Live With a Serious Mental Illness? The One Thing You Can't Afford is Complacency!

I live with schizoaffective disorder and anxiety. At times I let things slide and every time that has happened it ended in disaster. I'm here to remind you to make mental health your #1 priority

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Good day kind readers. I wanted to start off today with an offer and a request. It is a real challenge to live on your own and meet expenses when a disability like schizoaffective disorder has you by the throat. I am hoping to get a few people who can afford it to become paid subscribers so I can meet my needs and look at buying software and equipment to take these blogs and podcasts to the next level. Please consider switching from a free subscription to a paid one, and as a bonus I will provide you with digital copies of my three mental health memoirs. Thanks for all those who follow me, and please feel free to write or comment if any of this helps you.

Well, enough shameless self-promotion. I wanted to discuss today how important it is to make your mental health a priority. Before I even do that though, I want to talk about other aspects of your health that are going to affect your mental health. The first and perhaps biggest one is sleep. I have known people who made full recoveries from mental health disorders simply by changing how they look at their sleep habits. I have a very troubling sleep disorder, but if I am careful, and mature, it isn’t that hard to overcome. One of the ways I have problems is that I tend to take naps in the afternoon in hopes of having a productive evening after my meal/5 o’clock medications. This almost never works this way. I end up doing other things with my time after 5 and then when it comes time to sleep, I just can’t do it. I don’t know what the ideal amount of time it is for someone to lay down trying to sleep and not being able to drift off, but I have heard anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. With me, often I will lay down for up to 2 or 3 hours trying to sleep. With me, I think due in a lot of ways to my medications, it is very hard for me to get to sleep and then once I’m asleep it is even harder to get me up. I find myself drinking too much caffeine in the mornings. It is kind of ridiculous, because what often happens is I will wake up super early, make a cup of coffee and take my morning medications, then I will set my coffee down on my table and fall back asleep for an hour, and I wake up to a cold cup of coffee. I think a lot better method would be to have a cold shower, though I often find it hard to motivate myself to do even that. My sister once suggested I splash cold water on my face, which helps. One of my greatest concerns is that when I wake up without having enough sleep, then get into my car, there is a danger that I will fall asleep at the wheel and get into a horrible accident.

Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash

There are a few methods I try and use to counter some of these problems. I find that if I don’t nap, and severely limit my caffeine intake after say 5:00pm, I will often be able to sleep much better. One of my big problems with sleep is, sometimes I am able to get to sleep right away, but then I wake up about two hours later. I find myself at these times to be restless and bored and will often make a snack which just packs on the pounds. I should mention I was once 265 pounds and am currently just 210. Losing this weight took a long time and a lot of effort. Sadly my greatest enemy in the battle of the flab is that I don’t spend my money on much but groceries lately and I have also found ways to afford foods that I enjoy. More on diet later.

So here I go, sleep 2 hours, wake up, sleep 2 hours. I have never talked to a doctor about this much, but I have been told by a lot of people that this is extremely unhealthy. I know when it happens (and it happens nearly every night) I almost never get the proper rest I seek unless I waste a good long chunk of my day sleeping in.

The other thing I noticed about falling asleep is I need to simply do more. I didn’t think sedentary work like writing or reading or driving could tire a person out, but now I know that using my brain for a task where I am deeply engaged will definitely tire me out. When I worked a heavy labour job for a living, I would be tired, I would be sore, but that mostly led to me doing nothing and staying up late. I still like to work out, but I don’t just have a workout and laze around the rest of the day, I try to get in some meaningful work like writing or reading or sending out pitches for articles.

Basically, if I want to sleep well, I need to (a) get up early and stay up (b) limit caffeine intake (c) engage myself in a variety of activities and (d) I find a light snack before bed can help.

At times I also use prescription medication to help me sleep. This sometimes works well if I follow the other rules, and it allows me the option of not taking it in case I need to sleep just a short time and be able to get up and do a something I am tasked with.

So, sleep is one thing that is critical for good mental health. It rejuvenates us, it allows our bodies to heal from the previous day’s stress, and it allows our brains to work a lot better in both the short and long run. The next important thing never to get complacent about is our diet.

For me, diet has been for some time now simply trying to find ways to reduce my sugar intake. I was diagnosed with type two diabetes some time back and need to keep my blood sugar levels low or face a host of complications from needing insulin injections if I can’t keep my sugar levels low enough, to amputation of limbs and blindness.

A lot of the food choices I make aren’t always the healthiest ones, which I am sure works against the positive effects of my medications and exacerbates my mental illness. For example, some may think juice is a healthy alternative to pop, but a lot of juices, even fruit juices with no added sugar have more sugar in them than pop. And any kind of sugar is bad sugar when you have diabetes. Instead of juice I almost always drink diet pop, which I am sure is slowly killing me as well.

One of the things I have found that helped was to get a cook book for people with diabetes, I am actually surprised at some of the things I am still able to eat. Vegetables should really be more a part of my diet. I used to like to buy frozen peas, fresh lettuce, and frozen broccoli a lot and I would add them to other dishes. For a time, I even tried going on a vegetarian diet. It seemed to go well, but I was inexperienced in it and found myself craving foods that I could have gotten in vegetarian options but because of a lack of knowledge didn’t. I think there are two really good ways I can start to live better and have a better diet would be to join a diabetes support group, and possibly take a class. I often fall into the trap of thinking I can just get a book on the subject and learn much more cheaply on my own. But I have a book called Type Two Diabetes for Dummies and I haven’t even opened it in the year since I bought it.

A couple of things I have learned about the diabetic diet is that often you can get away with an unhealthy food simply by eating just a small portion of it. It can be very tricky though to find out what you are getting in a food you prepare at home. I know some of the soups I have in my cupboard, they list they have six grams of sugar, but then if you read the top of the nutrition label it says that those six grams are in every 125 mL of the soup. If you have a 500 mL soup, you are actually getting 24 grams of sugar.

