Finding Comfort Despite a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Listen People, It's Not a Death Sentence!

I have a few things on my mind that are just not organized enough to be a podcast. Stay tuned though and please do request subjects for further podcasts

Photo by Lazaro Rodriguez on Unsplash

Most people who experience schizophrenia experience it in a multitude of different ways. I have heard a lot of talk and read a lot about the prodromal phase where you have some other mental illness before you are diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a cunning and devious malady that can affect almost anyone of just about any age, though there are some guidelines like how most people develop the illness in their teens and early 20s. I have also heard most women who develop schizophrenia will do so in their late 20s. There are documentaries that have shown children as young as six who definitely have schizophrenia. One thing I think is important is, especially if you have a diagnosis of mental illness in your family, you should learn about the warning signs and ways to cope. You should prepare yourself, not resign yourself to the possibility that you too may suffer. You should also take a close look at your lifestyle. As a person with the genetic code to develop schizophrenia, you may never get it, but if you partake in heavy alcohol or THC use, or even methamphetamine, you are more likely to get the illness. And it is important to note that everyone, regardless of family history, still has around a 1 in 100 chance of developing the illness. For me I think the trigger that finally tipped me over the edge was stress, exacerbated by isolation and depression.

Schizophrenia, which hit me squarely in the head at 18, had been a long time coming. In elementary school I already showed signs of depression and social withdrawal, which are considered some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I knew it ran in my family, but I had no clue as to the extent of it. One day, years after I was diagnosed, my uncle told me my great grandmother had untreated schizophrenia. He himself had depression with psychosis, as did my mother. Having a mother who was sweet and kind, incredibly intelligent and supportive, made it hard for me to ever accept the fact that she had a chronic mental illness. Not accepting this was one of the biggest roadblocks to my eventual recovery.

It was strange because until I was beaten to the ground by the severe stigma of mental illness, I thought that things like depression and psychosis were simply medical symptoms that need to be treated with medical means like any other illness, and that if I showed I was treated, taking my medication, and now thinking rationally, no one could hold my illness against me. I recall a conversation in elementary school with classmates when they were asking me why I wore stinky socks or dirty clothes. I simply said that my mom hadn’t done laundry in a while. One classmate said that his mom does all the laundry in the hamper every night. I tried to explain that my mother was sick and couldn’t do that, and most of the housework went to the rest of the family, aside from some cooking, shopping and cleaning. I felt this was a valid reason, but I was extremely stigmatized, insulted, and left out of things like birthday parties or street hockey games by those classmates, and even the few people I considered to be friends.

This ‘radical idea’ that mental illness was something medical that needed to be properly treated stayed with me for a long time. At 18, I recall having a very well paid job at a grocery store and enjoying the work, but when I first got ill, I walked out on a shift in the middle of it because I simply saw no reason in doing something I didn’t want to do just for money. My delusions told me there were surely billions out there, at the very least millions. Soon after I was sent to a psychiatric hospital where I went on medications that cured me of my delusions and hallucinations. I went back to my workplace and filled out an application, clearly stating that I had a mental health condition, but I was treated for it and was ready to return to work. I can’t even imagine the laugh my old supervisor must have had reading that application before throwing it in the trash.

My prodromal phase lasted a number of years. I wonder sometimes if the lack of sleep I had growing up had anything to do with my eventual mental illness. Even as a young child, I experienced insomnia, and it took a heavy toll. Later on, as a teeny bopper, I would sneak downstairs at night and watch TV, eat hot dogs, exercise, with the main floor of our house all to myself. I greatly enjoyed these times, but I had a strange tendency. Right around the time most of the world was getting out of bed, I would get ambitious and think if I sat down and tried my best, I could memorize a school textbook or read a volume of our encyclopedia. These grand ideas always ended in me finally being too tired to function, but having to make it to school in just a few minutes. This pattern stayed with me pretty much up to present day. The only way I have found to combat my insomnia is to strictly discipline myself not to drink caffeine, not to vary my bedtimes, exercise, and stay in bed even if it takes me two hours to sleep. In my early days of treatment, I would often stay up for a long period and then sleep for days. This messed up the times I took my medications and made employment nearly impossible. I literally lived in my small apartment completely out of synch with the world around me. Finding a way to live a more normal schedule was something that eluded me up until I went to a group home where meals were served at specific times and I had to either get to sleep on time or miss out and go hungry.

A lot of things were happening when my prodromal phase progressed into full schizophrenia. Shift work, school all day, being socially inept. Abuse of alcohol didn’t help, and the loss of a friend to suicide all seemed to play a role. All I can think about was how at Christmas I was fine, I was working, about to finish a French course, reading a great deal, and I had hopes of getting into university after taking just a few more courses. But somehow, the incredibly complex and interconnected machine we call a body, but especially my mind, just kind of threw a gear. By April I was beyond any kind of help that could be offered outside of a secure mental health facility.

