I found myself a shrink in the fall. Dad mailed me the report from Hamilton's shrink. I got it when I made it back to Kegs. It was about a dozen pages long and made absolutely no sense to me. It only made sense to another shrink. I couldn't even look it up on the Internet, since nobody had gotten around to inventing it yet. Eventually I just tucked it in my drawer and went about my business.
Midway through the semester I got to thinking about it again. RPI didn't have any sort of medical or pre-medical program, so I couldn't find a friendly teacher to quiz. Maybe Professor Rhineburg knew somebody I could ask, or at least know where to start. I hit him up one day in his office when he was alone.
"Excuse me, Professor, got a moment?"
"Sure, Carl, what's up?"
I sat down across from him. "Do you know any psychiatrists?"
"Why? Finally starting to go crazy around here?", he joked.
"No, sir, it's not about me."
He sat upright at that and looked across his desk. "Wait, you're serious? What in the world do you need a psychiatrist for?"
I shrugged and gave him some background. "It's not me, sir, it's my brother. He's seeing a shrink, and my father sent me his preliminary report, and it might as well be written in Greek for all the good it's doing me." It was actually worse than that. Most mathematicians and physicists can actually read Greek, at least the alphabet, since we use it in math so much.
He nodded. "Yeah, that I know. Well, I don't know any psychiatrists, but Janet is a psychologist. She might be able to help you."
I looked surprised at that. "Your wife is a psychologist? I thought she taught over at Albany State?"
"She does. She teaches psychology."
"Oh." You learn something every day, I suppose. "Do you think she would see me?"
"Probably. I'll ask her tonight. At the minimum, I'll have her call you.", he offered.
"Thanks, thanks a lot!"
I talked to Janet Rhineburg that evening, and she agreed to meet me on Monday after her classes, in her office over at Albany State. I was to bring the psychiatrist's report with me. I made sure I was there early. She brought me into her office, we chatted briefly, and then I gave her the report. She read it twice, once just skimming through, and then a second time, much more thoroughly.
Then she set it down and sighed. "I'm very sorry to hear this, Carl. What would you like to know?"
I shrugged. "I don't know, not really. I don't even know exactly what it all means. There are words in there I swear aren't in the dictionary!"
Janet laughed at that. "We're doctors. We never use three syllables when four are available. Let's take it from the top. Your brother suffers from a form of mental illness called schizophrenia. I assume you've heard of it before."
"Sure. It's like he doesn't believe in reality or something, right."
"No, that's not really it. It's more that the sufferer is detached from reality, and in his own individual reality. His thought patterns are confused and disordered, he can be delusional and hallucinate, maybe see and hear things that aren't there, and exhibit signs of social dysfunction."
"Huh. Well, I've never heard of Hamilton hallucinating, but he has delusions, at least about me, and he isn't very social."
She nodded and continued, "Your brother has a type of schizophrenia known as paranoid schizophrenia. Now, forget about everything you have ever seen on television. They toss that diagnosis around like candy. Almost nothing that they show is true."
I gave her a wry smile at that. "I believe you!"
"In paranoid schizophrenia, many of the delusions and hallucinations are paranoid, or persecutory in nature. For instance, all of your brother's problems are because of you, in this case. If you weren't around, there wouldn't be any problems, that sort of thing.", she said.
"You keep mentioning hallucinations. As far as I know, he has never seen or heard things."
"That's all right. Not every case is identical. There are plenty of other indicators in the report. Certainly the delusions about you are what brings the diagnosis into the specifics of paranoia. He has had strong feelings about you from an early age."
I had to think about that. We had never been close, not even as little children, and it had gotten worse as we grew older. "Okay, I might buy that. We've never been close, and we used to fight all the time, at least until I got older."
"Oh?"
"Well, by the time I hit my teens, it just was obvious to me that we would never get along, and I just began to ignore him. I stayed out of our room unless I was sleeping, and would leave when he was around. It was easier than putting up with him."
"In a way, you were making it worse. By ignoring him, you were feeding his delusion that you hated him and were working against him. How much younger is he?"
"Two years.", I told her.
"So when you were in your early teens, he was 11 or 12. This is often when schizophrenic behavior becomes more marked.", Janet replied.
That made my eyes open. Hamilton's behavior became decidedly worse as I grew older. "One thing I noticed was that the more successful I became, the more he began losing it. As I began advancing through school faster, he became more aggressive towards me."
"You were feeding the delusion. By moving ahead of him, you must have been doing something to hold him back. I know, I know, you weren't, but that is part of the delusional and disorganized thinking pattern typical of paranoid schizophrenia."
"Huh." I thought about it some more. "What about the other stuff mentioned? Anhedonism? Avoluntary? Something like that."
Janet leafed through the report and found the proper page. "Anhedonia - that is a negative symptom." She saw me looking at her in total bafflement. "There are both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. A positive symptom is something the patient has - delusions, hallucinations, bizarre thinking patterns, that sort of thing." I nodded slowly, and she went on. "A negative symptom is something the patient does not have, at least not compared to normal people. Anhedonia means the lack of pleasure - hedonia is the root of hedonism - and shows that the sufferer does not enjoy things that others enjoy. Asociality means your brother has an extremely limited number of friends or relationships, if any. Avolition means almost a total lack of drive and motivation. Your brother shows practically all the negative symptoms, even though he does not have the positive symptom of hallucinations."
I sat there stunned for a few minutes. Hearing it explained to me made it all so clear. Previously, on the first trip around, Marilyn and I had constantly commented to each other about Hamilton's behavior, and it was all the negative symptoms Janet Rhineburg was discussing. He had no friends that anybody knew of, never dated - ever!, never drank, smoked, or did drugs. He spent over 30 years working as a clerk in the billing department of the phone company, 20 of them on the graveyard shift, where nobody could bother him. In fact, he threw a royal bloody fit when he got bumped to the day shift because of seniority. Everybody else begs to go to days, he was begging to stay on nights! He could never finish anything important, and we often talked about the bizarre, to us, lack of interest in much of anything other than history books and war games. He lived in the house with my parents his entire life, until they died, in the same room that he and I shared when we were teens.