I have been hearing something about so-called black sheep and I wonder whether there is any truth in it. There is this brother who is always on the wrong side of things. When we plan to go to our village, he does not want it; when his school suspended students after a riot last year he was on the list. When it comes to getting bad grades in class, he is among those students. As his elder sister (I am 22) I am often defending him because I think he might soon grow up (he is 17) but I am also wondering whether he can be helped to be normal?
It would seem that at the age of 17 years, there is “something” the matter with your brother who at that stage is clearly getting off the rails.
A number of things you have observed in him give me reason to advice that you get an expert view on him. You tell us for example, that he is always on the wrong side of things. Though not explicitly stated, you imply that as the proverbial black sheep, he is the number one suspect whenever anything goes wrong.
Purely out of interest, you might wish to know that the term “black sheep” has its origins in the 18th and 19th Century England. In a flock of white sheep, there occasionally was born a black one as would be expected from a study of recessive genes.
Black wool could not be dyed hence was most undesirable and basically useless. It thus became a term that describes a family member who brought shame to the family.
The example you provide about your brother being sent home after a riot in school makes this point rather well. Whether he was part of the riot squad or not, he ends up as the chief suspect and is sent away. To make it worse for all, his grades are poor and in a sense, to prove the point that you do indeed care for him as an elder sister, you have written to ask if he can be helped to be normal.
On the face of it, the meaning of the term normal is as simple as it looks. To the lay person, normal simply means normal and nothing more. In reality, however, things are not as simple as we would like them to be. There are for example men who are normal, and who are six feet tall.
There are other men who are also normal but are five feet tall. The question you might be asking, therefore, is who is more normal; the six or the five-foot tall man.
If on the other hand you came across a man who was nine feet tall, or one who was three feet tall and an adult, you might describe these two extremes as abnormal. This now brings us to the body of the conversation about what normal might be in the context of you and your brother.
To help you understand the concept better, you might want to familiarise yourself with the concept of the bell curve. Put simply, this is a bell shaped curve (or graph) that plots e.g. the height or IQ of people, starting with the lowest to the highest. If one was to take the heights of all the people on the new train from Mombasa to Nairobi, one would find some rather short and some very tall people. If you did the same for people in your church on a Sunday, you would make very similar conclusions.
In this regard, you will find that normal people have different human characteristics e.g. height, weight, intelligence, emotional stability etc but that normal is a range rather than a number.
In a similar way, the pulse rate, blood pressure, blood sugar and temperature of a human being fall within a narrow range. A blood sugar of 15 units would tell the doctor you have diabetes, while a temperature of 39 degrees would tell the doctor you have a fever, possibly due of an infection.
In the sense of the foregoing examples, and in the mind of a casual observer, there is a strong suggestion that indeed your brother has fallen outside the normal distribution curve of normal people. What you describe is more than a tendency to get into trouble once in a while, and is compounded by poor grades and riotous behaviour in school.
We do not have enough information to state confidently what the exact problem might be but it might be wise to get a mental health expert to offer an opinion. At the age of 17 years, a crisis in adolescence, depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, drug abuse or early Schizophrenia are all possible causes.
