What to Do When a Sibling Comes Home From a Mental Health Hospital: Real Tips From Experience
I’m standing at the washing machine folding laundry, and I keep refolding the same gray skate hoodie over and over. My parents left 45 minutes ago to pick up my 14-year-old little brother from the inpatient mental health hospital he’s been in for two months. The spare room down the hall just got a fresh coat of light blue paint, his favorite, and I restocked his go-to snack, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, on the lowest shelf of the pantry so he can grab them without asking. But I’m terrified.
The last time I saw him before he was admitted, I found him on the bathroom floor after he took a handful of pills. Paramedics carried him out past the broken coffee mug he’d thrown an hour earlier, when he was screaming that no one got how much his head hurt. I haven’t lived at home full time since I started college, but I took this semester off to take classes online and help my parents out. I’ve been the one rearranging the house, returning insurance calls, sitting through care planning meetings. No one asked me if I was ready for him to come home. I wouldn’t have known how to answer if they did.
The car pulls into the driveway, and I back up against the kitchen counter. He gets out, hood pulled up over his hair, sneakers scuffed the same as always. He doesn’t smile when my mom tells him we repainted his room. He just nods, grabs his duffel, walks past me to his room, and closes the door. I stand there holding the skate hoodie, and I don’t know what to do.
For the first three days, I tiptoe around the house. I turn my study music down, I don’t invite friends over, I stop having loud phone calls with my college roommate. I keep asking him every hour if he wants water, a snack, or if he wants to talk. On the third night, he comes out of his room, slams a bag of chips on the counter, and says, “Stop treating me like I’m a bomb that’s gonna go off if you breathe too loud.”
I’d stuffed the discharge notes the care coordinator gave us in a junk drawer, skipping over all the generic lines about “being supportive” that didn’t mean anything to me. I pulled them out that night and re-read them, stopping at two lines I’d marked and forgotten. The first said “bring back boring routines, not big events.” The second said “give specific choices instead of open-ended offers.” That’s when I started adjusting, small, concrete changes that didn’t require a big family meeting or a dramatic heart-to-heart.
The next day, when I headed to the grocery store, I texted him instead of knocking on his door: “I’m getting soda, do you want to come with or do you want me to bring you back a Mountain Dew?” No pressure to “get out of the house and have fun” just a clear choice. He texted back “come with,” so we went, didn’t talk much, just walked up and down the aisles, and that was fine. I stopped asking “are you okay?” 10 times a day. Instead, when he’s sitting on the couch staring at a black TV screen, I say “do you want to watch that stupid car show we used to love, or do you want me to leave you alone?” If he wants space, I leave, no hurt feelings, no big comment about how I’m here if he needs me. I still keep a bag of Cheetos in the pantry every week, I don’t mention it, I just put it there when I finish the grocery run. I turned my study music back up to its normal volume, I laugh when I take calls, I don’t hide my own bad days when I’m stressed about midterms.
I also started setting small, clear boundaries for myself, which no one told me I could do. Last week, when I was 2 hours from a deadline and he came to me wanting to talk about a fight he’d had with a friend from school, I said “I’m really overwhelmed with my essay right now, I can’t give this my full attention for an hour. Can we sit out on the porch and talk after I turn it in?” That was okay. He just nodded and went back to his room to play his game. No one got hurt, no one felt rejected.
What I’ve learned through this, that I wish someone had told me before he came home, is that fear doesn’t make you a bad caregiver or sibling. A lot of resources focus on what parents should do, or what the person coming home needs, but no one talks about how the rest of the house feels. That knot in your stomach when you hear their door open at 2 a.m., that worry you’ll say the wrong thing, that fear that something bad will happen again? It’s normal. You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared. I told him that one night, when we were both up getting water at 1 a.m. I said “I was really scared for you to come home. I didn’t want to mess this up.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, then he said “I was scared too.” That was the first real conversation we had, no scripts, no pretending everything was fixed.
It’s been four weeks now. Last night we played old Mario Kart on my beat-up Switch, he yelled at me when I hit him with a blue shell right before the finish line, same as he did when he was 10. We got Cheeto dust all over the controller, and I didn’t hold back my laugh when he threw a pillow at me. I still check that his door is cracked open when I walk past it at night. I still hold my breath sometimes when he’s quiet for too long. The fear didn’t disappear completely. But it’s not the big, heavy thing sitting in the middle of the living room anymore. It’s just a small thing, in the background, while we go back to doing all the boring, normal, messy stuff that families do.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What to Do When a Sibling Comes Home From a Mental Health Hospital: Real Tips From Experience