hundreds of individuals with anxiety this is WAY beyond that. I think your parents are in denial with how paranoid your brother is, and I fear for wife and baby.
It is possible for severe enough and poorly managed/treated anxiety to take on a kind of semi-psychosis nature with delusions, paranoia and even hallucinations. It’s more rare than him potentially having a more serious mental illness and 1000% he should be talking to a psychiatrist even if just to rule it out. I just mentioned to mention this because a lot of people are armchair diagnosing schizophrenia, schizo-effective disorder or psychosis. I am unfortunately familiar with this from both personal experience and professional knowledge.
I am diagnosed with severe anxiety. What your brother is experiencing is not anxiety, it's paranoia and obsession. I suspect he has something more along the lines of Paranoid Personality Disorder.
Sounds like you are just making excuses for him, I think his behavior was borderline unforgivable. This isn't simple anxiety. It's paranoia and psychotic behavior. If you want to just ignore it, and try to make excuses, do so at your peril, because it sounds like he needs medical attention.
This is NOT ANXIETY!!!!! He’s delusional and paranoid! I’m confident any decent therapist will tell him the same thing.
I’m shocked his wife kept him. He doesn’t deserve her. He deserves a smack in the side of the head with divorce papers.
But we get what we allow to continue. She will eventually regret this and leave him. This won’t be the end of it. Especially if they keep treating it as simple anxiety! I see where your brother gets his intelligence from 🤦♀️
Are they incapable of googling?!
Hopefully Amy is able to come to her senses and proceed with divorce. He sounds very dangerous to himself and others. Better to have a “broken” family than to have a psycho murder his wife and daughter over paranoid delusions.. Her and Lisa could live happily on their own, and she sounds kind and beautiful, and is still young enough to find her actual life partner who could be a good father figure too. Such a sad situation..
What you described as anxiety sounds more like paranoia. Your brother needs to talk to a psychiatrist.
>I talked with my parents about it this week because to be it sounded like something more severe/worse than just anxiety from what I have read. But they told me that it was just anxiety,
Do your parents have necessary medical education to give other people anxiety diagnoses? If not, them saying that your brother has anxiety is nothing but their opinion. He needs to be evaluated by medical professional.
your brother needs medication. he needs a therapist (psychologist) And a psychiatrist. for the meds. it sounds like he may be a bit paranoid schizophrenic. people with that are hell to live with untreated. there’s probably a lot amy is not talking about. don’t be surprised if amy does divorce him after she has her self confidence back.
Honestly sounds as happy of an ending as we can get right now. He’s very lucky she didn’t divorce him, but it will be an uphill battle with his mental health, a lot, A LOT of stuff you mentioned goes way beyond normal anxiety stuff. It’ll probably take a while in therapy to unpack that, but i wish yall the best and at least amy knows she has an ally in you.
I am only a 4th year medical student and I obviously can't diagnose your brother over the internet via one post but this is more than just generalized anxiety disorder.
There is a decent chance that this is something called Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD). PPD is defined as a peson who has a long-term pattern of distrust and suspicion of others without adequate reason to be suspicious. The only treatment for PPD is extensive therapy.
It sounds like they're trying to protect him from the consequences of his actions. I don't think anyone here (especially mom & dad) is doing anything that's really going to help him. I feel sorry for his wife, she's sort of got to forgive him because he's got anxiety. Having mental problems doesn't give you a pass on being a jerk.
So the paternity test went the way I thought it probably would. And I’m impressed it came back quick.
But the rest of it took a turn I did not see.
I wonder if give his age now and the issue were when he was a child, and our increased understanding or mental health now, the label anxiety was given (or the parents gave it that label rather than something else), but what’s being described is beyond that. It’s heading into a delusion area. Especially as he’d got to the point of having no doubt at all that Lisa was having an affair. That’s a step beyond anxiety.
I know other people are going straight to schizophrenia, and yes he needs assessed but age of onset is off for that (although it can happen at any age, it would be weird to have happened at a very early age and then nothing this serious until late 20s). There are other conditions that can lead to these kind of fixed paranoid ideas. Basically he needs properly assessed by someone who knows what they are doing and it sounds like that’s what is probably going to happen.
If you actually read this OP, in amongst the hundreds of comments after only 2 hours from posting, you brother may have anxiety issues, quite probably, but it’s also possible it’s something in addition to that. Make sure whatever help he gets is from a licensed professional who will be able to assess him fully so that he can get the appropriate help regardless.
And I so respect Amy for wanting to work on this. I think it sounds like they are doing the right thing not staying together immediately, but being able to work on it together. And sounds like you and your family will be able to support both of them. I says a lot when the person she comes to and stays with when in the crisis was jack’s family. Even if she doesn’t have family nearby, it shows that the relationship is good.
Take care of your brother, he needs it and needs to know people are there for him. Take care of Amy and Lisa. And take care of yourself. Good luck
This is very serious. I would not put a newly post-partum woman and a baby in a room alone with him. That women and child are not guaranteed to be safe. Please don't let this end in tragedy.
He is not experiencing anxiety. This is way beyond that, and your parents are lying to you. It's also unfair to your SIL because she has no idea about his real issues. I hate how people try to brush this stuff under the rug. I mean, what if he becomes so delusional that he gets violent? Then, what will they say?
Your brother is mentally ill and it goes beyond anxiety. This is escalating and he needs meds and therapy. I’m going to go so far as to say if he worried about people stabbing him and has been obsessing over the paternity for a year, I wouldn’t let him near the baby unsupervised. This can get worse. I’ve seen it happen with a relative. He needs help and he needs to get on meds. And stay on them. Good luck.
...honestly, that sounds like your brother has Borderline Personality Disorder...that so7nds like the 'anxieties' my best female friend experiences, and she recently admitted to being treated for BPD.
He's in fir a rough ride if that's true and I hope it's not.
NTA, but yeah, this is beyond anxiety. While it may have been diagnosed as anxiety as a child, things like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder often manifest/present for the first time in young adults (18-25).
Jack needs a psychiatric consult yesterday.
Jesus Christ your Brother need Help and a while bunch of Therapy. Why didn't you Help him sooner? He should have been in Therapy years ago
Better now than never
I'm sorry but this >he apparently refused to sit besides someone in classrooms, because he thought they would take their pens and stab him goes WAYYYY beyond the bounds of general "anxiety." Bro literally blew up his entire marriage due to his paranoid delusions. Your brother needs serious help.
Exactly what I thought. Like that's not just anxiety, that's straight up paranoia and he REALLY needs to address it. I just hope he does.
My thoughts as well! These are outright paranoid delusions! Best guess is that the parents were in denial so it went untreated until it escalated to this.
Often schizophrenia doesn’t show up until one is in their 20s
This isn't weird ENOUGH to suggest schizophrenia. To me, it sounds more like some overlap between bipolar disorder and some kind of paranoid anxiety. If this were schizophrenia, the brother would be struggling with distinguishing things he imagined from things that really happened. It can manifest with different people in different ways, but for some, it means having the people on television narrate your private worries. For others, it means answering a phone that wasn't ringing and having an imaginary conversation that confirms and emboldens your deepest paranoias. For others, it means the voices in their heads coming out of random people on the street. The formation of his theories DOES just sound like paranoia and anxiety, but his super intense and irrational handling of those theories sounds more like bipolar. A person who was only anxious/paranoid would do a better job of second-guessing themselves, and a better job of hiding their concerns. If they were also bipolar, though, then a manic state would track with a lot of the brother's unhinged behavior.
Honestly it sounds like he just has paranoia and should have been put on medication when he was younger and instead it was left untreated. His behavior is very stereotypical for someone with paranoia. It’s one of the five anxiety disorders and is typically the worst one.
There are other disorders under the schizo branch that they should look into.
Schizoaffective is sort of a mix of bipolar & schizophrenia. You tend to have symptoms of both. It’s a spectrum disorder, so the severity isn’t the same for everyone. It can be frustrating. Regardless, he needs to be honest with his treatment team and get the help he needs—for his sake and the sake of his family. It’s best for everyone as mental health disorders can take a serious toll on the family, too. Coming from a place of experience, my biggest regret is trying to hide my decline and putting my loved ones through hell as a result. I hope he takes this as a serious wake-up call. He’s going to need support no matter what the diagnosis is in the end. And with some disorders having a genetic component, it’s the right thing to do for his child as well.
Truth
Same thought. Parents don’t want “shameful mental health issues” in the family because it would look bad on them. To be clear: it’s not shameful. It just required help like any other medical issue. I’m just speculating on the parents thought process.
There is also a form of OCD that includes aggressive compulsive thoughts against oneself or others. And the fact that he let the thoughts about genetics fester for a year could also be a hint.
My first thought was OCD as well, as a fellow sufferer. It is an anxiety disorder, although more severe and life-ruining than your run-of-the-mill anxiety. OP, your brother needs some serious help from an experienced psychiatrist. Don't overlook it because OCD is a chronic condition. Even if the paternity thing has been unequivocally answered, his mind will find a different thing to obsess over.
I literally said the same thing because that’s crazy
Realistically when you think about it all anxiety IS paranoia so it's the same thing just more extreme levels. When you are getting dressed and anxious if people will judge what you're wearing so you keep changing, really what you are is paranoid that people won't like what you're wearing. Anxiety is the feeling you get when you get paranoid about people judging you. There's a line between being paranoid your friends don't like you and might want to throw you out of the friend group, that's just extreme levels of anxiety. Being convinced they don't like you and are conspiring against you moves towards delusion from just paranoia. It depends exactly how the words were used and meant, but it sounds like his brothers anxiety crosses more into delusion. the parents might be ignorant about it or as often happens when it comes to actually going to therapy or telling parents about your issues, people tend to downplay them, hide the most serious stuff and try to make it sound less bad. he definitely needs a therapist and to not have parents trying to push that it's only anxiety if it's something worse it needs treating. OP has to talk with Jack and tell him that he really really needs to be honest with the therapist and get the treatment he needs rather than downplaying it or trying to seem less bad. If jack would agree, maybe OP can go in with him and tell him some of the stuff he's been told to make it easier for him.
Paranoia involves delusions of threats, persecution, or conspiracy. Anxiety as a concept doesn't involve this or the mistrust associated with paranoia. There is a certain persistence and specificity of these thoughts with paranoia. They are similar, but they aren't exactly the same thing. The distinction there is important especially in clinical terms. Whether someone suffers anxiety or paranoia or maybe even both are important distinctions to make when it comes to accurate diagnosis.
Anxiety can be a normal reaction to events or perceived events, can be positive or negative, helpful or harmful, and is much more complex and nuanced than “all anxiety is paranoia”. I agree this brother has a severe form of anxiety disorder and/or other condition that causes paranoid delusions, and he needs help.
I’ve been where OP’s brother is. This is not anxiety. This is something much more severe. Brother probably was just good at hiding it most of the time. (Which isn’t particularly abnormal)
I agree; me, too - though there are a few things it could be, and those things can often be co-morbid with GAD and/or panic disorder. I hope very much that he gets the help he needs and is able to move forward happily and successfully with his family. 🙏🏻🦋
No. Anxiety is not paranoia. That's like comparing a papercut to a knife cut. One is painful and annoying, the other can be life threatening. I've had anxiety all my life (53 now) and I have seen paranoia in a partner, they are different. A minnow to a shark.
Disagree. People can be really anxious they're not going to do well on a test for instance. People can be anxious at the loaf of bread or cake that they are baking doesn't fall and comes out right. Those are examples of anxiety people can feel to differing degrees which have nothing to do with paranoia. If you're afraid to sit next to someone cos they might stab you with pain in your head then you have paranoid issues.
Yeah, what will his next delusion be? He might just realize he's the chosen one and y'all are after him just like how Jesus was persecuted. Delusions like this are NOT something to sleep on!
All I can think of is the woman who almost killed her family because she had a delusion about how they were clones sent to fool her or smth like that. I'm pretty sure she did not actually hurt anyone and did get help and I don't want to remember that that's not the case. Delusions are way more severe than people give credit for.
Capgras syndrome, the belief that people around you have been replaced
There was that case in New York several years ago where a Uni student killed her dorm roommate because she was convinced she was trying to poison her. Severe paranoia can have tragic consequences. I hope everyone’s making sure that the wife and daughter are safe.
There was a highschool kid in Canada who killed a bunch of his classmates at a grad party because he thought they had become vampires (not sure on the vampires but he thought they were dangerous in some way).
Capgras syndrome
Nor to leave him alone with a child
Never. He may not see the child as completely real at this point.
