When Your Serious Mental Illness Tells You To Take a Break, Listen!

A Little Discussion about Stress and How It Affects Those with a Serious Mental Illness like Schizophrenia

Hello Good Readers!

I just had a 3-day vacation on the West Coast in Vancouver. Though it wasn’t really warm enough to swim in the ocean, I got some important things done, and got a very long and relaxing sleep with the window open and the cool sea air streaming in my window as I did.

As far as taking a break went, I did do some business. Recently, Bethany Yeiser of the CURESZ foundation (Comprehensive Understanding via Research and Education into Schizophrenia) wrote a book that has a lot of stories about people with schizophrenia and other illnesses on the schizophrenia spectrum (like my diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, an illness where you experience bipolar and schizophrenia). The stories are amazing, as Bethany’s story is about living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles for years in a state of psychosis, and how her parents got her help for her illness and eventually an amazing doctor, Dr. Henry Nasrallah got her to take Clozapine which accelerated her recovery to the point of being able to return to school part-time, resume her life and found this amazing organization with Dr. Henry Nasrallah.

If you like classical music and waterfalls, this is a video I made about a very well known falls near Jasper, a mountainous national park recently ravaged by wildfires.

I don’t know how much has been said about Clozapine/Clozaril. It is often referred to as a last resort for treatment-resistant schizophrenia. I was almost put on it myself though I feared changing a medication that worked well for me and also didn’t know if I could keep up with the blood tests that are required. I do have to say something though, my brother was on this medication and became very ill and had to be hospitalized because of a low white blood cell count. He was a wreck and we are still struggling to find him a doctor he is more comfortable working with, but this is a rare side effect of Clozapine.

What I wanted to talk about today most of all is stress. We all experience it in varying degrees. My mom had a very hard time with stress caused by anxiety in a lot of social situations, but bless her heart she was brave enough to raise a family and sustain a marriage despite having a mental illness. The time that often comes to mind was when she admitted to me that she didn’t like holidays. On holidays, like Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mom would make a feast of dishes so extensive that my dad would take a door up from the basement to put on top of the table just to have enough room, and the youngest of us would still be assigned a seat at a rickety old card table.

Photo by Christopher Ryan on Unsplash

My mom confided in me that she didn’t like holidays because they sent her anxiety and stress levels through the roof. All the dishes had to be hot and ready and perfect. The smallest issue someone mentioned would seriously affect her mood and any large issue would leave her in tears. My mom explained to me that this was an instance of good stress, and that even good stress can wear a person down.

I used to be really good at handling stress as a teen. I was able to find jobs, advance in them, work hard, earn money. I had cars, motorcycles, a nice stereo, my own TV in my bedroom and a computer. I was always able to balance out the stress of working a job while attending school. Some things did scare me, like pretty girls. In my teen years I often dealt with my stress by drinking alcohol. Those were fun times at first, but soon just became a string of bad actions that either drove friends away or drove me closer to fake friends who wanted drinking buddies, not human friends who wanted to work together to do anything meaningful or important with their lives. I am saddened to think that two of my closest friends never left the small city we grew up in and are working simple manual labour jobs. They likely have a little money and one of them has a couple of kids, but the time has long since gone past where I have anything to say to them.

So anyhow, shortly after this teenage period of heavy drinking, hard work and balancing out the fact that I was a pure academic student, I suffered from what I now believe was bipolar disorder. Crippling depressions, punctuated with behavior that seemed to have little to do with the realities of the life I led. Because it went untreated, it eventually developed into psychosis and other indications of schizophrenia. I did bizarre things, I got into fights, I was arrested twice and given a heavy tranquilizer and taken to a locked ward of our local psychiatric hospital. It was pretty harsh for me to go from the go-getter I thought I was to a very disliked and disregarded patient in a hospital that had little if anything to do with it that one could call ‘nice’.

Eventually, medications got me better and I was released. I felt fine and noticed the medications had serious side effects, so I stopped taking them. This happened a number of times. One of the sad things was there was a time when I was living in Vancouver and connected with an old friend who was doing well in the entertainment business. I was doing well at the time but after a while I started having delusions that movie stars wanted to help me become famous like them or that I could join the military and become a pilot and then an astronaut. After a while I got so sick of all the delusions that only made me feel horrible and I went into a psychiatric ward of a very nice hospital in North Vancouver where I was living. After two months there I went back to my home of Edmonton and went into a psychiatric ward there for a while, but this time took my medications. Then time and side effects wore me down and I started to wonder if I ever really could have made it in show business if I had stayed in Vancouver. I was obviously too ill, but the dream of making it big was so compelling that several times I made plans to return to the city I loved.

But I soon learned that, especially on medications, after leaving a psychiatric ward, a person goes through an adjustment phase where they are barely capable of watching out for themselves. It seemed every time the whole entertainment business thing came up it meant I was becoming ill again and would soon have to return to the hospital and start all over. I did have one thing though, I had my writing.

Writing and reading (I loved poetry at this time, when I was in my early 20s) gave me so much joy, but if you have ever read Don Quixote, you can see an excellent representation of how a person can go insane doing nothing but reading too much day after day, week after week. It was sad because I was learning amazing things, but had no way in the world to sit down with someone who had read the same books and could carry a conversation about them. The isolation and loneliness drove me to experiment and change medications and just have problem after problem, living in isolation. It is believed that while schizophrenia affects around 1% of the population of Canada and the US, as many as 10% of those people will die by their own hand. (Schizophrenia Society of Alberta slides—fact checked) So basically I was playing Russian Roulette focusing on books instead of the outside world and a normal recovery.

