After seeing her dad lose control of his mind, art student Minerva Contreras decides to study the brain, in hopes of understanding him.
Minerva Contreras is a senior at Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro, where she is majoring in Biotechnology Engineering with a focus in Biomedical Sciences. Her undergrad research has lead her to explore different areas within neurobiology such as the molecular biology of glioblastoma at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, and neurodegenerative diseases at UCSD Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. Before discovering her passion for science, Minerva completed an AA in Filmmaking; she believes this was an important contribution to her appreciation for diversity and humanities. Her future goals include pursuing a doctoral degree in Neurosciences, as well as creatively communicating science to the general public, especially future generations, in a relatable fashion. As of next fall, she will be a grad student in the Neurosciences PhD program at UCSD. In her spare time, she enjoys going on hikes with her dogs, strength training, and spending time with her family and friends.
This story originally aired on June 14, 2019 in an episode titled “Adventures with Dads.”
Story Transcript
Growing up, I always had a feeling something was odd with my dad. Some days, my mom would pick me up from school and we would drive to this coffee shop where we could always find him. My dad spent every day there, all day just reading.
When I was a kid, I even thought that was his job because he spent the whole day there. Sometimes he would get home really late and I would stay up past my bedtime to be able to hang out with him for a couple of minutes.
My parents got divorced when I was 11 and, after that, I would hang out with my dad once a week then once a month and then less and less often.
I was 20 years old when I got a call from my dad saying he needed to see me. He sounded really agitated on the phone and I had not heard from him in over a year because he was talented in suddenly disappearing on me. Even though I knew I was going to miss class, I knew I had to go see him.
So I drove 150 miles south from my art school in Los Angeles and across the border to Tijuana to go see him. When I got there, I rang the doorbell and he came rushing out. This was the house that I grew up in but, like I said, my dad loved coffee shops so every time we would meet we would meet at a coffee shop. I had not been there in years.
He came rushing out. He seemed out of himself. And I asked him, “What do you want to do?” He didn’t respond.
So I said, “Can I come in?”
He said, “Do you really want to?”
And I said, “Sure,” trying to ease the tension.
We went in the house and he gave me a four-hour tour of the house. This was not a mansion. This was a small house. But he, smoking cigarette after cigarette, he meticulously pointed out every stain on the floor, every stain on the walls. The house was such a mess one could have easily assumed a hurricane hit it.
We carefully walked around every little piece of paper on the floor, every piece of trash so as not to alter anything, and he talked about the meaning behind these things. He said, “I’m not crazy, Mini. You have to believe me.”
He kept saying he had deciphered the subtext to every single one of these things. ‘They’ were out to get him and everything in his house had been carefully placed there as a sign by them.
I was clueless. I did not know what to do with any of this, but I did not question him because I had a feeling that he really needed someone to listen to this about him. He needed someone to share this with.
I felt so confused and then I left thinking my father, the person who’s supposed to be my role model, has lost his mind. I got in my car and I drove about two blocks away before I had to park and I burst out into tears. I felt so powerless, so confused and so worried.
I gather myself and drove home with only one thing on my mind. I had to help him out of this weird black hole.
So what is the mind? How can anyone lose it? How does the brain work? What is a neuron? What is the biology behind the brain malfunction? All these and so many more questions arose in my mind and I knew there had to be a scientific explanation to what was happening to my dad.
I was in art school at the time, as I mentioned, but all I did with my free time was read about the brain. I knew I had to go to the bottom of it so the brain books were not going to be enough. I needed a science career, obviously. So I moved to San Diego and I enrolled in a community college with the intent to transfer to university and pursue a scientific career.
I am no psychiatrist, especially I was not a psychiatrist back then or a neuroscientist, yet, but I eventually hypothetically diagnosed my dad with paranoid schizophrenia. One of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia is having grandiose delusions. Add that to being an older Mexican man, or a macho, older Mexican men don’t get sick. They're almighty, invincible beings. They don’t need help in finding directions. They have no struggles. And losing your mind is something that can only happen to women, so talking to my dad about the way he was acting or feeling was completely out of the question.