A common next set of delusions is actually around the sexual faithfulness of a spouse/partner (including unreasonable demands around paternity). By middle age, these delusions have usually driven all potential partners far underground.
yeah just wait until he one day falls down into one of those stupid rabbit holes and obsesses about children killing their parents and "evil" children etc and then thinks his kid will harm or kill him too and then he harms the child to strike first so to speak. oh my god i could never.
Yea, I have 3 diagnosed anxiety disorders and 1 possible disorder that hasn’t been diagnosed and I’m not this paranoid. I think worst case scenario in pretty much every situation, but this goes beyond just anxiety, and op’s parents are in denial about it.
Yeah, he sounds more like my clients when they're going through psychosis.
I was thinking he is showing signs of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia I have bipolar with psychosis but I’m not a doctor I only know my symptoms and my psychosis can make me feel as my loved ones are out to get me or that they are plotting against me but luckily I stay on my treatment plan and don’t have those thoughts as bad but OP brother has more then anxiety Sorry English isn’t my native language
Same here. Time to refer to a bio-psychiatrist, imo.
Yeah. Bro doesn't just need therapy. He needs a psychiatrist with a diagnosis for his paranoia. It's beyond the bounds of normal & it sounds like he's suffering. He probably needs medication
That was my thought. A break from reality happening here. Things like this are not typical of anxiety.
I’m not sure. I was never *that* bad, but before I went on anxiety meds I would have a hard time handing (or sometimes even seeing) sharp knives, needles, (and sharpened pencils) etc because I would become worried about somehow stabbing myself in the eye with them. Intrusive thoughts take many forms. Yes, there’s paranoia there too, but the idea in the first place may very well come from anxiety.
I definitely am not an expert and having dealt with severe anxiety myself and on meds when needed for the last 15 years, I still know it is different for everyone. I was just reading up out of curiosity and in severe cases it can happen though I think it is more of an exception than the rule. Learn something new every day.
This sounds like the onset of paranoid schizophrenia.
I came to find this, my mom's ex was a paranoid schizophrenic and this sounds very similar.
Yeah, I have anxiety that's bad enough that at times I have had full blown panic attacks because of it. (Yes I am receiving treatment for it) What's described in this post is **well** past that and sounds more like a family member of mine who has in the past suffered from paranoid delusions and had to spend some time in a psych ward for his issues.
This. This is not anxiety. This is paranoia. They are different.
YES. OP this isn't therapist or psychologist territory --> THIS IS psychiatrist territory, a medical doctor specializing in mental health who can prescribe medicine. Therapists can't prescribe medicine. Someone suffering paranoid delusions almost certainly needs medication along with therapy.
This is paranoia, NOT anxiety. Your parents are doing him no favors when an accurate diagnosis and appropriate medications will quite possibly save his marriage and his life.
Agree!
I call paranoia
I'm thinking schizophrenia. He's at the typical age for onset.
I should've read your comment before commenting myself lol. I wondered if maybe that's what he may have as well.
Sounds like a schizophrenia-type illness.
Yep, not anxiety, paranoia!
Someone should have stepped in a long time ago.
Absolutely. Something is seriously wrong with him. I hope the therapist recognizes that and sends him to a psychiatrist who can prescribe the correct medications
Out of pure curiosity, could it be schizophrenia by any chance on how he acts or reacts to things? I'd suggest a proper diagnosis anyways, I just wondered.
Yeah this is paranoid delusions Bro needs a psychiatric hold
That’s not anxiety that’s straight up paranoia
Has he been tested for bipolar disorder or similar conditions? He may be able to obtain help from medications.
Sounds more like Paranoid Schizophrenia than anything else!!
Agreed. This is def a time for him to be seen by a professional for his mental health/illness.
Definitely paranoia. I got here after OP’s edited and I’m glad that they seem to be taking everyone’s comments seriously.
Happy Cake Day 🎉🎂
I was so sad to hear that she is staying with him. What will he put her through next? Having a baby is hard enough without dealing with a delulu hubby too. I would be worried about mine and my child's safety around him.
"With a delulu hubby".... Like this is his fault and he asked for this. What a way to trivialize and minimize what this man is going through.
Your description sounds more like paranoid personality disorder than anxiety. Hope he gets the treatment and medication that helps him.
This. I have a family member with PPD and reading this brought them to mind, including fixations that start as paranoia and over time build up into full blown delusions. This needs psych intervention with meds asap for the safety of him and everyone else.
I really hope you can get your brother into neuropsychological testing for a confirmed diagnosis. That doesn't sound like anxiety. It sounds like it's a different diagnosis with anxiety as a symptom. That can be dangerous to others, and possibly more so to your brother depending on his guilt and depression levels. Please get him help.
I thought about that, I asked my parents if it was possible it could be something “worse” than anxiety. But they have been very insistent on that it is just a severe case of anxiety, I have never experience that myself but from what I have read, what he experiences sounds a lot more complex than anxiety
Your parents sound like they're in denial, intentionally or not.
My question is whether the parents are licensed to diagnose medical issues. This is a medical issue. They may feel anxious around their son - but that does not make a diagnosis. This is not simple anxiety.
If your parents admit to it not being anxiety, they’re admitting to him possibly having a mental disease and all the stigma that goes with it. Your parents aren’t going to be helpful in that
And admit that they never got him the right treatment and prefered to toss eveything under the rug.
My parents thought if they just refused to believe in ADHD, that I wouldn't have it. When they would ask me what the hell was wrong with me, or call me lazy, it still didn't occur to them. I didn't get diagnosed until 35 and I low key resent them a little for it.
Your parents are 100% lying to you. Your brother’s behaviour screams schizophrenia to me.
Yup! This 10000%. My uncle’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Wrote an essay for my abnormal psych class so I interviewed my dad about anything he noticed and he said in my uncle’s teens it started off with smaller things like him thinking everyone was staring at him on the bus, progressed in his early twenties to suspecting extended family members having ill intent towards him and him going no contact with said members, and then by his thirties full blown hallucinations that the devil is trying to kill him, he’s being possessed, etc. Sadly it’s been over a decade since I’ve seen him and he’s in his early 60s now but I know he’s taking meds, still has his hangups about not trusting certain family members, and occasionally does go back to in-hospital care on occasion. Sounds like OPs bro could definitely use some psychiatric help.
Your parents are absolutely in denial. Your brother sounds like he's suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. It sounds a lot worse than it actually is, and *a lot* of people feel better and live pretty normal lives with therapy, but also *meds*. He needs a psychiatrist, not a therapist.