One of the things I remember so clearly was that I had the impression that if I stayed my course, if I kept on working hard in school, kept on being the perfect son, the perfect employee, the perfect brother, all would be well. But I wasn’t in a perfect world. All of my ways of being perfect were impossible, and each for their own reasons. My dad was an alcoholic and would put unreasonable demands on me. He also didn’t want to support me any longer despite that I had a good job and never asked him for anything more than a roof over my head. My mom, though very kind and helpful, was unable to stand up to my dad, even unable to attend Alanon meetings. She had a severe mental illness and it never really occurred to me that I could have an even worse one. I don’t know if trying to be perfect was part of my illness, but I do know the strain of trying to meet impossible demands led to a complete breakdown in my mental state.

One of the funny things about this situation was that now that I have the time to think and look back, if someone in my family was consistent enough to write a memoir, so many problems could have been solved. I am plagued now with issues that come up which I should have been informed of years ago. My sister for example just told me that after I was born, I lived in the hospital for a month or more as my mom was being treated for postpartum depression. Knowing that could have helped me to accept that something mental/physical (where is the boundary really?) had been seriously wrong in my past. Then there was an incident when I was about three or so where my brother shoved a paint brush into my ear, possibly thinking it would come out the other side like in the cartoons. Sometimes I wonder if my brother actually wanted to kill me, but we were only small kids. For years I thought this never happened, that it was just a vivid dream from my past until a doctor asked me if I had ever had any other surgeries than the one done on my ear as a child.

Then there was my mom’s history. She had been a gifted student and was almost set to attend university on a full scholarship when she began experiencing psychosis and tried to kill herself. If I had known the truth, instead of being told she had been bullied at school which caused her suicide attempt, I may have been able to better understand what was happening to me and how incredibly necessary medications were for someone who had gone through what I did.

There is power in writing a memoir. I will never forget meeting an amazing older woman at the university while I was waiting to see a writer about some help with a novel I was working on. She was writing her family history and had no plans of publishing it, she just wanted to write it for her children and grandchildren to know about where they came from. She intended to make just five copies on her home printer, give them to her family members and leave things at that.

What I guess I wonder about sometimes is, should I have really written “Through the Withering Storm” and “Inching Back to Sane” my two memoirs. I had the idea that I wanted to be a writer, and that I should start with my own story because that was what I knew best. Write what you know and all that. After publishing it, I thought my mom would be extremely proud of me. It took years, incredible efforts, thousands of dollars and rejection after rejection to write that book, but instead of praising me, she read some parts where my dad did some very cruel things while drinking. She said I had made these things up and completely discounted the pain I went through.

It was a hard thing at many points of my life having a mother with a severe mental illness. Especially after I moved out. She had a lot of problems with her memory largely due to shock treatments and over-medication. There were moments, things she did for me that my dad was totally unaware of. All of them were completely lost even before she passed away. At 16, I loved Shakespeare and she gave me a book of love poems and sonnets of William Shakespeare. At 18 I went into the hospital, shortly after I left for the west coast and when I returned, I learned that anything in my parents house wasn’t saved for me but was reclaimed. The one thing that hurt the most was my dad not allowing me to take the Shakespeare book back. At the time it was given to me I felt I was truly in love and was actually dating the object of my desire. My mom saw this and knew that the book would have meaning to me. Then came my breakdown, my mom’s breakdown, shock treatments, and the time my dad kicked me out of the house and I left, but he still had me arrested and tried to charge me with trespassing. I guess when I think of those times I do really see the point in writing memoirs or an autobiography. But in reality, perhaps the people who most need such things are unable to do so. They say an unexamined life isn’t worth living, but I think that I can go one better and say that an undocumented life is one that will soon fade away.

I encourage everyone to write. I don’t want this to be another substack page telling people how to write substack pages, but I do honestly believe we all have a reason for putting our story down on screen or paper. If you have any kind of mental illness, including minor phobias or anything you would seek treatment for, a journal is such an essential tool in keeping track of what is working and what isn’t. Perhaps, (and I hope for this with all my heart), perhaps if someone were in the situation I was in and had a hard time understanding mental illness, the importance of exercising your right to keep your medical history private, and especially understanding that there is something wrong with your mind, but there is nothing wrong with asking for help, then perhaps all my efforts to write and market my memoirs will have been worth it.

For those of you who want to listen to me read and to get to know my work and my efforts better, try watching the following video: