Schizophrenia & Avatar Therapy

I just read this interesting article on yahoo concerning a new form of therapy for patients with schizophrenia. For those of us who experience audio hallucinations, paying attention to anything "real" can be difficult. I used to just huddle under the covers in my bed and listen to the never-ending stream of angry voices. I wouldn't leave, except to shower, eat, and sometimes to write out my responses to the voices in a journal I kept. It was hellish.

Now, there is this new idea that gives a face to the voices, projects it into the real world, and allows patients to confront their voices via avatar images. Though this might sound counter-intuitive (why would we want to make voices real?), it actually sounds like a great idea. Living in a fantasy world where verbal abuse is the only "radio channel" playing (so to speak) is not just horrible, it isolates patients which reduces their social skills and makes it harder for them to reintegrate once they are on medicine and no longer having what are known as "positive symptoms" (i.e. audio, visual hallucinations, persecution delusions). The isolation itself is painful, so by bringing the voices into reality it might help patients ground themselves. Instead of a floating voice, it is an on-screen avatar, an avatar that exists only in the monitor, not in the air like a phantom. The more you ground the patient in reality, the better they get. The only respite I ever got was when I could finally speak to someone about what horrible things the voices were saying about me. Just hearing it in this reality and saying it to a therapist/social worker/psychiatrist allowed me to hear just how far-fetched and impossible the comments were. I always felt immensely relieved after I had a chance to relay how the voices treated me and how it made me feel.

Below is the link to the article on avatar therapy. I hope that a good study is conducted to see just how effective it is. If there are already studies, we should do more to explore ways in which the avatar therapy could be modified to work even better!

Deepest thanks to the researchers who developed this new treatment idea. :)

http://news.yahoo.com/avatars-help-schizophrenia-patients-silence-tormenting-voices-131958804.html

Mental Health Book List

Over the years, I have felt inspired, educated, and intrigued by the following books listed below. Each one is related to mental health. Some books are memoirs, others are novels. I hope there is at least one of these books available at your public or campus library.

~ The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks = A true, often witty, more often harrowing story of the author's experiences as a schizophrenic attending law school at some of the most prestigious universities in the world. She is also on TedTalks discussing her illness. Also, she is on UCTelevision's youtube channel talking about her experiences and her knowledge of mental health and the law.

~ An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison = A lively true story written in flowing prose. Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while holding prestigious research positions at top medical universities. Quite the prolific writer, Dr. Jamison has written a number of books that are important reads (see, "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide", and "Touched by Fire").

~ Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Except More So by Mark Vonnegut = A memoir by a doctor slash writer slash schizophrenic who overcomes his diagnosis, completes medical school, and becomes a brilliant, witty, and charming doctor slash writer slash person with bipolar disorder with psychosis.

~ Madness by Marya Hornbacher = A memoir of bipolarity, eating disorders, and the creation of multiple wonderful memoirs by a woman whose talented writing surpasses the difficulties she suffered due to numerous diagnoses. Her book, "Wasted", is another amazing literary achievement.

~Wasted by Marya Hornbacher = A memoir of a talented writer hounded by the demons of food obsession and restriction. She focuses this autobiography on her personal experiences as an anorexic slash bulimic and the ways in which her illnesses ruined her relationships and nearly destroyed her health.

~ The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath = A novel based on Plath's real life, this book delves into the tunnel vision of a depressive woman who cannot see how talented she is because she feels only sadness and pain. The tragedy of Sylvia Plath's real life throws a darkness across the pages, but the prose is raw, candid, genuine, and sadly, very prophetic.

~ A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar = A deep, well-researched biography of Dr. John Nash, a mathematical genius who developed paranoid schizophrenia around the time when he was revolutionizing the field of math and science. The movie is excellent as well, but this book deserves special praise for Nasar's in-depth look at the personality of a prodigy whose mind gave birth to both groundbreaking theories and unreal conspiracies.

This is an incomplete list. I have not read every book out there so this list is not comprehensive. The more books I read, the more books I will list here. Have a great night! Thanks for reading.

Finals Over, Diet Begins

Every finals week I start to binge eat. I cannot stop. I will literally sleepwalk out of bed and rummage through the kitchen in the dark and stuff whatever there is into my mouth and crawl back into bed. I woke up once with little graham crackers packages littered all over and crumbs in my bed. Then, the guilt, the all-consuming remorse, the weight gain, the looming diet in my near future.

