Ah, so we're really talking about a lay person's concept of "Mentally Ill"; in other words "nuts". A lay person's definition of mental illness is simply, someone that doesn't behave in a manner that I am comfortable with. By that definition, I am absolutely mentally ill, and, more importantly, do not care. The appropriate treatment for this mental illness is simple; they can either shut up and go away, or they can find a way to become comfortable with what they are not.
The problem, the treatment, is entirely ON THEM.
Unless of course, your family is filled with licensed Psychiatrists who can make a real diagnosis, and prescribe a real treatment; but even then, diagnosing family members is kind of frowned upon because it effects objectivity, and physicians are inclined to be too lax with required record keeping when they make a diagnosis at the dinner table; which can cause all manner of problems down the road.
And again, I'd like to forcefully assert, there is nothing evil or repulsive about having a mental illness, whether YOU have one or not. Brain is just an organ, it can fail in all sorts of magnificent ways; sometimes you can teach it to accept and work around the failure, sometimes you can alter the chemistry and mitigate the failure, sometimes there's a surgical intervention, and sometimes you can't do anything and just have to live with the way it is, as best you can.
But a bad outcome on a major surgery should not surprise or shock the patient or the doctor. They will always happen, the docs try to learn from what went wrong, and they can try and mitigate the suffering that results. What they can't do, is undo what went poorly.