Before I could even talk to him about this, I had to figure out a way to interact with him because, like I said, we would meet in coffee shops, at this time about once a month. Sometimes we would just be having a conversation and I would do something as simple as this, like fixing my hair, and he would simply get up and leave.
Sometimes he would say, “What did you just tell them?” Then he would leave. So I had to learn to provide a safe space for him.
I could not look away. I had to have my eyes on him 100% of the time. I could not cross my arms. I could not cross my legs. I could not scratch my nose if I had an itch. I could not fix my hair. And it was really hard.
But one beautiful delusion of my dad was that he claimed he could communicate with birds and they were on his side, which was a good thing. Sometimes when he was driving down the road, birds would warn him about accidents on the road or, at the coffee shop, they would warn him about suspicious people.
I would tell him, “Well, I hope the birds like me,” and he would laugh.
I try to provide an environment for him where he did not feel misunderstood or judged but it became really hard, like I said. Sometimes we would have good dates but most of our dates were really difficult and ended up on a bad note. He really needed me to be a daughter and to listen to him and to believe everything he said, and I pretended to do so but, at the same time, I had to quiet my problem-solving, scientific self and I had to keep learning about paranoid schizophrenia or mental illnesses.
I wasn’t really able to do anything about it because I wanted him to go see a professional. As far as I understood then there are symptoms that can be treated to help someone with paranoid schizophrenia to have a better life but it became impossible. Every time I told him, “You should go see a doctor,” he would simply get up and leave. Statistics say about 40% of people with schizophrenia in Mexico could not get diagnosed because they deny being ill.
One time we were at a coffee shop and I was so sick of his harmful words or just simply getting up and leaving that I stood up and I told him, “I’m your daughter. Why would I be conspiring against you? Why would I do anything to hurt you?”
He kind of paused and stared at me and he had this look on his face like he wanted to believe me but I don't think he could.
One day in September of last year, I got a call from my brother. He said my dad was not feeling good. He had been coughing blood for two weeks and he was taking him to see a doctor. Like I said, my dad did not trust anyone so the simple fact that he was going to see a doctor was a big shock for me. At the time, I was in school in Queretaro but that’s a different story, and I had to fly to Tijuana to go see him.
I actually don’t remember buying the ticket. I bought a roundtrip which makes no sense because I did not know what was going to happen. When I got there, my girlfriend picked me up from the airport and we drove straight to the hospital. It was around 11:00 p.m., so past visiting hours.
I called my brother and I said, “Is it convenient if I go now or should wait until the morning?” I would always get really nervous when I was going to see my dad and it had been over a year.
My brother simply said, “Come. He's excited to see you.”
I said. “Okay.”
So I got there and seeing my dad in a hospital gown in a hospital bed with probably below 8% body fat was a huge shock. He seemed really tired. His skin seemed ashy and I had a feeling just by looking at him it was cancer, so I know I had to mentally prepare for it. I had some scientific knowledge on cancer. I thought this can help.
And I realized scientific knowledge can help you better understand a disease, how it will progress and what to expect, but it does very little to help you prepare for the emotional impact.
I'd like to think that I was one of the few people, or maybe the only one, who got closest to understanding what was wrong with my dad. I was one of the only few that understood that he could be the nicest, funniest, most charming person in the room for a minute and the next second he would flip and become a really rude man. And I like to think he knew.
On our very last conversation he told me, “You should try to not be so stubborn. Things aren’t always the way you think they are.” To this day I wonder what he meant by that.
I told him that I had found my passion for science because of him and I thanked him for that, that I have a huge need to understand everything because I have a deep need to understand him.
My dad passed away before I had a clear perspective of what he went through. It took me a while but I came to peace with being able to understand that I was never going to be able to understand completely. As a scientist, this is completely out of my league. I need the explanations. I wanted my dad’s mental illness to fit into a box with specific locks and I wanted to be able to find the keys to these locks to find what was inside, to be able to discover what he was going through. And I wanted him to help me find the keys. But for my dad, there was nothing wrong with him. His reality was completely different than mine. For my dad, there was no box.
Thank you.