Growing up near the Atlantic shore in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Kait Leddy was any little girl’s dream big sister. She clomped around in rainbow moon boots and her imagination turned seashells into mermaid cell phones. She invented secret games that only she and her sister,Kyleigh, knew how to play.
“I was her little dress-up doll, and she and her friends let me tag along to everything,” Kyleigh, now 25, recalls with a smile in an interview for the new issue of PEOPLE. “I idolized her. She was all I ever wanted to be.”
courtesy Kyleigh Leddy
But when Kait entered her teens with more than the usual teenage detachment and rebellion, her little sister’s adoration turned to unease. That darkened to terror after Kait suffered a traumatic head injury at age 19. She turned into a stranger — violent one minute, fragile the next — who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffered four years of hallucinations and hospitalizations, rages and stays in rehab before walking late one January night in 2014 to the peak of Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Bridge and disappearing, a presumed suicide.
Mark Sommerfeld
“I [had] played out the worst-case scenarios … a stranger killing Kait in self-defense. Kait accidentally killing us,” Kyleigh writes in hernew memoirThe Perfect Other, about her family’s experience with the trauma, stigma and maddening unknowns of Kait’s mental illness. “But this —suicide — I forgot to factor into the equation.”
Illness Dawned
Then came two distinct medical blows to Kait’s stability. As a high school freshman already skipping school, smoking and drinking, she was sneaking out her window to a party when she fell and suffered a concussion.
Afterward her mood became erratic, her actions sometimes aggressive. In 2007 Kait, then 16, attacked their mother while Kyleigh was hosting a sleepover. With a bruised eye and a hematoma on her cheekbone, their mom went to the ER. Kait went to a psychiatric hospital.
“They released her undiagnosed,” writes Kyleigh, who started telling friends that her house was haunted so she had an excuse not to ask them over. There was the stigma and the genetic component of mental illness—the fear that her friends and their parents would start to worry Kyleigh was dangerous too. But, even more basically, she writes: “We couldn’t guarantee their safety any more than we could guarantee our own.”
Then, at around age 17, Kait was diagnosed with the hormonal disorderpolycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). “What’s so hard about mental illness is distinguishing between what’s personality, what’s hormones and what’s something serious,” says Kyleigh. “My parents tried.” Her mom, a former stockbroker who stayed home to raise her daughters, took Kait to doctor after doctor but got no answers.
(Kyleigh’s dad, a tech executive who traveled a lot for work, “did not believe in mental illness,” she says, and then split after Kait’s death. Kyleigh asked that her parents not be named in this story.)
‘The Breaking Point’
On an October day in 2010, what remained of any stability was shattered. In her first semester as a Drexel University freshman, Kait was on the steps of a Philly brownstone when a friend fell into her for an exaggerated bear hug. Kait lost her balance, fell backward, smacked her head on concrete and suffered traumatic hemorrhaging in her brain. “That was the breaking point,” says Kyleigh.
While Kait was sedated in the ICU for three days to help her brain heal, her doctor warned that the 19-year-old wouldn’t be the same Kait when she woke up. “She’d been struggling with things, partying a lot … we didn’t know what the doctor meant but thought it could even be a good thing,” Kyleigh says.
It wasn’t. Kait’s first day home from the hospital was the first time their mom feared her daughter might kill her.
Hallucinations began, along with paranoia, delusions and rages. Kyleigh writes about days when Kait chased her family with an iron poker through the backyard, nights when she hit her father with a weight while he slept. “We were all fearing for our lives,” Kyleigh says. “Anything could set her off. The way I chewed my gum. She became another person sometimes. The sister of my childhood would be there, laughing and joking around and then she would just turn.”
One month after her fall, Kait wasdiagnosed with schizophrenia.
Prescribed at least 17 medications over time as doctors attempted to stabilize her, Kait tried to stay in school and dabbled in modeling to regain self-esteem, but she spent the last four years of her life in and out of psych wards and rehab for alcohol abuse.
As Kait grew sicker, her mom encouraged modeling (above in 2010) “to focus on something positive” says Kyleigh.Kait Leddy, courtesy Kyleigh Leddy
“Nothing was sticking,” says Kyleigh. In fact, Kait had been released from her latest psychiatric hospitalization, “given no medication, not even an emergency dose, only a prescription she needed to fill at the pharmacy,” Kyleigh writes, just days before she vanished off the bridge. “We never recovered her body,” says Kyleigh, “never had the chance to have a funeral.”
An Ongoing Mission
At Boston College, Kyleigh studied abnormal psychology and neuroscience, volunteered at a homeless shelter and then at a group home for women with psychiatric disorders, trying to help fill the gaps in a system that failed her sister.
Her mother, too, has committed to helping families like their own, doing volunteer psychoeducation work with theFamily-to-Family program of the National Alliance on Mental Illnessand raising money for herlocal NAMI chapterandFairwinds, the local counseling center near her home in Nantucket.
WritingThe Perfect Other, she searched for studies of the mysterious links connecting head injury, hormones and mental illness.
Dr. Susan Kornstein, Virginia Commonwealth University professor of psychiatry, affirms thattraumatic brain injury(TBI) like Kait’s can lead to the development of psychotic disorders including schizophrenia. While milder mood, behavior and cognition troubles are more common aftereffects, psychosis — a mental disorder so severe it causes loss of contact with reality — occurs in 1 percent to 8 percent of cases following TBI. And though psychosis is more likely in someone who is already genetically susceptible, TBI can cause physical brain changes that result in psychotic symptoms “even without a genetic predisposition,” Kornstein says. Symptoms can appear days after injury but typically develop over years, so “individuals should be monitored over time.”
Kornstein, who runs VCU’s Institute for Women’s Health, says women with PCOS should also be monitored for psychiatric illness because they are more likely to suffer depression, anxiety and — in rarer cases — psychosis than women without PCOS.
“That’s mood changes and temperament, and that’s hormones, too,” says Kyleigh. “It’s all so convoluted. It was always hard to tell what was really going on with Kait.”
As Kyleigh finishes work on the master’s in social work that she is due to receive from Columbia University in May, and focuses on training to be a therapist, she intends to keep looking for the answers that eluded Kait. “I want to give people hope that new things will come out,” she says.
“We can do more research, find better therapies, better medications. And I can move forward, make my sister’s life stand for something.”
For more about The Perfect Other, Pick up a copy of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.
source: people.com