Well, finals week is over. I failed pre-calculus. The professor posted a message online saying that it was very common to have to take his class twice. That did little to quell my feelings of failure. I had just gained about 3 pounds during finals week. To fail AND to gain weight. No. Bad. The rest of my classes were A's and B's, but that class dropped my cumulative GPA significantly. Now, it is summer, I am not working, I have a lot of free time, and my primary goal is to lose weight.

In 2011 I weighed 194 pounds and I was at my heaviest. In 2012 I weighed 155 pounds, having dropped around 40 pounds in a year. Then, I dated some guy who liked to fry all his dinners and he was always making me dinner---I gained 15 pounds. Then, we broke up and I felt completely dumb for letting him stuff me full of deep fried salmon just to be polite about his cooking. Never again, I vowed. I enrolled  in martial arts classes, but alas, I still gained weight over midterms and the dreaded week of finals. Now, at 167, I am back to being at the borderline between obese and very overweight on the BMI chart. 

At 167 pounds my pants fit, which is not good. I was starting to get used to the loose waistband and the need for a new wardrobe. I am determined to lose at least 20 pounds before the end of August. I did it before, I can do it now. 

My diet since I got out of class about a week ago has been dramatically altered from my high caloric finals-week-diet. Now, I drink a lot of tea and I wait until after 6 pm to have a normal sized meal. By "a lot of tea" I mean somewhere around 6 cups during the day and another 3 cups of green tea at night. I always put a bit of fat free half and half or almond milk in each cup, which does add calories, but that 10 calories per cup (or 100 calories per day) is equivalent to a small, single snack. I run on chai (tea). 

For example, today I had 3 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 plain flour tortillas for breakfast, and a large diet Coke from McDonalds. It is 1:30 pm and I kind of feel full. I have no desire to eat more flour tortillas, even though my relative just finished making delicious home-made tortillas from scratch. 

Dieting is an old friend for me. I think to some extent it is healthy, but then again, maybe having 2 tortillas for breakfast isn't healthy and also those are pure carbohydrates. For lunch I will have a nice tomato and cheese sandwich on flat bread, followed by 5 cups of tea with fat free half and half. Maybe some shots of espresso after that...who knows? If you're trying to lose weight, see a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am just a desperate, unemployed graduate student with little money and little control over my life. I am only relaying this information because I want this blog to be as honest with the reader as I can be. I know that obsessing about weight is never good. I applaud those women who are free from the self-disgust I feel. I also know that I have body issues, food issues, and overall issues. This blog was started to show the real human behind mental illness (I am schizo-affective who gained a lot of weight taking the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa). Now that it has been a year, I still want this blog to be honest, even if that means showing my ugly bits. 

To some people, summer is a time to relax. For me, it is the time when I exercise daily and limit my calories. Sometimes, summer also involves getting involved with some guy and maybe even smoking marijuana now and then. I would prefer not to smoke marijuana or get involved with some random guy for three months, but that has been my pattern for the past 3 years. Maybe I will sign up for classes at the dojo near my house. :) Cheers to summer, kickboxing, espresso, tea, and you!!

Article/Video on Social Skills & Mental Dysfunction

I was reading an article on the Wallstreet Journal's website concerning social skills and how waning social skills might indicate mental dysfunction. I think these insights should be used as pre-emptive diagnostics, long before the dementia, autism, or schizophrenia wreaks total havoc on a person's life.

I know first hand that social skills, or rather, lack thereof, are signals of neurological illness. For myself, a schizo-affective, I know when my mind is sinking into illness when I think every compliment is sarcasm, every comment is a subtle jab at my intelligence or appearance, and when I spend five minutes secretly trying to decipher a facial expression that a person had for a split second.

I hope you find the article interesting. I posted the link below. The link goes to the Wallstreet Journal's website where both the article and an accompanying video can be found.

To all the schizophrenic or bipolar readers, please read the article and know that you have a neurological disorder that is not your fault and that there are warning signs you have that can help you to stop a potential episode before it ever happens. I can vouch for this; I've stayed out of Hospital since 2009 or 2010, compared to the yearly or bi-annual forced hospitalizations that I  had from between the ages of 19-25. I can definitely say that I owe my freedom and well-being to my family, to the outpatient programs, and to the recovery model in mental illness treatment which focuses on monitoring oneself on a daily basis and reinforcing positive thoughts.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323398204578489542660099544.html?ru=yahoo?mod=yahoo_itp

Grad School Finals Week and my 30th birthday

Dear public, online diary,

today I woke up and realized I am about to turn 30 this week. I woke up and thought, "why am I still in school? Why have I only had cashier and customer service jobs? Why am I still living with my family? Why aren't I married?" I guess I had an early mid-life crisis this morning.