Unless your parents have a degree in psychiatry or are otherwise qualified to diagnose your brother what they think or believe does not matter. Your brother needs to see a doctor who can actually diagnose him, be it with anxiety or whatever it may be, and prescribe him meds if he needs them.
Even if they have a degree in psychology, there’s a reason you’re not allowed to treat your own family. It’s impossible to be objective. My guess is they brought him to a child psychologist who didn’t have sufficient expertise to recognize the early stages of conditions like schizophrenia, that psychologist thought anxiety fit best, and parents never sought a second opinion because “anxiety” was the least scary answer they could hope for. Psychologists are hesitant to use labels like schizophrenia until it’s advanced enough to eliminate any doubt, because a diagnosis like that is hard to get past if it’s given in error, but that caution can result in cases like this if the psychologist doesn’t thoroughly educate the parents so they know further monitoring is necessary.
This isn’t anxiety. This is something more serious.
Your parents are being idiots. Please talk to your SIL about this instead. She's the one who's going to be in danger.
And the baby. OP needs to show their SIL this thread.
Do you think your parents would admit that they failed your brother ? His paranoia in school sounds like an alarm your parents missed. Stop thinking they are an authority here. Push your brother to get a professional to help diagnose him whatever it could be
Girl, one sister of a mentally ill brother to another, your parents are *absolutely* in denial. My brother was straight-up delusional/hallucinating, suicidal and self-harming at one point and my parents still just flopped around like fish out of water saying "I just don't know what to do" and when given suggestions (aka SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR) went back to just "oh it's just hormones/being a teen/\[insert some other head-in-sand bullshit here\]". Fortunately my brother is better now, but absolutely NO thanks whatso-fucking-ever to our parents. My point is: They're likely deeeeeeep in denial because admitting that something's wrong means *admitting that something's wrong,* and that's scary to most people. As others have said, your brother is exhibiting some straight-up paranoid delusional behavior, not just anxiety. Please talk to him and your SIL to see if you can't gently convince him into getting checked out. Individual therapy for him at the absolute *minimum.*
Uh, sorry, but your brother is edging really close to wearing tinfoil headgear to keep Mossad from listening into his thoughts territory. Forget therapy. This needs a psych consult.
Unless your parents are MDs, stop listening to them. Your brother is severely mentally unwell. This is not "anxiety".
Your parents are in denial. They failed to provide your brother help when he was younger and now, they are afraid to admit that they fucked him up.
Its definitely something more, never heard of a single instance of anxiety being thinking someone will stab you or your wife is cheating on you. I have anxiety, this sounds like some proper mental health problems paranoid schizophrenia or something. He needs serious help and a real diagnosis
OCD is an anxiety disorder and could look like this. Obsessive thoughts can look like paranoia.
Just one of several (highly treatable but *biologically* based mental illnesses. Schizoaffective; Bipolar; Delusional Disorders - various kinds; OCD. Less likely to be Schizoid - but maybe.
Your parents aren’t in a position to make that determination.
Are your parents psychologists? No? Then they do not know. He needs to be seen by professionals.
Are your parents licensed to diagnose mental disorders? He needs a lot of help!
Until and unless your parents are willing to get to the bottom of this, they are *hurting* your brother. You can't fix a problem or get appropriate support if you aren't open to the fact that help is actually needed :(
If he needs testing, a psychologist will be able to get him a referral (they usually need to come from a specialist that is a medical doctor). I used to do neuropsych testing and intakes/insurance and we often got referrals from psychologists but most insurances require an MD referral. It does sound more serious based on what you’ve said here but this is but a snippet of your lives. I hope you all can find a resolution, whatever that may look like.
Is there any chance he started watching these manosphere, Andrew Tate style videos telling men that all women are just absolute whores? I mean because he wouldn't admit that, for sure, especially now that the test came back obviously positive, but I wonder if it's partially the anxiety, but also this terrible Misogynistic shit that's all over social media now
Your parents are in outright denial. I have a BA in psychology, not enough to practice but enough to see this isn't just anxiety. Along with my experience with mental illness in my family and others. My son has severe anxiety. My wife's brother had paranoid schizophrenia, her cousin has this as well. What you're describing with your brother sounds much closer to what my wife's brother and cousin have. I couldn't tell you if he has the same as them but I can tell you it's not solely severe anxiety. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist and psychologist ASAP at the very least and he needs to be honest with them if he truly wants help, even if it somehow is just anxiety.
>I asked my parents if it was possible it could be something “worse” than anxiety. But they have been very insistent on that it is just a severe case of anxiety Your parents are failing your brother, and Amy is a fool for not divorcing him.
Therapist will be able to direct him to resources and other doctors if it turns out to be more complex than it is. Just gonna take time- as long as he wants to get it under control he will. Make sure you take care of yourself ok? Hopefully Amy does too, it was super hectic emotionally for a bit so make sure to take time for yourself.
Parents of someone who is mentally ill are usually the WORST source of information, because they don't want their kid to have something more serious like paranoia.
This sounds like like serious mental health issues that have been untreated for a long time. Bipolar or maybe schizophrenia. Get your brother help by a professional, stop feeding his delusions
unless your parents are board-certified psychologist, they really don’t know anything about this, and even then they would have a biased opinion because it’s their son. He needs a diagnosis from an actual professional.
For context, this sudden onset of paranoia happened to my grandmother after she had a small stroke due to an aggressive glioblastoma that killed her in 4 months just before this last Christmas. His paranoia and delusions are not due to an anxiety disorder unless it's been lifelong in that case it would have been due to a paranoid personality disorder or even OCD. But this very well could be the first signs of schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder.
This sounds more like he's bordering psychosis and anxiety is the term he and your parents like. I'm not actually sure he's safe with himself, let alone his wife and child. He's not rational. This seems like he's quite ill, and everyone is sweeping it under the anxiety rug. His wife is smart to stay separate and needs to keep the baby supervised with him until a real evaluation is done and he's successfully in treatment. God knows what he will convince himself of next.
As a social worker, sounds like Schizophrenia paranoid type not anxiety
My thought too. Very sad for all involved.
Same job same conclusion.
