How to Help a Loved One with Schizophrenia Who Won't Talk About It?

Hello. I’m sorry to hear that your son is going through this. In my experience, I have been pretty open and communicative with the people I thought would at least try to understand and offer their insight and feedback. But over time I came to realize that talking too forwardly about my delusions, hallucinations, and my own unique existential reality does not ever do much good at all. In fact, it drives people away, makes relationships distant, because it becomes clear to both parties that neither of us can relate or understand what the other is experiencing, perceiving, etc etc… I’m not saying he should keep it to himself, but ultimately he needs to face what he’s dealing with on his own. Maybe it could help to collaborate with him on what could help him improve his life overall, not to get bogged down with specifics and potentially distorted interpretations and other things. Be there for him. Just make sure he knows that you care and want the best for him. But unless he’s hurting himself, endangering himself or others, stuff like that, just being a part of his life can be a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But you know, desperately trying to help him, fix him, cure his sickness, this certainly is understandable on your part, you want him to be happy and successful and experience all these things that life has to offer. But every single person on this planet experiences life differently, perceptions and interpretations and all these different variables amount to the fact that there is no such thing as “reality” as everyone generally just agrees on the most basic sensory things but when it comes to belief, thought processes, memories, cognition, etc.. it’s hard to find common ground at all sometimes. Most people just fake it in order to get what they want from life . And because they do it well enough to convince others, they may end up convincing themselves at the same time. I digress…point was that it’s probably not the best approach to treat his experience of this life as some terrible thing that has to be fixed. Offer support, encourage him to make choices that will benefit his wellbeing, but yeah mostly just don’t give up, stay practically optimistic. I say all this cause that’s exactly the opposite of what my own parents did over the course of time.. when I got diagnosed it was like my life stopped while the rest of the world kept spinning. My parents took the news as their own personal catastrophic failure or something.. really I see it as something no one had any control or fault . Maybe everything is predetermined from the very beginning to the very end. No sense in letting some abstract concepts and labels ruin your inner peace

I have schizoaffective so I get what it's like to just not be able to talk about it no matter how bad you want to you can't get the words out