Photo by Simon HUMLER on Unsplash

One of the things that made this time hardest was that I would be able to put up a good front, and get jobs, but soon after I would become so distraught and stressed out that I would lie or cheat to get out of going to work, and eventually quit or get fired. I saw this as a great relief and would take my final pay and stock up on what I needed and go right back into the isolation. A couple of things about those books did help though. I was able to learn a little about meditation, which led me to meet a psychiatric nurse/therapist who was a Buddhist herself. She helped me find classes and I discovered a whole new world of beauty and simplicity. I could even say for a while I didn’t care at all if I never had another job. I could control my spending, I could control my eating. I would live like a monk and read books but I still felt compelled to work.

Most of the time the only work I could find was labour. I would often work a day or two and get injured, and spend part of my pay on muscle relaxants and pain killers and have to go back to the same work in a couple of weeks when I was broke again.

One thing I will never forget was getting a wake-up call on my birthday from my mom and my brother. I felt lousy, I had to work that day, but that simple gesture meant so much. I think I should mention here that caregivers really need to develop a thick skin, and forgive a lot of things from their mentally ill loved one. Sometimes the choice comes down to either being their friend or saving their lives and having them hate you. It doesn’t always have to be this way, one of the books I tout quite a bit is Dr. Xavier Amador’s wonderful book “I’m Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help” where the doctor, a psychologist, uses a method he calls LEAP which means Listen, Empathize, Agree, and Partner. He used this method to build trust with his brother and to eventually have him get the help he needed.

One other place I know there is a lot of stress is the psychiatric hospital, especially if you are unfortunate and get a disagreeable doctor like I did. I spent six long months in a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital all because I requested a new doctor and my doctor felt insulted and wouldn’t do it. It was around this time that I started to develop a very serious case of acid reflux. My stomach would make more acid than it needed, it it would work its way up my throat, burning with a vengeance as it did. This was from constant worry about where I was going to end up, how long I would be there, all the voices and delusions. This is a very serious condition which is greatly affecting the life of my sister’s husband and possibly was what killed my mother. Both of them had been taking medications for a long time, so I can’t definitely confirm it was worry. I do know I had a great deal of gastric distress in the hospital. That is where it really can come in handy to be on a hospital psychiatric ward rather than a ward on a psychiatric hospital, two very different places. The hospital will do all they can to work with your health issues while I have found with any ailments in the psychiatric hospital they often dismiss it no matter how serious it could be. There was one case where I was experiencing severe pain in my knees and went to see the only medical doctor they had on staff, and he referred me to a surgeon. The waiting list was a couple of months long, and when the date came, a nurse told me she didn’t think I needed the appointment so she cancelled it on my behalf. Some of the cruely I experienced was incredible.

But lets say you are done with the hospital, you have found meds that work for you and you can deal with the side effects. This is where I put in some advice I got from a student social worker. Never use your illness as an excuse. I think if you are stable, feel better and can cope with life outside your own four walls, you need to do all you can. I like to suggest people start with two things, one being a life skills course, and the other an exercise program, preferrably with both cardio and weights. This could be a lot of things, from bike riding to swimming, to jogging or walking. Even just playing raquetball a couple of times a week. The exercise will do wonders for your stress, and as you condition your muscles to your exercise, you will feel like a superhero as your game improves.

There is an interim step that I think a lot of people should also consider, which is taking the WRAP course (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) by Maryann Copeland. This class, which also comes in the form of an APP, will help you recognize when you are getting stressed or triggered and give you some coping skills like deep breathing or even meditation to get back to baseline. As the course progresses, you write down what you want done if you do get very ill. You can name someone to manage your money, pay your bills and rent while in the hospital. You can pick the hospital you want to go to, and choose which treatments you want and what you don’t want. There is no guarantee professionals will follow things to the letter, but the WRAP course is an excellent step towards controlling your own treatment while you are well and lucid. Many classes also give you the option to take an advanced course and be paid to give subsequent WRAP courses.

Meditation is wonderful for stress. There are many methods, I used to simply sit still and breath in and out to a count of ten. If thoughts invaded my mind, I would gently go back to one. This is known as taming the monkey mind. Keeping our thoughts from going all over the place. I currently use an adapted form of TM that is definitely not TM but until I can afford to take the Transcendental Meditation course it is doing me a lot of good. I simply repeat silently in my head a mantra I made for myself that has no specific meaning and actively keep my head clear and let my whole body go deeper and deeper into relaxation. I try to do it 20 minutes a day, but most do it twice, and many pay for the course and get benefits like support groups.

So I don’t really know if I have given you my dear readers much to go on for relaxation. I think it is all about mindfullness. Simply being aware of such things as the air around you, the colour of the walls, the comfort of your chair. It is important to leave out things like politics and romance. If you do this, it can be an incredibly restful experience. I also do walking with mindfullness while I sort of ‘broadcast’ my attention to the trees around me and the fresh morning air. The important thing is not to get caught up in any negative thinking and let your body slide down through layers of relaxation and awareness. I have been writing for a long time, and wanted to share some photos and videos. The shot below is from the jet I was on yesterday. Please remember to like and share this post if you get something out of it, and enjoy my photo.