I grew up with a close uncle who suffered for decades from this disease. The tales of his brilliant youth, on track as a naval nuclear engineer, are only more t

I grew up with a close uncle who suffered for decades from this disease. The tales of his brilliant youth, on track as a naval nuclear engineer, are only more tragic to the shattered shell of a man I knew. Most of his treatment involved a cocktail mix of a dozen or so "medicines" who's primary purpose appeared to be to keep him sedated for long stretches of the day. He was absolutely unable to hold a job, or even a coherent conversation, and was in and out of half-way houses and treatment programs. At times he would get violent to himself or others as various psychotic fantasies moved him to be. He famously assaulted my sister one day before my father sent him away to stay with my mother's family (of which he was a sibling)...when he remembered the event at all he insisted he was trying to save her from one of a variety of fantastic and impossible sequences of events. Often in tears trying to explain what he had been trying to do, the family eventually concluded that in his mind he was trying to do a good thing and help against some imaginary evil, but his reality was so distorted it had turned into harm and that we simply couldn't risk his presence any further. Drugs of various levels of legality were a constant feature of his life. It was well known that he ended up dropping out of the Navy as a pot head that morphed into a serious cocaine and lsd user. Much of his treatment in his later years was trying to get him to stop self-medicating and to let the professionals provide the legal stuff. He made it to his 60s before a tumble in the bathroom knocked him unconscious and sent him into a hospital bed where he never woke up. Another Uncle, the guardian of his estate, made the decision to take him off of life support and hope his next chance turned out better than this one. His autopsy wasn't revealing, his system was basically a mobile pharmacy and narcotics evidence locker combined, but it still devastated the siblings who had tried to help him find his way back to the brilliant 20 year old they last remember.