Here is the answer to most of the questions above: I have a major mental illness and it is very difficult to get the medication to treat my symptoms. My mental illness froze my progress. I spent so many weeks lying in bed, in a catatonic depression. I spent more weeks huddled in the kitchen, in my "safe spot" by the fridge, hearing voices and trying to breathe through my fear.

I parted ways with my former outpatient treatment center. I am now back with the county's main outpatient center. My former treatment center released me because I have had no major symptoms the past 2-3 years and they are intended for people who are fairly non-functional. Now, I am with the more lax system that treats people who are not on the verge of total self-destruction. It is less "intensive" as my former therapist put it. Sadly, it is also more apathetic. If I miss an appointment I have to wait another 3 months to see a doctor, without medication. Thankfully, I have a cell phone app to remind me what my schedule is like.

Thirty years old and I still feel like that 18 year old girl starting college for the first time. One year later, at age 19, I became floridly psychotic, my life spiraled up and down, jobs came and went, I dropped out of school, then returned again, and now here I am, 30, with my head kind of screwed on straight and about 35 years left for working full-time.

It is finals week. For me, that means a last ditch effort to get a C in my math and programming classes. I started so promising, but then I slipped into a depression and started sleeping through the night and half the day, missing my classes and falling behind. Still, I have hope that I will not crumble into another depression. My new doctor at the county is putting me on Prozac and taking me off Zoloft. I told him I had totally built up a tolerance to the Zoloft the past half a decade and he agreed it had lost its efficacy. I am being weaned off Zoloft this week, taking half my dose with the other half being Prozac. I have felt a difference in that I am awake before noon. That is usually the sign that my depression is receding. Luckily, I saw my doctor before finals week, so I have been patched up the past few weeks and now I am prepared to study hard, study long, and write programs like my life depends on it.

My graduate program is going well and I'm 90% finished with my graduate class term papers. I just need to pass my elective classes, which have nothing to do with my field, but I am enrolled in them and the grades still count on my GPA. After next week, I will be done with finals. I will be thirty years old. I will be healthy for a solid 4 years.A toast to you, dear reader! A toast to you and to good mental health and a strong GPA!!

Anxious about Being Outed

If I suddenly stop blogging it is because I am afraid of being outed as a former mental patient. I try to deceive myself into believing that everyone around me thinks I am crazy due to my quirks and neurotic personality. However, nobody has tried to coral me into the back of an ambulance where a burly EMT and a stretcher with the restraints wait. I must not be as insane as I once was, because before the burly EMT came every year, at least twice.

I prefer calm, dull life to the adrenaline spikes of psychosis and the inevitable period of confinement that followed. I blog just as proof that a former mental patient can lead a calm, dull life just like most of you. I want to show you the inside of a person with real mental illness, the horror, the irony, the ups and the downs. Still, I would not want my professors, classmates, or future employers to know. I can hide safely behind this computer screen from all of you who are critical, but in real life I get enough of that without everybody knowing I am medicated to the gills. If people found out I would be tempted to move. I would leave for a far off place, preferably Sweden.

So, if one day you find that I have deleted this little blog, it is because I got nervous that I may be outed for being certifiable.

Just to cheer myself up, I will now talk about people I admire. Kay Redfield Jamison is a researcher, PhD, and writer. I admire her. Elyn R. Saks is a lawyer, writer, and activist. I admire her. John Nash is a mathematical genius and Noble Prize winner. I admire him. They're all bipolar or schizophrenic. Okay, that cheered me up.

Psychiatric Facilities

I have never instigated any sort of violence. One time, a woman who looked high on hard drugs came up to me on the street and hit me in the chest as I was walking to Starbucks. I had to push her away several times as she continued to attempt to attack me. Eventually, she ran away. I reported her to the police, like a good citizen is supposed to. Other than that, I have never been in any kind of altercation.

I am a former mental patient, but I assure you that I have not and will not use any violence or weapons against a person in my life. In my times at the psychiatric facilities, I have been sexually victimized by other patients, mistreated by the staff who allowed male patients to roam into my room while I was sleeping, received numerous death threats from men, and I  had to resort to making phone calls to my patient's rights advocates and administration to report the ridiculous negligent attitudes of staff. Since I last was hospitalized about 3-4 years ago, the psychiatric facility has since been taken over by a private company, and many of the staff were replaced. Regardless, I have horrible memories of abuse and restraints, and I have no desire to ever be confined to a space where my safety rests in the hands of underpaid, unsympathetic staff.

