My younger brother was institutionalised as a child because his care brought my parents money. Ten years later, I’m trying to get him out.
I’m 34F, my younger brother is 25, and we live in the Netherlands.
When I was nine, after years of believing I would be an only child, my brother was born. Two years later, we had a little sister too. She drowned in the creek behind our house when she was 2½. My brother was four and watched it happen.
I was thirteen. I came home from school and my mother told me the little ones had wandered off. I started searching the neighbourhood. When I reached the creek, I heard my mother scream. My sister died in hospital several hours later.
My brother never really recovered. His development stalled, he struggled at school and eventually went through seven different schools.
Then my parents went bankrupt and were close to becoming homeless.
At that exact point, my brother was placed in residential care against his will.
There had been no sudden violent incident, no crisis that made living at home impossible. My parents had discovered that, under a care arrangement, they could receive roughly €1,000 per month for caring for him during weekends while he stayed in residential care during the week.
That money paid the rent on their new home abroad.
From that moment on, my brother was increasingly described on paper as extremely difficult and highly dependent. Yet whenever he was supposedly “too much to handle” during the weekends, I was the one my parents called to take care of him.
And he simply wasn’t the person those descriptions suggested.
He was traumatised. He was behind developmentally. He needed guidance.
But he was not unmanageable.
For years, I didn’t fully understand what had happened. I was the older sister in a chaotic family and had already become the person who fixed things.
Then, in 2024, everything changed.
My mother finally left my father after decades of a deeply unhealthy relationship. She and my brother moved into my home.
Within months, my mother had taken over my house, my finances and increasingly my life. I was in my thirties, working full-time, yet she acted as though everything I had built belonged to her because she was my mother.
When I discovered how badly she was speaking about me to relatives, I gave her one month to find somewhere else to live.
She left the next day.
My brother stayed.
For several weeks, it was just the two of us.
And for the first time, I saw what happened when nobody constantly treated him like a helpless child.
He learned.
I taught him how to do laundry, iron, cook, manage household tasks, navigate relationships, talk about sex, arrange appointments and make everyday decisions.
I kept telling him:
“I’m your sister. I’m not your mother. I don’t want to run your life. I want to help you learn how to run it yourself.”
The day my mother left, he went on the first date of his life.
They are now engaged.
After my mother was gone, I also started helping him gain access to things he had never properly been involved in: his own care plans, his financial administrator and the documents that have determined his life.
What I found horrified me.
The man described on paper bears surprisingly little resemblance to the man I know.
According to his current care indication, he requires an extremely high level of support, approaching nursing-level care.
In reality, he speaks three languages fluently. He cooks. He cleans. He travels. He maintains a serious relationship. He can manage a household with support. He knows exactly where he wants to live and what kind of future he wants.
I am not saying he has no disability or that he needs no help.
He does.
But there is an enormous difference between needing support and being incapable of having your own life.
His current care package is worth roughly €7,000 per month.
That financial aspect is impossible for me to ignore, because money was part of his institutionalisation from the very beginning. When he was a child, his care generated the money my parents needed for housing. Today, an entire system is funded based on how dependent he is assessed to be.
Every individual involved is deliberately exploiting him. I he becomes more independent, his care needs decrease. If his care needs decrease, so does the money attached to him.
And nobody seems particularly motivated to discover how independent he might actually be.
Meanwhile, he is miserable.
He is 25 years old and has a curfew. He is generally only allowed to see his fiancée once a week. Since my mother disappeared from his daily life, he has lost around 25 kg. Staff have invited him to activities only to exclude him at the last moment. He regularly calls me heartbroken.
His wish is incredibly ordinary:
He wants to move to the city where his fiancée lives and transition into a more independent form of supported housing.
The problem is that my mother and I are both his court-appointed mentors.
I support him.
She refuses, because he does not want to talk to her.
She has told him she will only cooperate with his move if he shows her gratitude and agrees to see her personally.
He doesn’t want to.
The last time he saw her, she told him that she had nearly died by suicide twice. He called me afterwards completely overwhelmed, and I drove 1½ hours to comfort him.
His personal support worker appears to side with my mother. Contact with her has been kept from me despite the fact that I am also his mentor. The discrepancies between what my brother tells me happened and what later appears in official reports are becoming increasingly worrying.
I have complained.
I have sought independent client support.
I have written to the court.
I keep running into walls.
And I am getting dangerously close to simply taking my brother into my home.
Not because I want to become his full-time carer.
Quite the opposite.
I want someone independent to finally compare the person described in twenty years of paperwork with the person who actually exists today.
But taking him home could have serious legal and practical consequences, and I don’t want my desperation to make his situation worse.
There is also a selfish part of this that I struggle with.
I was a glass child. I was heavily parentified. I spent my childhood dealing with my parents’ crises and protecting my younger siblings.
I love my brother more than anything.
But I am 34 now. For the first time, I have a happy relationship, a career and the chance to build my own life.
I do not want to become his replacement mother.
I want him to have his own life.
His own home. His fiancée. Work or education if that is possible. Freedom appropriate to his actual abilities. And support for the things he genuinely cannot do alone.
I cannot accept that the answer is lifelong institutionalisation simply because that is what has been written about him since childhood.
So I genuinely don’t know what to do anymore.
Please tell me what to do, because I genuinely feel like I have tried everything.
I carry a lot of guilt around this. When I was a child, I prayed every single night for a little brother. Sometimes, irrationally, I feel responsible for the life he ended up with because I wanted him so badly.
I don’t want him to merely exist inside a system. I want him to have a life where he is allowed to reach for the stars, even if he needs help getting there.
He wants to be a dad. He wants to own a farm. And I don’t think those dreams are unrealistic. I know my brother, and I know what he is capable of. He may need support, but he deserves the chance to build a life that is bigger than the limits other people keep placing on him.
Right now, almost every ambition he has is shut down before he even gets the chance to try. He has been told he will never be able to get a driver’s licence, yet he has passed his trial theory exam four times in a row. He is not stupid. He is delayed, traumatised and needs support. That is not the same thing as being incapable.
I have tried complaints. I have tried independent client support. I have contacted the court. I have tried raising concerns through safeguarding channels. I keep asking for someone to look at the person he actually is, instead of blindly accepting what has been written about him for years.
If there is anyone reading this who knows the Dutch care system, disability law, safeguarding, mentorship or supported living, please help me.
I don’t know how to get him out.
I promised him I would get him out. Big sisters keep their promises. I just don’t know how to keep mine anymore.