Brent, who is now 28 years old, suffers from schizophrenia, the disease made freshly famous by the book, A Beautiful Mind, about the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, John Forbes Nash. Just as Nash was, Brent is subject to paranoid delusions in which he experiences, in the most terrifying ways, constant menace from other people in his life. Of course, he isn’t being threatened at all by those whom he perceives as attackers. No matter to Brent; he lashes out anyway.
Desperate parents
The second time he beat up his father, he was about 21, and his parents began looking in earnest for real help from experts, from social workers, from their church, from anyone who could release them from the awful burden that their son had become. They obtained the appropriate drugs for treating Brent’s psychosis, but Brent wouldn’t stay on the medications. He even refused to swallow them when they were forced into his mouth by his distraught mother. They obtained shelter for him as respite from the never-ending task of caring for someone so psychologically debilitated, but after a few days, Brent turned belligerent and was sent home. His parents obtained governmental benefits that ran out, advice that didn’t work, offers to