The hospitals are a breeding ground for neglect. Unlike elderly homes, mental asylums are possibly more vulnerable to hidden abuse because it is expected that patients are delirious and imagining things that are not happening.

The psychological wounds I received from my schizo-affective disorder are nowhere near the sort of emotional injuries I received from the treatment of this illness. These are not hospitals but asylums and the patients are not patients so much as captives.

I usually get told my doctors that I am pretending to be better when in fact I am still too sick to leave the hospital. Of course I am!! Anywhere, ANYWHERE, is better than the hospital. One would expect constant monitoring of patient activity, but that is usually not the case except at medication dispensing time. Staff is fully aware that a 280 pound guy who wants into my room might be resistant to being told no, so they ignore him.

The safest I felt in the psychiatric hospital, to be totally frank, is when the murderers and rapists from the nearby prison were on our ward. Why?? Because the police came with them to make sure they didn't escape. There would be two guards sitting near their beds (which were always in the middle of the main TV room) at all times. During their stays, everybody else behaved, including the visiting criminals. Ironic, right?

A lot of times, some of the patients would be in the hospital because they made murder threats and were put on a "threat to others" hold. Between jail and the mental hospital, the volatile people feigned mental illness to avoid a cell. Other times, the patients would be in the hospital after mixing alcohol with meth or cocaine. These drugs can look like violent psychosis and the cops were just as likely to stick them in the wards with genuine mentally ill people than put them in jail or into rehab.

You know those stories about how prisons are the new mental hospital? I am not sure I believe that. Personality disordered people are quick to figure out who gets cool mind-altering drugs, time in co-ed hospitals versus jail cells, and a quick release. They fake illness. I know there are criminals who are genuinely mentally ill, but trust me, 90% of homeless people are genuinely mentally ill and at least 50% of criminally insane people are faking their insanity. If you really want to see a cluster of mentally ill people go to your local homeless shelter. That's where they are. Not in jail cells. People like John Hinkley are exceptions, not the rule. 

"Hidden America" : Abuse of Mental Patients by Hospitals

Today, Diane Sawyer did a report in her series, "Hidden America" on the plight of mental patients in America. The newest trend in patient abuse is "patient dumping" where the hospital buys a one-way ticket to another state, drives the patient to the Greyhound bus terminal, and sends them to an unknown place so that the hospital and the state won't have to pay for the patients' treatment. If that sounds totally outlandish and fictitious, please click on the link below to watch the video. The reporters did an excellent job of finding documentation that proved at least one hospital repeatedly "patient dumped."

I am a paranoid schizo-affective so I am prone to paranoia and persecution delusions. Yet, sadly, sometimes people really do persecute the mentally ill. We are not chattel. We should not be dehumanized this way. If someone put 80 year old elderly people on a one-way trip to nowhere because they all need dozens of heart, blood pressure, arthritis, kidney, liver, and diabetes medicine, everybody would be in an UPROAR. This would be a major issue, not a tiny side-story whose title says it all "Hidden America."

The abuse of mental patients has a long and gory history in the United States. Lobotomies, barbiturate poisoning, repeated and prolonged restraint use, cases of sexual assault, violent assault, and other negligent treatment leading to death (i.e. heart attacks after prolonged periods of being forced to lie prone in restraints), are all examples of the history of the culturally accepted and widespread abuse of mental patients.

This is sickening. Perfectly innocent victims of a degenerative illness are now victimized by people who appear to be spurred on by some modern day version of the eugenics movement. We are categorically abused because of our brain chemistry, labeled wastes of life, and treated as cockroaches.


If you take this widespread abuse and apply it to another group, like Latinos, Asians, gays, or cancer patients, you would have riots, rebellions, and general anarchy. Nobody deserves to have be treated this way, certainly not mental invalids who are already in a state of fear and panic.

The System has greatly injured my brethren. If you think for one moment that high-functioning mental patients, the families of mental patients, and ethical mental health employees will continue to ignore the abuse and neglect of the poorest, most vulnerable adults among us, you are fooling yourself. The pain of one mental patient is my pain as well. I am high-functioning and I have a long memory. I will not forget. I vow to volunteer for mental health rights organizations, to donate money to the cause, to vote for supportive legislation, and to promote civil rights for mental patients.

For those of you with a mental illness ::: remember, the U.S constitution applies to us! We have civil rights and those who violate our civil rights are traitors to the U.S. constitution.

Here is the link, please watch!

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/accusations-patient-dumping-19096538