My brother is a strain on my senses and emotional resources.

We're three siblings, I am the oldest. The youngest is 15, she's the love of my life, very bright and conventionally meritorious. My brother, second in the birth order, is a diagnosed shizophrenic and lives off the money that my parents had saved up for our college (that I never required because of public school + scholarships) and is also just very hard to be around.

He sends long rambling texts in the family group, is constantly getting in trouble that I have to bail him out of, and is prone to relationships that prove disastrous for him in the end. I usually am putting out small and big fires and spending my money to cover his exigencies that my senior parents cannot take care of for him. I don't want to disturb the peace of the household that my little sister lives in anyway, especially because she might be headed to medical school and will need all the support she can get.

How do you deal with a mentally ill sibling especially if they are partially dependant on you financially and emotionally? He barely has a career and I find myself planning hard and doing lots of labour to establish for him a career trajectory that he can follow despite his illness. It drains me and leaves me anguished, because despite everything I suppose I do love him.

Therapy has never been too effective for me because the 'advice' they give does not take into account the difference in our intellect. I find his speech and mannerisms mind numbingly annoying, just chalk on cardboard for days. I know he needs his family but I don't know how to be there for him, especially because now he has the maturity of a five year old, thereabouts. I never really got along with him in the way that I bond with my sister even when we were younger, but he's going to be in my life for the rest of my life, so how do I help myself?

I guess I want to ask people here how to actually learn to help a mentally ill person who is family when your IQ is 130+ and they are especially difficult to relate to because of their condition. Am I looking at this the wrong way?

Would love to hear from other people who have faced something similar. Wide open to new perspectives that I might be missing because of emotions clouding my judgements.