I felt like writing something from Professor Membrane's point of view for once so here you go :3
Every day he was like this.
I always wanted a son – a daughter, too – but never before did I think I'd have a child with the amount of issues that Dib does. He's so intelligent, so brilliant, so creative, and so…schizophrenic.
I remember when he was younger and talked about aliens and ghosts in the house and all sorts of crazy things, but he was just a little boy. I thought he just had an amazing imagination, of which he really does, and I thought that he had countless imaginary friends. After all, Dib never got along well with other children. He was always the outcast as far as social norms went, so it made sense to me that he would create his friends for himself than meddle with actual people. Little did I know was that he was actually seeing things that weren't actually there.
I can remember Dib looking at things that were never there and talking to people that didn't exist from a very early age. Sometimes he'd talk to the wall and tell me that there was a ghost in it somewhere. He had this whole elaborate story for this one ghost, gave her a name and everything. She had died in a car accident and got stuck in a dimension that melted her spirit to the wall and I thought he was just playing. No, he was actually hearing voices in his head.
I thought he'd grow out of it, but he never did. The imaginary friends became more and more real to him. This phase wasn't a phase, but instead a permanent condition. I only became truly concerned when he was in middle school and came home trying to expose a new, little green kid in his class as an alien, except there was no new student, and there was no green kid. He went after that "alien" for months, but he never existed.
I took him to a psychiatrist recently and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was both auditory and visual for him. My poor, sweet little boy, despite being a freshman in high school, couldn't seem to understand it, even when we explained it to him. He thinks that there's nothing wrong with him and he puts up a moody fight with me whenever I take him to the doctor or to the therapist. He thinks it's all real and that nobody's listening to him, that we're all stupid and narrow-minded.
Lately he's been spiraling downward real bad. He refuses to take his medicine so I started to hide it in his food, but ever since he found out by accident one day, he won't eat anything I cook now. I will admit that I'm a workaholic, but I can't stay in my labs nearly as much anymore. Dib needs me, whether he realizes it or not. I'm afraid I'm going to have to force the medicine down his throat, but then he'd just throw it up. I'm stuck and I don't know what to do for him.
Anyways, it's Tuesday now, and it's been months after his diagnosis. He's in his room right now talking to a blank computer screen. He thinks that the green kid, Zim, is sending him a transmission. He's arguing with him, but there's nothing on the screen. It's blank and there's no sound coming out of it. My poor baby really thinks that he's talking to someone…
Sometimes I hear him crying at night. He doesn't sleep much because has this irrational fear that there's an alien who's going to break in and steal his organs when he's asleep. I've been telling him over and over again that NONE OF IT is real, but he can't understand it. It's too real for him. He's living in a world that none of us can see or experience.
Lately, his thoughts have been more incoherent. Yesterday he acted like he was terrified of something and started babbling on about Zim trying to take over the world and that he had to stop him, but then just thirty minutes later, I saw him sitting on the couch watching Mysterious Mysteries as if there had never been an issue in the first place. When I asked him about it, he called me crazy. He was so distressed and then so calm within the same short period of time that I was left more disturbed than anything else.
I called his school's guidance counselor and informed all of his teachers of his current condition. He's actually had it for his entire life, ever since he was a small baby. I'm a man of science. I'm very logically minded, and I like to invent things to help others, but this is different. This is my own child, and I don't know how to help him. I'm not sending him to a mental facility. He'd die in there, and I'm afraid of him being the cause of his own death.
So, I'm truly stuck. Dib's screaming right now in his room. I don't think he's talking to Zim anymore. I think he's just frustrated. He beats his bed instead of people whenever he gets like this, but in a few moments, he'll calm down and go back to normal. Either that or he'll huddle in the corner near the closet with his head in his heads, staring at the ground as he rocks back and forth, muttering nonsense to himself. He's been doing that more often now. It frightens me.
He loses his grip with reality very frequently nowadays. He'll be eating breakfast or talking to Gaz and suddenly he'll go off into this elaborate, random speech or point at something and say that his hallucination is a real thing. Often it's Zim who's broken into the house. Once he grabbed a knife and chased after the hallucination, of which I had to fight him to get the knife back. He screamed at me and attacked me instead, and I had to restrain him to the ground to get him under control. The look in his eyes…I had never seen something like that before.
Eventually, he tired out and came back to reality, hardly aware of what he had done. At first he was confused, then he started crying and pleaded to me for help. I just hugged him close and told Gaz to go to her room for the night so that she wouldn't have to see her brother in such a condition.
He cried for a long time that night. I'm afraid this night might be a repeat, though under other circumstances. I really, truly hope it doesn't become one, though.
He just stopped screaming. I'm not hearing anything from my room. I can sort of see him from where I'm sitting, and I'm pretty sure he's lying face down on his bed. Good, he's not retreating into the corner. He's just going to focus on breathing now. Good boy. Just breathe.
It's nearly midnight now. I'm tired and I have to take him to the psychiatrist again tomorrow. It's going to be a long day…anyways, I'll go make sure that Dib's alright. I'll give him a hug and a kiss. He always seems to like that, like it comforts him in some way.
My poor insane son.
