"She'd worry that skin until it was all bleeding and crusty," she recalls. "Today, that kind of anxiety and hurting yourself would be a big red flag. But I was young, she was young, and our parents weren't around that much. And that kind of thing was never talked about in our family."
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Close, the People's Choice winner at the 2015 WebMD Health Hero Awards, always felt protective of Jessie, who is 6 years younger. But she didn't always have the opportunity to act on those protective instincts. In 1954, when Jessie was a baby, their father, a surgeon, joined a cult called Moral Re-Armament and uprooted his wife and four children to the group's headquarters in Switzerland, where the family lived in a hotel.
"I was always fascinated and charmed by Jessie. She had such imagination; she was so funny and original. I guess I kind of considered myself her guardian. But when we were in that big hotel, we were all in different rooms, and you don't live together like you do when you're in a family. I was with her but not 'with her,' you know? So Jess really fell through the cracks."
Sister Struggles
During the next few decades, Jessie Close's life became increasingly turbulent. She began drinking heavily and doing drugs in her teens. She had five failed marriages, three children, and lots of affairs. "I had my first psychotic break when I was 21," Jessie recalls. "I was living in Washington, D.C., and going to school. I felt this prickling on my scalp and I turned around and looked, and I was sitting on my bed looking at me. It scared me so much I couldn't leave the apartment until I ran out of food."
But despite the family's history of mental illness -- one uncle had schizophrenia and another committed suicide -- no one realized that Jessie might be struggling with her own mental illness until she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2004, at the age of 51. By then, she had come within inches of taking her own life.