Credit: Howard Wise/JPI
Viewers know him as Adam Newman on The Young and the Restless but when it comes to his portrayer, there are many things one may not know about Mark Grossman. The CBS soap fave recently went on State of Mind to talk with General Hospital’s Maurice Benard (Sonny) about mental health and opened up about a very personal part of his life.
Over talk of mental illness, while the actor doesn’t suffer from any of his own, he revealed he had a younger brother who did. “I had a younger brother who passed… he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,” Grossman shared then went on to reflect back on his death on January 1, 2007. He was 19 and his younger brother was 17 and while he wasn’t officially diagnosed until “probably three months before he passed,” the actor talked about how “the whole progression of him getting worse” took place over a time period of “two or three years.”
At the time, the family had no idea what had been going on. “I don’t know what I thought about it then, you know, like I probably thought ‘Oh, my brother’s going through a phase’,” Grossman stated. He recalled how they were both attending public school and how his brother suddenly wanted to be homeschooled. “He started to withdraw and things just got worse and worse.”
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Other things started to happen and Grossman went on to explain, “He stopped hanging out with his friends and then it really got real bad… he put on weight, he would wear all black, he would not want to go in public, he would shower in the dark. It took a while to get that bad… There was times where he was walking around the house with a bat, he was extremely paranoid.” And at the time, his parents didn’t know what to do. However, when it got so bad, they took him to a doctor and he was diagnosed “but there was a pretty long period of time where they just did what parents did… they loved their kid.”
He remembered seeing how much pain his brother was in but at 19 years old, Grossman continued, “I don’t know that I comprehended what he was going through. I probably thought in that moment, ‘Hey, he’s going to grow out of this.’ I didn’t understand but looking back, he was in a lot of pain.”
You can watch the full interview below…
And if you know anyone who may need help, visit the National Institute of Mental Health for guidance.