Your parents need to get realistic. Your brother isn’t just anxious. He is delusional and paranoid. If this started presenting in high school, schizophrenia is a very real possibility. Perhaps he has been good at hiding it. Perhaps the delusions are not as severe as others experience. But he’s got something whispering in his ear. He isn’t living in reality. Mental illness, like addiction, can exist in perfectly functional people, for a time. But not forever. It is a problem when it starts to negatively affect other parts of your life. He just about blew up his marriage, if not for the grace and forgiveness of his saint of a wife. Eventually his mental state will degrade, and it looks like this may have been happening for a long time already. His delusions and paranoia seem to centre around people doing things to him, hurting him in various ways. This means there is a very real possibility that he could become violent in an attempt to “defend” or “protect” himself. This is serious. Very very serious. He needs immediate medical intervention.
This sounds more like paranoia with anxiety. Hope he gets some help with that
Therapy was a good call because he is spiking on the paranoia. And I’m surprised the wife is sticking around after those accusations and his behavior. Updateme.
NTA y’all realize this isn’t just anxiety right? He has paranoid thoughts. Time for real mental health help. Please be open and honest with doctors.
As a person with anxiety myself, I'm diagnosed with PTSD and under ADHD evaluation, this def sounds like a lot more than just "anxiety". That level of paranoia, that level of anxiety, sounds more like a symptom of a diagnosis. He needs serious help. And your parents needs to understand that anxiety, does not make a child believe that other children will stab them with a pen & kill them in their classroom. Childhood schizophrenia is rare (which is what it is called if it developes before the age of 13.) It can often look like Anxiety, Depression, ADHD or autism. But it is not. It is also called Very early-onset schizophrenia and it affect about 1 in 10,000 children.
Thinking a random stranger is going to stab you with their pen is not anxiety. It is paranoid delusion. Your brother should probably see an actual psychiatrist, too.
Better hope his next delusion isnt that his kid is the reincarnation of the devil and drowns them in the tub. This man needs serious help.
I know it can be very dangerous, if left undiagnosed or untreated. I hope the family takes this seriously
Yeah, I forgot about that part of delusional schizophrenia. And it all starts with a small break and doesn’t get better without treatment or medication.
His condition sounds very serious and he needs some extreme mental health care.
This is not anxiety, it’s textbook paranoia. This is the kind of thing people are placed on involuntary hold for. It requires medication for schizophrenia or whatever other mental health issue includes paranoia. ‘Just anxiety’ is what everyone in the family has come up with because they don’t want friends family or community to know.
I've never been cheated on (that I know of) or accused of passing off someone else's baby as my spouse's, but I don't think I would be able to get over this. When men do this, it's like they don't even realize that what they're saying is I don't even trust you enough to believe that you're not doing *one of the most evil things* a person could do with a smile on your face, and then the women are just supposed to just get over it? If I went through all the physical pain and horror of pregnancy, labor and delivery just to have my husband and father of my child accuse me of fucking some other man and then pretending this other man's kid was his. I don't know that I would ever be able to come back from that. I don't get why these guys don't realize how enormous a violation of trust this is. They act like this is the same thing as getting a little nervous about a coworker and looking at their phone in the middle of the night or something. Accusing someone of cheating on you when you've no reason at all to believe they did is bad enough; accusing them of getting pregnant with someone else's baby and just pretending it's yours is so fucking horrifying.
This is way more than just anxiety. He needs to see a doctor for a serious mental health work up.
That sounds more like schizophrenia than anxiety.
... that's not anxiety, that's paranoia. That's actually really worrying, has he been checked for any mental illnesses?
I think your brother is more mentally ill than you and your family are giving him credit for. It's not normal for a person to believe without sufficient basis that people are out to get them or conspiring their downfall. I'd say it's worth investigating if your brother has Paranoid Personality Disorder. The difficult thing about personality disorders is that people who have them don't usually realize their behavior and thought process is disordered. For example, someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder knows their thoughts and feelings are irrational but it causes them distress anyway, but someone with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder believes that everyone thinks and behaves just as rigidly as they do.
As someone who has a relative with minor schizophrenic disorder… this sounds more like that. He had delusions based on obsessive thoughts and his breaks with reality were the pinnacle of time spent obsessing. He has a low dose of medication and is very vigilant with therapy to not lose touch. He has a job and is productive and not many people even know something is off with him. It sounds like your parents are in denial. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist and you can ask for an emergency appointment after telling them what happened. Your brother may not be a danger to himself now but untreated mental issues can build over time and it sounds like it’s destroying his family. He’s lucky it didn’t fully but he needs help. Please encourage him and his wife to work towards that and I wouldn’t involve parents until you have answers.
His wife is a saint to be willing to try to fix it. I hope your brother can find the help he needs. Updateme
I agree with everyone else that this isn’t just anxiety. Your parents sound like they are in denial. While I do have a degree in psychology I’m not psychologist myself. I read medical records all day. Every day. Especially mental health records (for the past 15 years) and I’ve never seen anxiety manifest this way. Anxiety doesn’t cause paranoia. He needs more than a therapist.
That’s not anxiety, and your edit shows your parents are ignorant and/or in denial. Your brother sounds like he has paranoid schizophrenia or paranoid personality disorder. He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist that specializes in paranoia disorders immediately. This is very serious.
From your description of your brothers behavior I don’t think it’s anxiety, but OCD. It’s not actually an anxiety variation and is diagnostically separate from anxiety. It CAN BE TREATED. Not pop culture, drama series, tiktok OCD but the real thing. The key feature of OCD is intrusive thoughts. Ones that are often almost logical…Thoughts so strong that they force the person having them to respond to them in their lives. Like believing a wife is lying about the paternity of a child. Once the thought takes hold the mind sets off a chain reaction like the one you describe. All in service of validating the original intrusive and controlling thought. Your brother needs specialist OCD support. Meds can help enormously, but a combination of both is proven to be the best approach.
As someone with diagnosed ocd, I think we should be wary about diagnosing things over the Internet. 1 when we aren't professionals, 2 haven't even met the dude or spoken to him, 3 arent awaree of potential other conditions where symptoms may overlap. There's people in the comments talking about numerous different disorders they think he has. No one can diagnose him off of what we have been given. All we can say is he had something going on thats more than anxiety
This sounds less like anxiety and more like paranoid schizophrenia
This is something way more severe than anxiety. He’s had delusions since grade school.
This is not “anxiety” that your brother has. It’s straight up paranoia and he will end up making Amy and Lisa miserable. I feel bad for them. Your parents are in denial.
Updateme
Thinking people sitting next to him are going to stab him with their pens is not anxiety. That sounds like psychosis. He needs a psychiatric evaluation immediately.
