BOSTON.

When I asked my grandfather about his wife, who lived in the old Rhode Island public mental asylum, all he ever said was that her side of our Irish family was "away with the fairies." He added that if we ever went back to Ireland to shake the family tree, then, in the parlance of the day, lots of lunatics would fall out. My own mother, Mildred White, was having none of this fairy nonsense. As a lawyer, she weighed the evidence. Mom knew full well the risks of passing the schizophrenia down to her own kids. She decided upon a career in law precisely as an alternative to having children.

Her best-laid plans were upended when her head was turned by my father, Patrick Tracey Jr., a charming Providence gambler who insisted on having his own big Irish Catholic brood. Mom went ahead and rolled the dice with Dad, and when two of their five children were vaporized by schizophrenia, following in the footsteps of my mother’s brother and her own mother, all bets were off.

A biological disorder of the brain that runs in families, schizophrenia is the most severe of all the mental illnesses, one characterized by auditory, visual and even tactile hallucinations. It is an enigmatic psychosis that seems to come out of nowhere, the onset developing rapidly over six months or so just as they enter adulthood. When it strikes, the effect is devastating and total, like the impact of an asteroid that isn’t seen until it hits. And then for the treatment-resistant, like my sisters, it’s all aftermath.

You never get over the loss of two sisters, and you never get used to it either. My sisters Michelle and Austine were the loveliest of girls, so picture-perfect that they were professional models for Polaroid. Now they are such blighted beauties, living in day-care homes for the mentally ill.

Family lore has it that my great-great-great-grandmother Mary Egan was a full-blown schizophrenic when she washed up on the docks of Boston in 1847. She and her husband had just fled the Great Irish Famine.

Recently I took my dead grandfather’s advice, going back to old Ireland to stalk the madness that stalks my family. It was a bit of a Hobbit’s tale, but what I discovered was that rates of insanity among the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic had been driven to extremes in that brutal 19th Century for them. The chief culprit: a maternal malnourishment from the famines that were more or less a permanent condition for 300 years in Ireland.

Only through the lens of modern science do we see the links between maternal malnutrition, on the one hand, and schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and substance-abuse problems in the next generation on the other. Only now can we draw the lessons for the next generation from Darfur, because the Irish were the Darfurians of their day.

Another factor that can double to triple rates in children is older fathers. Here, too, there was a clue. In the peasant Ireland of my ancestors, as the Catholics were squeezed off their land by the British ruling from Dublin Castle, a poverty-stricken man was not eligible for marriage until his father died and he inherited the tiny potato patch.

Fifty-year-old men were commonly marrying 15 year-old parish girls. In that part of the world, it was just the done thing. In Ireland, between the famine and the older fathers and the steady Irish diet of poitin, a blinding moonshine that was drunk in the wet ditches to drown one’s sorrows, my ancestors hit the schizophrenic trifecta.

I came away from Ireland knowing that my grandfather got one thing right. Lots of lunatics did fall out of the family tree. But it wasn’t the fairies who fueled my family’s 160 year-old blood feud with schizophrenia. The evidence suggests that Mom’s legal mind was right about one thing: The fairies were framed.

Patrick Tracey is author of the newly published Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia. He can be reached at www. stalkingirishmadness.com.