Well, after listening to me for 40 minutes, I thought I would post a video from a person who has more letters after his name than I do. Watch this video if you want to increase your knowledge of schizophrenia, listen to my podcast if you want to hear from someone who has lived through it and is still doing their best. More of my words after the YouTube link
So, I wanted to make a podcast about what has changed with schizophrenia. Instead, I kind of forgot myself (serious-do you know how hard it is to talk to a computer screen for 40 minutes when you are not hallucinating?)
All I can really talk about is how schizophrenia changed over the years in my own life. I was witness to a lot of stuff over the years, but also hidden by being young and protected from the darker side of life.
Something I kind of wonder about at times is what is worse: being poor, as in dirt poor, homeless, with an addiction to support and being mentally ill. Truthfully, I am sure there is a lot of overlap.
As a youngster I remember believing that education could cure everything. I thought that if someone killed or raped or murdered, that they should receive training and education to bring out their inner good, rehabilitate them to the point where they would never think of doing such a thing again and then given a second chance.
Of course, I was a student at the time and I thought what I was doing was better and more important than anything. As far as criminals go, what I wasn’t aware of was that there are conditions people have like sociopathy and psychopathy or narcissism that render people unable to understand right or wrong, even understand why one shouldn’t lie to or hurt others. I don’t think there should be a death penalty, but I think with a lot of reform to mental health and the justice system, things could be improved. How exactly I don’t know.
What I do know is that more and more when I give talks or do some writing, people will approach me and treat me wonderfully understanding that I have an illness and am working hard not just to recover from it, but to help all those affected by it. And then I think of a time I was out for a walk and as I walked past a car on the street I could hear the person engaging the electric locks on her car.
There have been many such situations, one of the worst ones was living in a house rented to people with mental illnesses and my neighbour refusing to help me get to work by giving my battery a boost knowing he had cables though he claimed he didn’t.
The truth in the end though is, before I matured, before I understood that all human beings in this world are working together, and we all struggle with some serious shit, I did things that were unforgivable to people who had mental illnesses. I don’t want to get into everything, but I will never forget a young man who I had known from the psych hospital seeing me and saying:
“Well, how was your day today?” and I stood three feet away pretending he didn’t exist.
But some may wonder why I did this? I had some pretty sick theories in my head that perhaps a lot of young people do (I was 18). I thought if I associated with someone who was mentally ill I would become that way myself. I knew it was wrong, I just lived with that delusion, while sick or sane, that you shouldn’t trust anyone who doesn’t wear expensive clothes, drives a nice car and has a fancy haircut. One of the weird things about that is during that same summer I met a guy who I thought was pretty cool who drove a BMW or an Audi and dressed well. The only problem was, he was a cocaine dealer.
Someone who expresses and explains beautifully this type of misguided and prejudiced thinking using the written word is my close friend, the author Richard Van Camp. He wrote a short story in one of his several bestselling short story collections about a guy that was often bullied but in the end was a simple, nice person who no one could hate once they got to know him. In the story the main character slashed his bike tires, then lived with the regret and the consequences of losing a friend who was of better moral character and a much better friend than the people he was trying to impress.
Well, I don’t want to write too much here all at once. I should restate my original question, what has changed in psychiatry since I first became ill… I know electric shock treatments are still being used. This seems cruel and inhuman, but not only are better methods with lower doses of electricity being used, it has been found and understood by many doctors that ECT can be one of the fastest and most effective way to bring a person back to their baseline so other therapies can be used.
New medications, new treatments. finding out old treatments work. In some ways, in many ways, things haven’t changed at all. We all need to keep our physical health in line (though there are promising drugs that help deal with the huge side effect of weight gain on antipsychotics) with good exercise, diet, and sleep. We all need to keep making it to every doctor’s appointment and to learn as much as possible about ourselves and our illnesses. And we need to be good examples. We need to prove people with schizophrenia can live healthy, happy, productive lives. Bye for now, and remember that with each paid subscription I am still offering digital copies of my three mental health memoirs!
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