EVERYTHING IS FINE

Probing memoir of a family tragedy and the search for explanations.

Granata was 27 when his brother, Tim, “convinced that the woman who made him peanut butter sandwiches when he was a grass-stained child was the source of his constant pain,” killed his mother. Ultimately, the court declared his brother to be not guilty “by reason of mental disease or defect….Defect, like there was a flaw in Tim’s design, an error buried in the schematic for his brain.” Arriving at that decision—and Granata’s acceptance of it—involved developing a more granular understanding of schizophrenia and its effects than most of us carry in our minds. A critical component is anosognosia, a neurological effect that prevents a mentally ill person from recognizing the illness and substitutes for clinical terms something that, in the brother’s case, approached a language of the hero quest: “spiritual warfare, the wrong path, demonic possession.” About 300 mothers are killed by their children in the U.S. each year, and about two-thirds of those victims are slain by children who suffer from untreated mental illness—the key term being untreated. “Is there a link between untreated serious mental illness and violence against self or others? All of my language here needs to be clear, every word,” writes the author. One of the problems is that sufferers often fail to take their medication. Confined to a Connecticut mental hospital for “a period that would likely span decades” after being found not guilty, Tim adopted a voluntary regimen of medication that has enabled him to see his actions differently and take responsibility for the act. Granata records his own sometimes discomfiting reactions to events, such as the impulse to turn his mother into a martyr and figuring out how to keep in balance the contradictory repulsion for and love for a desperately ill brother.

Candid and carefully argued, Granata’s memoir helps us better understand the horrors of mental illness.