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Molly McCloskey was haunted by the idea she might develop schizophrenia as she grew older, like her older brother. Then, one day, she realised her anxiety was caused by something else

In the mid-1990s, when I live in the west of Ireland, I saw my drinking was out of control. I had moved to Ireland from the United States a few years ago, and had enjoyed more than a decade, often unconventional drinking. But in my late 20s, I had entered a period of unhappiness and psychological discomfort. Cat had stopped, only physical ailments and conditions with a hint of darkness and paranoia.

Many days I was a free-floating anxiety overshadows my perceptions often feel out of kilter. I would reach my hand to look for something and see it stutter, as if under a strobe light. When the phone trilled, it seemed, would blow up the air, like a pane of glass. Other people took a hyper-real quality. I slept too much and was prone to gray, apathetic mood. My memory and concentration were sometimes terrible. My thoughts are crawling over each other angrily or dripping so slowly it seemed large empty spaces between them, and I would stare at whatever I feel as though life were a dull slide show.

Despite the fact that the reasons were for my state of mind in front of me, I was side-stepping the hand. And just when I thought that the shaking in my hands could be the beginning point of a neurological degeneration, so I imagined my psychological stress to onset of schizophrenia could be linked.

It was not a random fear. In 1973, when I was eight, my brother Mike, the oldest of my five siblings, with paranoid schizophrenia, an illness from which he still hasn diagnosed 't recovered. He was 23rd For the next 10 years until I left town in Oregon where my family lived and went to the University, I witnessed Mike 's battle with the disease.

First, mixed with the hallucinations and delusions, he had periods of clarity and increased motivation when it seemed it could again. (Studies indicate that up to one third of people diagnosed with schizophrenia have a full recovery.) But then there would be a result - Mike pulled his clothes out of our church, Mike suddenly grows manic, racing around in circles moving our front yard , yelping as he went - that would end with his re-election admission to hospital. He hated the hospital and sometimes without leaving anyone to easily throughout the country, to take his medication and end homeless and disoriented, at which point my parents somehow repeat it back home and stabilized, then the whole cycle would.

One thing my brothers and sister and I learned following Mike's diagnosis was that as siblings of someone with schizophrenia, we had a greater chance of developing it ourselves – 7-9%, versus the 1% in the general population. And what struck me as particularly frightening was the way the illness had taken hold of my brother without any apparent warning. No one had seen anything in him growing up that indicated future trouble.

At the time, I didn't realise how extraordinary her handling of these crises was. But as I grew older, I realised that strength is not a given, that it is easy to implode under pressure, to lose perspective. These things became clear to me when I was in my 30s.

by Molly McCloskey is published by Penguin, ?14.99. To order a copy for ?11.99 with free p&p, go to