UNNECESSARY SORROW

In this memoir, journalist Hight examines the life of his troubled brother and how society fails the mentally ill.

For more than a decade, the author conducted research and pored over the many documents left behind by his older sibling, Paul, who was shot by police in 2000. “For my brother,” Hight writes, “the battles of the mind were constant.” Hight begins his account with Paul’s childhood in the 1940s in Guthrie, Oklahoma. (Hight himself was born in 1958.) A tragic accident resulting in the death of Paul’s sister, Linda, led the family to become even more devout Catholics, and Paul set his sights on becoming “the perfect priest.” Against the backdrop of ’60s social unrest and the Catholic Church’s Vatican II reforms, Paul managed to achieve his goal and seemed poised to become a progressive, promising priest. By 1970, however, his parishioners had begun whispering to church officials: “Something’s wrong with father.” It would take years for the term “paranoid schizophrenia” to enter the family’s vocabulary, but it was clear that Paul’s mind was deteriorating, which caused him to be declared unable to perform his duties, and he was removed from the priesthood. This would be the first but far from the last time that an institution would fail him. From there, Hight mixes his own memories with meticulous investigation to relate the narrative of Paul’s many ups and downs, his time in mental institutions, and his encounters with law enforcement, which would eventually claim his life. Hight’s considerable talents as a journalist led him to unearth fascinating details in the history of the Catholic Church, Oklahoman mental institutions, and the use of deadly force by the Oklahoma City Police Department. These findings range from intriguing debate among psychiatrists about the effects of cigarettes on mentally ill patients to starkly differing accounts of the confrontation that left his brother dead.

At times, it feels as if the book loses sight of Paul and his struggles amid all the historical context, but Hight mostly balances this tendency with affecting stories; his account of finding Paul’s disturbing writings for the first time or reconstructing his brother’s memory of a particular rainbow are just two heartbreaking examples of many. The result is a deeply personal biography with tremendous scope: Paul is just as much at the whims of public policy as he is tormented by his hallucinatory demons. Major events, including tornadoes, the Oklahoma City bombing, and other crimes, occur, and their effects leave no room for Paul’s special needs. Hight presents a practical and persuasive analysis of the ways that institutions share information, and he gets across the urgency of reducing the stigma of adult mental illness. The emotional core of the book is found in the stories of family—the only institution that didn’t fail Paul. “The perception has been ingrained into our psyche...the psychotic killer who’s less than human,” Hight writes, “For me, that person was my brother.”

An intimate and moving account that also makes a rigorous call for change.