Finding Work After Time in a Psychiatric Facility

We all need to have something, some activity that makes us feel worthwhile, gets us out of the house, hopefully helps us meet people and helps pay the rent. Here are some suggestions.

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Author’s Note: Read to the very end, or read as far as you can then scroll to the very end for the “book recipie” I share with everyone which includes three books that can help anyone out of poverty and start them on the road to happiness and financial freedom.

I am one of the people that saw a need to bring more money in than my parents could provide from an early age. I was very enterprising. For example, as a boy of 11, during the summer, I would walk a couple of miles to a farm that hired day labourers to pick beans and weeds and do general farm work. On the way home I would avoid the convenience stores selling iced drinks and instead try and drop in on my sister who worked at a restaurant and would often give me a plate of fries and a pop free. After I returned home I would set out to do my paper route, after which I watched a little TV (yay Star Trek!) and then after supper do the dishes which my sister would pay me for as dishes was her job. I would use every cent I could spare to build my comic book collection, which I hoped would one day be sold for a large sum to fund my education. I had my sights set on Law School. When I was forced into the psychiatric hospital at the ripe old age of 18, perhaps the worst part of it was that no one respected what I could do or had done. The occupational therapists would try to force me to make wallets or to do colouring. I couldn’t stand it.

Later in my hospital stay, I was given a job at the woodworking shop which was a little more my speed but they only paid me $1 per hour or some pittance. Before that, I had been making $9 an hour stocking shelves at The Real Canadian Superstore. It was a massive place and I had to know where every single item went and there were quotas and various demands put on me. If I stayed with that job I could have easily gone into being a specialist and later a manager.

What ended up happening was that I counted too much on the programs I was put through in the psychiatric hospital. I didn’t understand how serious the stigma of being in a psychiatric hospital was. I went to my former place of employment and explained I had been in the hospital and was rehabilitated with occupational therapy. I never heard back from them or any other employers I told about my mental illness.

What ended up happening was, my parents kicked me out of the house, mainly because I didn’t have a job. I moved into a housekeeping room in downtown Edmonton which was far, far below the standard of living I was used to. I did make a connection with a temp agency and got some good jobs. I will never forget working as a forklift operator at a pluming supply company. I loved driving a forklift, the money wasn’t bad, and I made friends with a few guys who worked there. There was this one time working there that one of my friends showed me how to log onto a bulletin board on a computer, and I was in awe. I had no clue how it all worked, but it seemed fascinating to me. Sadly, in my situation I had as much ability to buy my own computer as I did the ability to buy my own jet.

While I was working there, I put my application in to join the military. I could have stayed working there, but I had bigger plans. Join the army, go to the Persian Gulf, become a war hero and either redeem myself for all the strange and harmful things I had done while I was in psychosis, or die trying. The military took a long hard look at my psychiatric history and threw my application in the trash. I decided to move back to my parent’s house where I really was not wanted, and eventually after a fight and some serious threats from my dad, I hitch-hiked to the west coast.

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I had so many jobs in Vancouver despite that unemployment for the uneducated or unskilled was high. I would go to what people called the slave market where people would gather and employers would come looking for day labourers. I would take jobs no one else wanted. For a couple of weeks I worked in renovation construction. One time I worked all day in three feet of mud in the rain, building a basement of a house. I was grateful that my training to join the army had me in good shape because this was one of the most physically demanding jobs I ever had.

I ended up going back and forth to Vancouver a few times. Somehow I always seemed to get some work to get me through. It is hard to describe, but sometimes in my daily life or even while working I would make a total fool of myself. One of my jobs was working as a bus boy at a restaurant and one night a group of four young people came in right near closing. One of the things I kept doing while I had that job which angered my boss was that I would talk to customers. I just thought it was good policy, to make friends with everyone. I tried talking to this group of young people but they saw me as some kind of undesireable person. I went about my floor cleaning as they sat long after we closed despite that I made it obvious I wanted them to leave so I could go home. As I went around the floor with a mop, I went near their table and one of them had their foot out in the aisle. I stood there with my mop waiting for them to pull their foot in and they didn’t, so I mopped their foot. I will never forget my boss showing me a long and durogatory note they wrote to him about how I should be fired and that I eavesdropped on their conversation. I could never understand why people could be so hateful. The truth was, I had some problems setting boundaries.

Around the same timeI was working this busboy job, I connected with a young woman I was friends with from high school years and had a major crush on. I don’t know what to call it, but basically when I was in grade 12, after I stopped seeing her, every little thing would make me think of her. I would compare all females I met to her, I help her up on a pedastal as someone who could do no wrong and saw her as someone who would go a long way in life. Finally, when I thought I had overcome my mental illness, I gave her a call from Vancouver. I don’t know if it was the dreary, rainy weather of Vancouver in the winter or the stress of reconnecting with this young woman, but soon after I contacted her, I slipped into psychosis. I would call her up, and talk a mile a minute, I would make some strange connections to things that really had no actual connection, and I also talked about my desire to become an officer in the British military, which was literally impossible. Eventually it all just got to be too much for her and she cut off all contact.

