LIVING WITH SCHIZOAFFECTIVE DISORDER - A Family's Love & Resilience

ACTRESS GLENN CLOSE AND HER FAMILY KNOW FIRSTHAND THE PAIN OF MENTAL ILLNESS. NOW HER NEPHEW CALEN PICK AND HIS MOTHER, GLENN'S SISTER JESSIE CLOSE, HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK INSPIRED BY THEIR OWN RECOVERIES-TO HELP OTHERS KNOW THEY'RE NOT ALONE

- LIZ MCNEIL

Finding His Way "Maybe it's just understanding myself. That's the journey I'm on," says Calen Pick (with his mom, Jessie Close, on the family's property in Bozeman, Mont., on Nov. 15). "So to have freedom and feel good again is all I'm trying to do."

Nothing could have prepared Jessie Close for what she saw that day in 1998 when she climbed the stairs to her son Calen’s loft studio over the family’s garage. “He had painted ‘Silence You’ across the wall with dripping red paint,” says Jessie, now 71. “It was like, ‘Holy s---, what is this?’” Sadly it wasn’t the first time her son had displayed troubling behavior. “He’d sit on the couch and rock and rock, and his pupils were huge,” she recalls. “He’d look out of the windows of our house in Bozeman and say things like, ‘That person is watching me,’ but no one was there. He had just deteriorated right in front of our eyes.”

Compassionate Care "When Calen was in the hospital, the doctor said he was suffering maybe more than some others because he was so intensely aware of what was going on in his head," recalls Glenn (left, with Calen and Jessie, holding Mattie, in 1992).

But that day was more frightening than anything she’d seen before. After Calen’s father (Jessie’s third husband, Tom Pick, who died in 2016 ) took him to the hospital, he called her. “I had never heard Tom cry like he did after Calen was admitted,” she says. “Calen was a golden boy. He was gorgeous and smart and funny, he had a ton of friends—and it just all went to hell in a handbasket.”