My sense of what exactly is up with your son is drawn only from what you write here - and it sounds frustrating as hell. Now that he's supposedly an adult, are you more or less on your own with it?

The framing of questions like "how bad is bad?" and "how do you make comparisons between two individuals" seem pretty unmanageably difficult. I barely know what to expect from a more or less typical teenager (my sister and I spend a lot of time on the phone marveling that T seems to be pretty darn normal - if on the bright side - and that a lot of the time neither of us really know how to relate to this in terms of our own teenage years. Luckily, there are other ways to relate.)

I do spend a lot of time wondering about the parenting side of things in the case of my brother - but again, it's not like there's any doubt about the parenting quality involved. I just have no real way of understanding the effects of my brother's mental health issues were he not a) stuck with awful parents and b) pampered and indulged and given a playboy lifestyle on a platter. It would probably help if I could spend more time with him without wanting to wring his neck.