Across the country, the families of the seriously mentally ill are stuck in an all-consuming struggle to save the sick from themselves.

Bill Weaver Jr. could see the devil in his old man's eyes. Weaver lashed out at his father's every move and turned his retirement into an endless misery.

Alone together in their condo in western Miami-Dade County, they were locked in a pitched psychological war. One night, Bill, who is schizophrenic, leapt out of the dark and tried to smother 77-year-old William Weaver with a blanket.

Weaver escaped his son and called police, hoping the criminal justice system would help him -- a move he will forever regret.

In the psychiatric ward of the Dade County Jail, Bill dived headfirst from his bunk bed in a manic fit, hit the rim of the toilet and broke his neck. Doctors don't know if he will walk again.

Like so many others, the tragedy lays bare the perils of untreated mental illness and highlights the desperate struggle of relatives to get a disturbed family member into treatment.

Florida's poorly funded and fragmented mental-health system, combined with laws that protect the rights of people to refuse treatment no matter how dysfunctional they are, all but block the path to sanity.

"The law protects the right to be psychotic," said Rachel Diaz, who runs a group in Miami called Families of Untreated Mentally Ill Persons. "Even though, by definition, they are not able to think clearly, we give them that choice."

At a time when new medications can do more than ever, an estimated 92,000 adults and 79,000 children in Florida with serious mental illness do not get the treatment they need.

The social consequences are disastrous: rampant homelessness, suicide, drug abuse, prostitution, overcrowded jails, tragic police shootings.

But one consequence of a deficient system is kept vigilantly behind the closed doors of thousands of homes: the ceaseless, all-consuming battle families fight to keep those they love from becoming a part of these statistics.

They give up jobs and personal lives. They secretly slip their children medication. They battle to convince the afflicted that they are sick, only to be berated, accused of persecution. They pray when their troubled children disappear for weeks and brace for the storm when they come back.

PROTRACTED ORDEAL

Years and decades pass and their adult children are still at home going through the same tortured cycles.

"It's living with a person who insults you, who doesn't obey you, who doesn't appreciate you, who doesn't love you," said Diaz, 80, whose husband is schizophrenic. "It's a miserable life."

Weaver tries to roll with his son's hostility. Since the accident last year, he visits Bill, now 44, at a nursing home in Allapattah three times a week.

Thursday, he took him a lottery ticket. Bill appreciated the visit at first. But his thoughts quickly took a turn.

"I wish you would die," he said, rasping through a dry throat. "Go home and die. You ruined my life. I really think you are the devil."

The two argued for a half hour.

"Maybe I'm wasting my time," Weaver sighed. "He doesn't seem happy to see me."

NOT COMPREHENDING

Nationwide, an estimated 4.5 million people suffer schizophrenia and manic depression. Half do not have the ability to understand that they are sick, experts say.

"It's a real dramatic inability to see what's so obvious to everyone else," said Xavier Amador, a Columbia University psychology professor and author of the book I Am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help!

"You hear the same stories over and over and over."

The last year of Maria Santos' life has been a case study in how a family gets stuck in a psychiatric sinkhole.

No matter how many people tell her 28-year-old son Frankie that he is schizophrenic, no matter how many times he ends up in a crisis center, no matter how many times he is locked in jail for disorderly conduct, he refuses to believe he is sick.

"They call me a schizo," he whispered to a reporter in November. "I think I'm just thinking outside the box."

He lives at his parents' Southwest Miami-Dade home, cannot hold a job and considers himself a "scholar warrior." He thinks God "inserted" him on Earth for a divine intervention. He is festooned with grandiose tattoos -- the words "King One" cover the side of his neck.

Frankie experienced his first psychotic episode at 18, and he lay naked in a fetal position in his bedroom for days.

Santos is at her wits' end. She watched Frankie's schizophrenic father drive himself into homelessness.

To keep Frankie from the same fate, she is a full-time mom with no end of her work in sight. She has no friends, no hobbies, no job. She's always strategizing, slipping him medication, anticipating the next eruption. The schizophrenia never rests.

And on Dec. 5, 2003, it detonated out of her reach.