Delusional Family Member Offers Free Advice
BART, Massachusetts (FP) Although nearly everyone in Janet Massagua’s extended family suspects the truth about her life, Janet remains the only believer in her ability to diagnose the family ills.
A voracious reader of Psychology Today and subsequent dispenser of advice from here to eternity, Massagua has found her own calling as the ‘knower’ of everyone else’s problems and frequently explains their deficits to them. Unfortunately, Massagua leaves out the critical reference point that is her own station in life. For years, family members have listened politely as Massagua has gone on about her specialty, brain chemistry, and it’s effects on their ability to process life’s challenges.
Says sister, Donnie Martin: “I’ve never had a conversation on the phone with her that didn’t come around to brain chemistry or the drugs that alter brain chemistry. She talks to me like a college lecturer on the subject, but we all know that we’re not the only ones who need the meds.”
According to several relations interviewed for this story, Massagua’s ‘expertise’ does not extend to herself and her ‘advice’ to others has worn thin. Friends and family think she’s finally gone off the deep end, leaving her theories alone on the precipice where theories perch just before leaping to their demise. Massagua thinks otherwise:
“Who are you and why are you interviewing me?”, replied a startled, Massagua, when approached for this article. “I’m fine, it’s them who need the help.”
Donnie Martin’s husband, Phil, tells a story of once making the mistake of picking up the phone when Massagua called and as she began to explain the dynamics of Abilify, her brother-in-law put the phone down, went to the kitchen and made a sandwich, checked the mail, took a shower, came back to the phone to say ‘right’, went to the grocery store, came back and “she was still talking.”
After a family meeting, members decided to send a swat team of mental professionals to her home in Waukeegan in a last ditch intervention. The plan, however, backfired when Massagua began to explain the physics of depression in lab rats, thereby causing seizures in 3 of the 4 physicians assigned to the case.
