When Jonas Daughdrill was 19 he started hearing voices. They didn't say good things. They told him he had been hypnotized. They told him other things, too. Soon afterward, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on heavy medication.
That was more than 17 years ago. Ever since, except for a short stint on his own, he's lived on his parents' 26-acre farm in the Atwater area where he works with his father.
In 2004 Jonas' younger brother Eli Daughdrill, a filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, decided to make a film about what had happen to his brother and his family.
The film, "Jonas," which was shot mostly on the family's farm six years ago, documented the family's travails, Jonas' recovery and his frustrated desire to move beyond a mental illness that he's learned to manage.
But the film is more than a narrative of one family's struggle with mental illness. It's also a counterpoint to stereotypes of mental illness -- especially schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia, a mental illness that affects 1.1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, is often seen as something that just makes people go off the edge, said Eli. But the experience of watching his brother deal with the illness, and making a film about it, have changed how he views mental illness in general. With this film he hopes to show people that mental illness, especially schizophrenia, is not as simple as we have come to think of it. It made Eli confront his opinions on what sanity really is. It has also highlighted society's shortcomings when it comes to dealing with mental illness, he said.
Jonas' childhood
From early in his life Jonas was different. He wasn't like his two brothers or other kids, his parents say in the film. He kept to himself. He wasn't affectionate. At one point in the film, Eli, who narrates his brother's story, said he was always kind of frightened of Jonas as a child. "Jonas was just belligerent," says his father, Barry, at one point. Jonas always thought everyone in the world was against him, says his other brother, Josh Daughdrill, in the film. It wasn't until his breakdown that the thoughts of persecution actually manifested themselves in voices and visions, said Josh.
Jonas' breakdown came in the summer of 1993. Helen Daughdrill, his mother, recalls in the film that summer he spent more and more time in his room. She could hear him talking to himself in his room. "I'd open the door and say, 'Who are you talking to?'" she said. At one point in the film Eli said he would put his head under his pillow to muffle what he heard coming from Jonas' room.
Finally, Jonas' mother said she told him he had to get a job. But after just two days working at an almond huller, Jonas came back from work claiming he had been hypnotized. It was at this point that the family had to confront what they were all facing.
To Jonas the voices and hallucinations were frightening. In the film he describes seeing crowds of people -- hundreds -- gathered to kill him. "I thought the whole thing was a con, that I was the only one who really knew what was going on," Jonas said in an interview with the Sun-Star. It must have been hell for his family, he added.
Once it was obvious to his family that something was seriously wrong, Jonas was taken to a doctor, who heavily medicated him.
Helen said it helped him and the family get through the day. Jonas described it as simply "brutal." He would sleep all day. He was comatose. A slow recovery began. Since 1996 he's been on much less heavy medication ---and it has made all the difference, he says in the film.
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