But above all, the point is not about sugar and diabetes, it is about being aware of what you eat and how it affects your mental health. I think it is pretty fair to say that a large percentage of the North American population likes their coffee and tea. This is something that really should be used carefully. I know if I am really tired and I drink coffee, it throws me out of kilter. I may get minor symptoms of psychosis or go into a manic state. I curse the years I spent in isolation as a security guard living all night on endless cups of coffee, and endless packs of cigarettes. One thing I learned about cigarettes is that with certain medications, one of them being a very well known and highly praised medication called Clozapine, smoking will make it so you need a double dose of the medication to get the same effect a non-smoker would get. With all the side effects medication causes, and the health effects smoking causes, it seems so simple. Simple, but not easy—I was a heavy smoker for 18 years and quitting was nearly impossible for me.

When I finally decided to quit, what it came down to was having enough support through the mental health clinic to stop. One of the amazing things about Canada is that we have residential rehabilitation centres here where people can go to quit drinking, using drugs, and/or smoking. I used to think that with the high taxes on cigarettes people shouldn’t complain because smokers were paying a lot into the system. Then a friend of mine told me recently that for each cigarette a person smokes, it costs the system about $10. That would mean a $15 pack of cigarettes should actually be taxed up to $200.

Smoking is definitely an issue and then there is drinking and how it affects your mental health. I am not an expert on this but I have seen many lives destroyed by alcohol. My dad used to be a heavy drinker and we would get into screaming matches and physical fights when I was a kid. I missed out on having a normal relationship with my father because he chose to drink. These are the sorts of things that people don’t realize deeply affect mental health. I often wonder if I would never have had my first serious breakdown which caused me to be hospitalized several times if I wasn’t under the stress and pressure of having an alcoholic father who I fought with constantly. I don’t blame him, but I do blame the attitude in our culture that drinking is fun, or that it is a harmless vice.

Twice I heard something that has stuck with me about drinking. The first was when my psychiatrist told me that alcohol and marijuana aren’t benign drugs. They cause brain damage, long-term abuse can cause an illness similar to schizophrenia. The other thing I was told was that once a person is put on psychiatric medications, they should never drink alcohol again. I am not able to check all the facts, but I do know in the 15 years or so since I quit all drinking, my mind has become much more clear and my mental health has grown stronger. Staying away from vices is one more thing that I have to keep reminding myself is critical in me staying sane—and I really wouldn’t want even my worst enemy to go through the hell I did during periods of psychosis I experienced.

The next thing that is important for mental health is exercise. I recently got back from vacation and hadn’t exercised much except for a great deal of walking. Having strength and endurance is something that needs to be cultivated. I used to go to the pool a lot in the mornings. A long, cold and very dry winter made it nearly impossible for me to go without developing extremely dry and cracked skin on my feet, so I was unable. I did invest in some weights and an exercise bike but it seems to much better to get out in the cool morning air and walk to the pool and feel the relaxing comfort of being immersed in water or to sit in a steam room. It also really helped with another part of my illness, which is having difficulty with hygiene at times. Today I did have a long shower, but more often I just change clothes and underwear, use deodorant and body spray and see how many days I can get away without a shower. A big part of this is dry skin, especially in the winter, but I am getting better at using moisturizer. It also helps to lead that busy life mentally and physically that I mentioned which gives a person a valid reason to overcome difficulty with hygiene.

I wanted to save the most important point I wanted to make for last. This has to do with medications. I really hope that all my readers take their meds as prescribed. But I also know that my friends to the south in the US face debilitating costs for medications. This is because drug companies are far less regulated in the US and can basically charge what they want. I encourage my Yankee friends who take any kind of prescription to go online and find Canadian pharmacies and send them a copy of your prescription and have them ship the medications to you. It is much cheaper this way and there is no difference in the meds.

I take a lot of meds, including some for cholesterol, diabetes, depression, a mood stabilizer plus antipsychotics in pill and injection form. I often think about a time around 34 years ago when I was living on my own. This was when I got complacent and really paid for it. First, I kept cancelling my psychiatrist appointments or sleeping in and I just stopped going. I was still taking medications, but there was no monitoring or counselling. After a period of beginning to wonder if I wasn’t over my mental illness and was healed, I lowered the dose of one of my medications. In a short time I became very ill. I was twice admitted to a psychiatric hospital and the second time I had to stay in that horrible, soul-sucking place for six long months being treated worse than a criminal. The staff never believed me when I said I was taking my medications and that they were working. They didn’t believe one of the better pills I had taken was simply reduced. They just treated me like a child and took me off all medications and the doctor put me on a bunch of pills that didn’t work at all. This was an incredibly horrible six months of my life down the drain, plus the time it took to recover from the abuse and maltreatment one suffers as a psychiatric patient.

Things are much different now, though there is plenty of room for improvement. I would caution anyone who has read this far first of all that I am not a doctor. I do say though, if you want to get better, and lead as full a life as you can, think about how important it is to maintain good sleep habits, avoid too much coffee, learn all you can about healthy eating, and move your body every day, even if it just means walking to the grocery store for a bottle of water as I did for exercise for a long time. If you have read this far, there is a good chance you or a loved one lives with a mental illness. Doing these things and taking prescribed medication will allow a person with mental illness or health issues to live their best possible life. The last thing I want to stress is that it can be so important to join a support group. People in the US can try NAMI I think, most people in Canada are near an office of the schizophrenia society or a group for people with bipolar disorder. The great thing about 2025 is that there are a lot of online resources. Become an expert in the illness you or your loved one experiences. And never let yourself fall into the trap of complacency.