Stalker in the House

(Translated by Saya)

This is a story that appears on the website of Dr.Hayashi, a well-known psychiatrist on the internet.
He recieves a lot of mails everyday and the contents of these mails sometimes get displayed anonymously on his site alongside his own responses to them.


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Case【1087】 I Have a Stalker in My House

Question:
It's about my younger brother, who is 38 years old.

He hasn't been working for the past seven or eight years and he just stays at home all day.

For a long time now I have suffered constant childish harassment from him but he is getting even worse recently.

My room and his room were originally one and the same room but we divided it by a sliding door and by propping some pieces of furniture against the door.

These things have no sound insulating properties and we can hear everything in each other's rooms.
On weekdays my younger brother wakes up between thirty minutes to an hour before I get up, by a very loud alarm clock.
When I go downstairs he follows close behind me.
When I go upstairs he comes up immediately after me, stands in front of my room and bursts out laughing in a creepy way, and then goes back into his room, banging the door shut.
When I am getting ready for work in the morning, he follows me every time as I go back and forth between the 2nd floor and 1st floor.
When I want to use the washbasin he follows me too and uses it immediately after I finish.
When my hands get dirty and I go to the bathroom to wash them, my younger brother comes soon after me and washes his hands too.
When I come home from work and start having supper he goes to the washbasin and starts brushing his teeth and makes disgusting noises.
Those noises make me lose appetite so I always decide to stop eating and wait until he finishes, but when I stop he stops too, and he waits until I start eating again to start brushing again..
When he has a bath he is determined to have it before me so he is always watching me and biding his time.
When he does have a bath before me he either drains all the hot water and pours cold water in instead, or pours scalding hot water in instead, purely out of spite*1.
When I have a bath late at night and goes upstairs after bath, he will be waiting for me in the dark on the first floor and follows me to upstairs from behind and bursts out laughing in a creepy way.
When during the night I go downstairs to drink water and after that go upstairs again, my brother, who has followed me secretly, comes upstairs right after me.
When I turn off the light to go to sleep he immediately turns off the light in his room too, although he may have been watching TV and laughing up until then. He then does his best to make some loud noises before he finally goes to sleep.
When I have a day off he gets up earlier than usual and turns up the volume of the radio really high.
He won't stop listening to the radio until I wake up.
If I still don't wake up despite his radio he starts vacuuming the room.
It appears that he contrives to make the vacuuming as noisy as possible, and he would let the vacuum cleaner go over the windowpane for many minutes producing squeaky noises, or he would sometimes keep vacuuming the same place over and over for more than an hour.
When he opens and shuts the door he does it so violently that things in my room move.
He stops doing all these things only after I am completely awake ( I use ear plugs).
The only time he dries his laundry on the balcony is when I have day-offs.
He uses every single wash-line and dries everything he has and tries to prevent me from drying my laundry.
He does it even when it's raining.
Other times he won't dry his laundry even if the weather is fine.
Instead he comes while I put things on the wash-line and watches me, pressing his face on the windowpane, and again starts laughing in a creepy way.
When I am vacuuming he immediately comes along and sits in the middle of the corridor to block the way.
He also does numerous other things that are not on the list.
At the moment I try to ignore him and do my best to get on with my own things, but I might go mad if things continue the way they are now.
Sometimes even when I try to ignore him, something would get on his nerves and he would start hitting me or try strangling me.
My brother is the only male in the household and nobody can stop him.
Other things he does include him leaving mosquito coils*2 all around in the house in summer because he hates getting stung by mosquitoes.
I think the reason for all his abnormal behaviours is that he has schizophrenia. What do you think?


Answer:

Dr. Hayashi

If all the facts in your mail are true, we have a strong reason to believe that your brother is suffering from schizophrenia.

But some details in your story puzzle me.

 Even supposing your younger brother really is a schizophrenic and has some sort of delusions about you, would he do something as elaborate as constantly keep a watch on you and obstruct your every single action? It is hard to imagine he would do such a thing.
 It is also hard to imagine you have been able to ignore his actions and go on living relatively normally for such a prolonged period of time.
 On top of that, this "someone is keeping a watch on me all the time and tries to interfere with my every single action" type of thinking is a typical delusional complaint made by a sufferer of schizophrenia.

  I cannot be sure but do you think there might be a possibility that this "younger brother" you speak of is someone who exists only in your imagination? If so it is most likely that you yourself are suffering from schizophrenia.
 Or it is possible that this "younger brother" does in fact exist but he doesn't exhibit these strange behaviours, and all of them have been the creation of your delusion. In this case too you are most likely to be suffering from schizophrenia yourself.

I may be completely wrong but I wanted to point it out to you as a possibility.
Since I have to base my judgement solely on the information provided in your mail, please understand this is the best I can do on this Q&A psychiatric site.



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*1 Japanese bath - some Japanese people like to share bath water, so for example the first person who has bath might not drain the water after he finishes, thereby letting other people who come after him use it too. This might sound rather unhygienic but modern Japanese bathtubs (I believe) often come with this hi-tech self-cleaning system that cleans the water at the touch of a button so that shouldn't be a huge problem. (my own house doesn't have this system because no one in my family likes to share bath water, except my dad lol)

*2 mosquito coil (pictured above): This coil of green incense produces a mosquito-repellent smoke when burnt, and is used widely in Japan during summer.