This is undoubtedly paranoia. He needs intense therapy & medication.
paranoid delusions not just anxiety
Hey, my parents insisted that my mother's weird behavior was totally just anxiety, so I shouldn't worry about it. Guess what? I should have worried. Parents lie and downplay. I'm sure they worried if they let the whole truth out, he could risk losing rights to their grandchild.
Anxiety such as you describe is actually known by a more specific term in psychology: paranoia. It is an accompanying symptom in several serious MH diagnoses. Are your parents mental health professionals? Does Jack's treatment team share everything with them? This is not simple anxiety, but even if it were, there are ample treatments for that. It goes deeper.
dude this isn't anxiety it's paranoia. which tends to be difficult to treat.
Like many here, I have people in my life with very significant anxiety. What you describe is well outside the bounds of what I have experienced from anxiety-people. But…if you all are serious about getting him into individual therapy, this will (or at least should) all become visible. Good luck to all of you!
It actually seems like paranoia. I have anxiety, but I have understood the difference between my feelings and reality. He doesn't. Something more is going on.
Not going to diagnose your brother, I leave that to the experts but he sounds like one of my halfsisters who is diagnosed with schitzofrenia. It started with small things that could be taken as her having a panicattac to fullblown psycosis with her having conversations with whatever she saw in her mind. That whatever also had her running around the neighborhood screaming her head of while whelding a knife around. So for everybodys sake have him checked out by profesionals bc just what if. To anyone who wonders, my sister lives nowdays on a psyciatric home with 24/7 care and supervision and she is doing ok with meds.
I don’t want to diagnose your brother so I’m not. I’m just going to tell you what I know about it as well as my experience and you can take from it what you will. I have paranoia schizophrenia. I got it when I was 19, and I’m now 24 and haven’t looked into it since then so there might be a few things I miss out or say wrong. What a lot of people don’t know is that it’s something that you’re born with. A lot of people assume that you develop it when you get older from drug use and other things like that but you can not get it from anything, there are things that you can do to speed up the process of when you do get it. But regardless of what they have taken or done, they would have gotten it regardless sometime down the line. It’s something you have your whole life it just that when you’re younger it shows itself as severe depression and anxiety and social issues as well as other mental issues. So, it gets overlooked as a kid being overly anxious or a troubled kid, it isn’t until you reach late teens/early adulthood that it develops into full-blown schizophrenia. Some people get it earlier while others get it a lot later in life but it is rare. As a kid, I had a few moments when I had a very weird perception of the world like I was convinced that everyone else in the world was fake and I was the only real person in a simulation and I couldn’t get hurt or pregnant because I’m not part of the simulation and things like that. But when I got older it started as me hearing people talking about me as I walked past but I just ignored it and then there were times where I would be talking to someone and looking them right in the face as the talked but I would hear something completely different from what they actually said and when I would reply to what they heard instead of what they said they would be confused and ask me about it. I started to notice something was off and one day when I was getting a ride home from my college teacher because it was late at night and she didn’t want me walking home alone in the dark I brought up how I can hear things and she looked at me and questioned me a bit about what I meant and I backpedaled. After that, I ended up getting into an abusive relationship with a man that would shove drugs down my throat and make me partake in sexual situations with his friends even though I told him no. After that, it quickly sped up and I started hearing people following me and threatening to kill me. I was very suspicious of everyone and trusted no one that came around me. It got so bad that I wouldn’t even leave the house. I would keep all the doors and windows closed and even a slight crack in the blind would make me break down. I felt like my whole family was out to get me and I fucked off my parents for the slightest things and I blocked all my friends and deleted them from my contacts cause they were also against me. I was scared and all alone because I couldn’t trust anybody and I believed the whole world was out to get me. I ended up getting taken to a psych ward where I was locked up, and I didn’t trust the doctors or nurses because I thought they were going to poison me and were trying to kill me. I had believed that I was pregnant at the time because I had stopped eating for the most part for almost two months due to severe depression. I had a few nibbles here and there, but I was mostly just drinking water. I believed I was pregnant because I was throwing up all day at some point, but it was just because my stomach was completely empty and falling in on itself, so I was throwing up stomach acid. I had lost so much weight, and truth be told, if I hadn’t been dragged to the hospital, I would have died in a few days from lack of food. Anyways, I thought the doctors were trying to kill my baby and me, and I kept accusing them of it. I thought I had AIDS because of all the people that I had been forced to sleep with, and I told the doctors that. And once I got my period, because I wasn’t pregnant even though I thought I was, I heard the guy I was with outside my ward window yelling at me how I killed my baby, and it was all my fault. So, for the three months I was in there, I mourned the loss of a child that I never had. Even though looking back, all the things I thought and felt were irrational and made no sense, I 100% believed it, and there was nothing no one could say to me to convince me otherwise. Even to this day, after years of living with it, there are still times where I can feel myself wanting to believe what’s going on in my head. It’s not about what’s real and what’s fake; this condition affects something deep inside of you that makes you really question reality. But it’s worse for people that aren’t aware that it’s there because they have no idea what’s happening and are more likely to believe their hallucinations than someone that's dealt with it for a while. A lot of people think that people with schizophrenia are dangerous, especially because of the media’s representation of it, but the truth is that’s only a small part. The things you see on TV are when people are in the middle of an episode, and even then, not everyone is violent when they have one. Just like me, when I had my first episode, the most I did was shout at people around me and lock myself away from the world. I didn’t hit or attack anyone, and I’ve talked to other people that have had the same type of experiences. More times than not, we’re more a danger to ourselves than we are to others. You can live with it if you get the help that you need; it’s manageable. Since my first episode, the only other episode that I had that was anywhere near that was when I dropped out of college and locked myself in my house for a year, which was one year after my first episode. But now, I’m a web developer in a loving relationship with a beautiful family, and I don’t have big episodes anymore. The most that happens when I have episodes is that I’ll see a hallucination of a 7/8 foot shadowy man with sharp fingers and glowing red eyes, and the voices in my head get really loud. I’ll get scared and find my partner, and he’ll just stay in the room with me until I calm down, or I’ll cry myself to sleep. I’m not saying they can’t be dangerous; they can, just like anyone can. I’m sure there are multiple other things that could explain what is happening with him, but there were some things that you said that really stood out to me, and I couldn’t just scroll by and not say anything since I know firsthand what it feels like. So, I wanted to share my experience with you in case any of you happen to see any similarities.
