This is a composite story, drawn from common experiences shared in the schizophrenia community. It does not depict a real individual.
I am 27 years old. I live in Pittsburgh. My grandparents — both in their late seventies, both first-generation immigrants from southern Italy — found out about my schizophrenia diagnosis when I was 22. For five years they did not really accept it. Last fall, something shifted. I want to write about that shift, because the conversation about family understanding usually centres on parents and siblings, and almost never on grandparents.
What they thought it was
When my mother first told them about my diagnosis, my grandmother cried and asked if I had been baptised. My grandfather did not say anything at all for several months. When he finally spoke about it to my mother, he said, "She needs to get out more. She needs a husband. She has too much time to think."
I was not angry at them. I knew the shape of where they had grown up. In the village they came from, people with schizophrenia were spoken of as "u' pover'omu" — the poor man — and lived in back rooms, cared for by mothers who did not let visitors past the kitchen. There was no public conversation about mental illness. There were no medications when they were children. There were no diagnoses, only whispers and church.
For five years, my grandparents did three things. They prayed for me. They blamed my mother for "letting me move to the city" (I had moved to Pittsburgh for college). And they tried, very kindly, to set me up with the sons of women in their church.
What did not work
I tried, in the first two years, to explain. I sent my grandmother a NAMI brochure in Italian, which she read and put in a drawer. I tried to talk to my grandfather about brain chemistry. He listened politely and then asked if I was eating enough. My mother, on her own, brought them to a NAMI Family-to-Family class in English, which they sat through but did not really engage with.
The arguments did not work either. Telling them that schizophrenia was an illness, not a moral failing, did not move them. Telling them that I was on medication and stable did not move them. Citing studies, citing the Pope's own statements about mental illness, citing the church's hospital chaplaincy programs — none of it moved them.
What did work
Two things, in the end. Neither was what I had been trying.
Time spent with me when I was well
For five years I had visited them carefully — short visits, not staying over, leaving before I got tired, not bringing up my diagnosis. They had no images of me being sick. They had no images of me really being well, either. They just had a granddaughter who came over for an hour, ate one cannoli, and left.
Last summer my grandfather had a hip replacement. My mother and I took shifts staying with him for three weeks. I was at his house most weekdays. He saw me cook. He saw me read his newspaper aloud to him. He saw me handle his medication schedule (an irony I think only my mother and I appreciated). He watched me take my evening pill at his kitchen table without explaining or apologising, the same way I take it at mine.
About two weeks in, on a Wednesday afternoon, he asked me what the pill was. I told him. He nodded. He said, in Italian, "It works." That was the whole conversation.
Another grandchild's diagnosis
The other thing that helped, and I want to be honest about this, was that my younger cousin was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around the same time. My grandparents loved him without question. They did not ask if he had been baptised. They did not suggest a wife. The two diagnoses, in the same family, in the same year, in two grandchildren they loved equally, broke something open.
My grandmother called my mother one Saturday morning and said, in Italian, "If both of them are sick, then maybe I have been sick about this." My mother told me on the phone that night and we both cried.
What understanding has looked like
My grandparents do not now use clinical language about schizophrenia. They are not going to read the WHO fact sheet on it. What they do, instead, is treat me like the granddaughter I am. They ask how I have been sleeping. My grandmother sends me extra food on Sundays so I do not have to cook on hard days. My grandfather, who has never been an emotional man, kissed my forehead before I left his house at the end of the recovery month and said, in Italian, "You are good. You are my granddaughter. We are family."
That is what acceptance looked like in our family. Not a TED talk. Not an embrace of psychiatric vocabulary. A kiss on the forehead and a sentence about who I was to him.
My grandparents did not understand my diagnosis through education or argument — they understood it through five years of seeing me as their granddaughter, plus enough time and proximity for the rest to settle.
What I would tell someone with skeptical older relatives
- Argument almost never works with elders who grew up with stigma. It hardens the position rather than softening it.
- Spend time as your well self, on their terms, in their homes, when you can. They need new images of you to overwrite the old ones.
- Take your medication in front of them without explaining or hiding it, when you are ready. Visibility plus normalcy is a powerful combination.
- Find one person in their generation who can speak the language they need. A priest, a doctor, a friend who has been through it. They may hear the same information from a peer that they could not hear from you.
- Do not wait for understanding before you accept their love. Many older relatives will love you fiercely while never quite saying the right words about your illness, and that love still counts.
For related reading, see family psychoeducation and teaching family about schizophrenia.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.