It turned out that my bus boy job was going to be the last job I would have for quite a while. I ended up in a terrible state and I think all the people around me knew and were being incredibly cruel about my predicament. They would play jokes on me, treat me like I was some kind of dangerous or insane person. This all happened while I was staying at the one place I could afford, a traveller’s hostel near the waterfront in North Vancouver. Eventually, I made a desperate cry for help, calling a 911 operator and telling them that I thought someone had put hallucinogenic drugs in my food. I was taken to a hospital and given medications and locked in a psychiatric ward. This hospital was such a nice place, it was clean, the staff was kind and attentive, there was a wide screen TV and the food was great. They even had a basketball court accesible by patients. But they had wrongly diagnosed me. Then, they gave me a time-released shot of medication and discharged me. I was completely unable to function.

I ended up returning to Edmonton where my parents couldn’t and wouldn’t help me. My sister had an asshole boyfriend who said he would help me on the condition that I never ask him for another thing again in my life. I still have a lot of pure hatred for him forcing me to make that promise while I was in such desperate need of help. All he really did was get a friend to drive me to a hospital which wouldn’t admit me as a patient, then took me to an emergency shelter and while I was there, they refused to talk to me on the phone or to check in with me or anything.

The people in there weren’t the greatest, and the medication I was on wasn’t helping. One guy kept asking me for cigarettes and I barely had enough for myself. He would do things to make me feel obligated, like one time he told me about a labour agency across the street where I could make $50 in a day or something, then he would beg me for a cigarette unaware that I was completely unable to work any kind of job.

The next years were difficult. I had some part-time jobs, one of them I liked the most was working at Safeway as a clerk. The people there were nice and the pay wasn’t too bad. But at the end of one of my pay periods I couldn’t find any way to make myself feel good about having a little money other than to go straight to the bar. While I was there, I talked to a guy who kept making me feel like shit and he thought since I had money I should buy him drinks which I stupidly did. I don’t remember any hangover in my life that was worse than what I went through the next day being on heavy medications and getting extremely drunk.

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I think one of the best things I did was to move out of the neighborhood I was in and into an apartment I liked. I eventually got a job with a legendary security company and my boss was amazing. I used to come to the office just to shoot the shit with him, he had been in the army with someone I had known and we both had a lot of interesting stories. The head boss was possibly even more interesting, he had a full career in the RCMP and had been posted everywhere from Parliament Hill in Ottawa to undercover work in Montreal. This was perhaps one of the most enjoyable times of my adult life up to that point.

I like security work, I was able to get a lot of reading done, I enjoyed the people I worked with. The only real problems were isolation and sleep deprivation.

Eventually, after bumping around to a few different companies, I got a job as a security guard on a movie set. I got to know the assistant locations director and he painted me a rosy picture of what it was like to work in film. I put in my application and eventually got work on productions like “Waking Walter: The Walter Gretzky Story” “Christmas in Wonderland” with Patrick Swayze and “Freezer Burn” with Tom Greene. They also had me set up stages for major concerts and I got to see dozens of shows, work in live theatre, and much more.

The good part of it all? Eventually, I learned enough about work by cobbling together a living of minimum wage jobs, well paid jobs, and a small disability pension to have my book edited and published. I think the way I accomplished this was simply by demanding that each step I took in life had to be a step forward. Even at the worst times when I was under the effects of medication that was not helping but hurting me, I would read and study, write journals, experiment with poetry.

I also think one of the critical things about my life being at such a low point while I was just released from the hospital but getting to the high point of having a book published, getting teaching jobs, opportunities like I have now where I am paid for travelling across the country to speak at a conference, and more, is that I put my main focus on using my lived experience to help others.

I want to leave you, my precious and most dear readers with a short list of books that made a huge difference in my life. Of course there were many more books like this, but these are the ones that gave me true economic freedom. They are:

The Richest Man in Babylon, by Richard S. Clason

The Secrets of Power Negotiating, by Roger Dawson

The Greatest Salesman in the World, by Og Mandino

For anyone who would like to read a book that is beautifully written and tells a compelling true story of a man in the grips of schizophrenia, I suggest:

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert M. Pirsig (and the sequel, “Lila”

I feel that anyone who can absorb and consume the wonderful wisdom and strategies in these books, regardless of their present situation, will one day thrive. Thank you for reading this far!