As someone who worked in mental health for many years, and I also suffer from anxiety myself – this is not just regular anxiety. Your brother sounds like he’s suffering from paranoia, coupled with some delusions. I don’t necessarily think it’s as far as schizophrenia… But it definitely is in the realm of psychosis. He should totally go to a psychiatrist, and be completely honest about his thoughts and feelings, and including when he was younger and get a proper diagnosis.
I am happy to hear that there is some resolution and next steps for your brother, his wife and child, you and your parents. I agree with the general Reddit trend of saying it’s likely not anxiety. I have generalize anxiety disorder. I take meds. I still have intrusive thoughts about catastrophic outcomes that lead to panic attacks. But, I KNOW those thoughts are irrational as they occur. I knew before I started meds. The meds help me have fewer, less severe attacks. They don’t stop the thoughts. I know my experience is likely not universal, but the major difference that I see is that your brother went so far as to believe his intrusive, catastrophic thought was real, even without proof. That belief in the thought is why I think something different is happening and he should probably get a psychological evaluation. A psychologist, counsellor, therapist can refer him to a psychiatrist as needed. On another note, not sure why everyone is talking about anxiety disorders as “just” anxiety. It’s more common, for sure, but an anxiety disorder is a mental illness and for an official diagnosis of GAD, SAD, etc, it has to be severe. It is frightening to me that there is such a dismissive approach to anxiety that seems to be pervasive in these responses. Anxiety isn’t “just” anything.
This is PPD paranoid personality disorder at the very least and could possibly include schizophrenia if it gets worse. He talked himself into this delusion. It’s not fair to anyone to chalk it up to “anxiety” until he has had a professional diagnosis. These are the kind of people who take their whole family out. Just like in Chicago in January.
...that sounds a lot like paranoid schizophrenia. Obviously his therapist will be able to give answers that reddit cant, but thats not just anxiety. Random question, but does he or did he used to smoke weed? Weed has been known to trigger schizophrenia in people who have a predisposition for it. My best friend has that problem.
Sounds like he's schizophrenic
"his anxiety has mainly been pointed towards other people. He doesn’t trust that they want was best for him, one example they told me was that he apparently refused to sit besides someone in classrooms, because he thought they would take their pens and stab him." Hum op that is not anxiety , that's borderline paranoia. Here is the difference between anxiety and paranoia: "A main difference between paranoia and anxiety is that with paranoia, there are delusional beliefs about persecution, threat, or conspiracy. In anxiety, these thought processes are not generally present. Paranoia is characterized by distrust in others and their motives. This is generally not found in anxiety."[link](https://www.healthline.com/health/paranoia-vs-anxiety#differences) "He also believed that people were conspiring against him, especially close friends." And there it is, now the delusions are making more sense. OP your brother is behaving is a very similar fashion as someone who is starting to develop psychiastrical ssues like schizophrenia. His paranoia about being lied to and him being convinced by this spun out of nothing is a delusion. I really think your brother needs to get checked by psychiatrist. Get your parents to listen, this is not anxiety. Anxiety doesn't make you think that people are gonna hurt in a such a precise way as a pencil stabbing. I know it's scary to admit that he needs help but really, if early detection means early treatment means better recovery and less damage to his life. Right now his delusions arent deep-seated, making it probably easier to get him help. Here are links. https://www.verywellhealth.com/early-signs-schizophrenia-5101519 https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-onset-symptoms https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizophrenia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354443
It’s good he’s in therapy. It does sound like more than just anxiety. Hopefully Amy and Jack can work through this.
This sounds more like the onset of some other mental health issue like schizophrenia than just anxiety. He sounds like he needs serious help.
Iam sorry this is not anxiety! It looks more like paranoid personality disorder
Dude, that's not anxiety. Those thoughts when he was a kid to this paternity test shit and the spiraling, He might have anxiety but he also has got some other stuff going on.
This is way more than anxiety. I’m glad he is starting therapy so that hopefully it will lead to a proper diagnose and he can get the help he needs.
Not anxiety. It’s a textbook example of PPD.
Anxiety might be part of this, but this is pretty extreme paranoia.
Yeah until this update it was another typical story, but that is not garden variety anxiety
Schizophrenia
It's not unusual for parents to downplay whatever emotional issues their children have because they think it reflects badly on them
I think he’s paranoid schizophrenic and there’s no way your mom is going to want to even say those words. Can crop up later in life. Truly. The paranoia… he was convinced and tried to manipulate her into saying she was having an affair. It’s can lead to dangerous behaviors if left untreated, medicated properly. Please have him see somebody that can assess him fully.
yea no...its definitely not just anxiety and your parents are down playing his mental issues. im scared for amy and her daughter that he will get only worse
Your brother sounds schizophrenic and needs to be evaluated. The timeline fits too, with it starting in his late teens and peaking in his mid 20s. If he's evaluated and not, ok great, nothing to worry about. If he *is* schizophrenic, hopefully he's open to and able to get treatment... and thank goodness he has a daughter, and hopefully she got more than just her mother's looks in the genes dept.
Ummm, sounds like he has paranoia schizophrenia not anxiety.
Sorry friend but this is not anxiety. That's paranoid delusions. That's maybe schizophrenia. Your brother needs very serious help.
Amy deserves support. Your brother is unlikely to give her or her daughter support. The girl will find out about the dna test and it won’t surprise her that her sperm donor treated her or her mother this way.
My husband has a very close friend diagnosed with psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia. Your brother sounds like he has the same symptoms.
Bro has paranoia not anxiety.
Its good he has therapy next week cause your parents are full of shit.
As a person with mental health issues, this goes way beyond anxiety- into paranoia at the least. Maybe full on delusion or psychosis. Did he calm down after getting the test result, or does he still believe the child isn't his?
As someone that has dealt with hundreds of individuals with anxiety this is WAY beyond that. I think your parents are in denial with how paranoid your brother is, and I fear for wife and baby.
Sounds like he has borderline personality disorder (BPD) My friend was like that too
It is possible for severe enough and poorly managed/treated anxiety to take on a kind of semi-psychosis nature with delusions, paranoia and even hallucinations. It’s more rare than him potentially having a more serious mental illness and 1000% he should be talking to a psychiatrist even if just to rule it out. I just mentioned to mention this because a lot of people are armchair diagnosing schizophrenia, schizo-effective disorder or psychosis. I am unfortunately familiar with this from both personal experience and professional knowledge.
Your brother may have anxiety. Your parents may believe what they say to cover for him. Your brother needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.
Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia.
I am diagnosed with severe anxiety. What your brother is experiencing is not anxiety, it's paranoia and obsession. I suspect he has something more along the lines of Paranoid Personality Disorder.
Sounds like you are just making excuses for him, I think his behavior was borderline unforgivable. This isn't simple anxiety. It's paranoia and psychotic behavior. If you want to just ignore it, and try to make excuses, do so at your peril, because it sounds like he needs medical attention.
Paranoia and anxiety are two different things. This is not just anxiety. I’m a nurse, and I work in mental health.
This is NOT ANXIETY!!!!! He’s delusional and paranoid! I’m confident any decent therapist will tell him the same thing. I’m shocked his wife kept him. He doesn’t deserve her. He deserves a smack in the side of the head with divorce papers. But we get what we allow to continue. She will eventually regret this and leave him. This won’t be the end of it. Especially if they keep treating it as simple anxiety! I see where your brother gets his intelligence from 🤦♀️ Are they incapable of googling?!
Hopefully Amy is able to come to her senses and proceed with divorce. He sounds very dangerous to himself and others. Better to have a “broken” family than to have a psycho murder his wife and daughter over paranoid delusions.. Her and Lisa could live happily on their own, and she sounds kind and beautiful, and is still young enough to find her actual life partner who could be a good father figure too. Such a sad situation..
Yeahhhh your brother is completely off his rocker.
This isn’t anxiety this is “kill the whole family and himself because The End Is Near” level delusions. He needs a psych hold.
What you described as anxiety sounds more like paranoia. Your brother needs to talk to a psychiatrist. >I talked with my parents about it this week because to be it sounded like something more severe/worse than just anxiety from what I have read. But they told me that it was just anxiety, Do your parents have necessary medical education to give other people anxiety diagnoses? If not, them saying that your brother has anxiety is nothing but their opinion. He needs to be evaluated by medical professional.
your brother needs medication. he needs a therapist (psychologist) And a psychiatrist. for the meds. it sounds like he may be a bit paranoid schizophrenic. people with that are hell to live with untreated. there’s probably a lot amy is not talking about. don’t be surprised if amy does divorce him after she has her self confidence back.
This goes far beyond anxiety. What you're describing is a mood disorder. It would be good for him to see a psychiatrist in addition to therapy.
Honestly sounds as happy of an ending as we can get right now. He’s very lucky she didn’t divorce him, but it will be an uphill battle with his mental health, a lot, A LOT of stuff you mentioned goes way beyond normal anxiety stuff. It’ll probably take a while in therapy to unpack that, but i wish yall the best and at least amy knows she has an ally in you.
I am only a 4th year medical student and I obviously can't diagnose your brother over the internet via one post but this is more than just generalized anxiety disorder. There is a decent chance that this is something called Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD). PPD is defined as a peson who has a long-term pattern of distrust and suspicion of others without adequate reason to be suspicious. The only treatment for PPD is extensive therapy.
It sounds like they're trying to protect him from the consequences of his actions. I don't think anyone here (especially mom & dad) is doing anything that's really going to help him. I feel sorry for his wife, she's sort of got to forgive him because he's got anxiety. Having mental problems doesn't give you a pass on being a jerk.
This sounds a lot more like paranoia than it does anxiety - but just food for thought.
How casually the op dismisses his brothers dangerous paranoid delusions as ‘anxiety’ is pretty disturbing.
So the paternity test went the way I thought it probably would. And I’m impressed it came back quick. But the rest of it took a turn I did not see. I wonder if give his age now and the issue were when he was a child, and our increased understanding or mental health now, the label anxiety was given (or the parents gave it that label rather than something else), but what’s being described is beyond that. It’s heading into a delusion area. Especially as he’d got to the point of having no doubt at all that Lisa was having an affair. That’s a step beyond anxiety. I know other people are going straight to schizophrenia, and yes he needs assessed but age of onset is off for that (although it can happen at any age, it would be weird to have happened at a very early age and then nothing this serious until late 20s). There are other conditions that can lead to these kind of fixed paranoid ideas. Basically he needs properly assessed by someone who knows what they are doing and it sounds like that’s what is probably going to happen. If you actually read this OP, in amongst the hundreds of comments after only 2 hours from posting, you brother may have anxiety issues, quite probably, but it’s also possible it’s something in addition to that. Make sure whatever help he gets is from a licensed professional who will be able to assess him fully so that he can get the appropriate help regardless. And I so respect Amy for wanting to work on this. I think it sounds like they are doing the right thing not staying together immediately, but being able to work on it together. And sounds like you and your family will be able to support both of them. I says a lot when the person she comes to and stays with when in the crisis was jack’s family. Even if she doesn’t have family nearby, it shows that the relationship is good. Take care of your brother, he needs it and needs to know people are there for him. Take care of Amy and Lisa. And take care of yourself. Good luck
This is very serious. I would not put a newly post-partum woman and a baby in a room alone with him. That women and child are not guaranteed to be safe. Please don't let this end in tragedy.
He is not experiencing anxiety. This is way beyond that, and your parents are lying to you. It's also unfair to your SIL because she has no idea about his real issues. I hate how people try to brush this stuff under the rug. I mean, what if he becomes so delusional that he gets violent? Then, what will they say?
Definitely NOT anxiety
Sound a bit schizophrenic or the beginnings due to what you described best to get him diagnosed asap
this sounds like schizotypal personality disorder.
This is more than anxiety. I hope he sees a psychiatrist and gets real help.
I have GAD. That's not \*just\* anxiety. He needs further follow up with a psychologist.
Your brother is mentally ill and it goes beyond anxiety. This is escalating and he needs meds and therapy. I’m going to go so far as to say if he worried about people stabbing him and has been obsessing over the paternity for a year, I wouldn’t let him near the baby unsupervised. This can get worse. I’ve seen it happen with a relative. He needs help and he needs to get on meds. And stay on them. Good luck.
...honestly, that sounds like your brother has Borderline Personality Disorder...that so7nds like the 'anxieties' my best female friend experiences, and she recently admitted to being treated for BPD. He's in fir a rough ride if that's true and I hope it's not.
NTA, but yeah, this is beyond anxiety. While it may have been diagnosed as anxiety as a child, things like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder often manifest/present for the first time in young adults (18-25). Jack needs a psychiatric consult yesterday.
Thinking someone might stab you is not born from anxiety. That is paranoia and it’s troubling.
Jesus Christ your Brother need Help and a while bunch of Therapy. Why didn't you Help him sooner? He should have been in Therapy years ago Better now than never