Looking back at that time in his family’s history, Grossman remembered that his brother wanted to drop out of the public high school they were both attending to be homeschooled. “He started to withdraw,” the Y&R star noted. “Things just got worse and worse. He stopped hanging out with his friends, 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, but there were times where he was walking around the house with a bat. He was extremely paranoid.”
Back then, there were fewer resources dedicated to mental illness, and neurological disorders like schizophrenia were often misunderstood. “My parents, at the time, I don’t think they knew what to do. Until it got so bad that they took him to a doctor, and he was diagnosed,” Grossman shared. “But there was a pretty long period of time where they just did what parents did… they loved their kid.”
There have been major breakthroughs in mental and behavioral health treatments since Grossman’s brother was diagnosed nearly 20 years ago, and the actor even briefly wondered if things would have been different had his sibling been diagnosed earlier. “I do remember that he did not like that medication; he did not like the way it made him feel. But who knows if he had started it earlier… ”
As he recalled how much pain his brother was constantly in, Grossman admitted that at 19 years old, “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.”
