Dependent & 30 years old

Now that I am 30 years old I have my Bachelor's degree and by the end of 2014 I will have a Master's degree. Despite my newly found sanity, ambition, and successes, I lack independence.

Many schizophrenics live with their parents or in boarding houses. It is because schizophrenics tend to need a care-taker. No, we are not the sociopathic killers you see in the news. The majority of us are more similar to those socially awkward autistic adults who need someone hovering over them telling them what to do and what not to do.

Common orders include "wash your dishes," "brush your hair," "eat," and so on. If you want an idea about how schizophrenics tend to behave, watch "Asylum" by Laing, a documentary about severe mentally ill people living in a boarding house.

My diagnosis of having schizo-affective disorder has recently been challenged by my psychiatrist, and 2 therapists. Fine, whatever. I have agreed to be termed bipolar with psychosis instead. I really don't care about labels too much. Still, I have grown rather fond of the aloof, giggly, reclusive skitzes I  have come to befriend through various outpatient services and I consider myself closer to them than the other people with bipolar or unipolar depression I have met. Despite the loss of my severe label, "schizophrenic," I still have more in common with schizophrenics than with the Normal population.

I live with my parents. I obey their rules, their curfew, their anti-medicinal marijuana attitudes, everything I do, down to when I take a walk around the neighborhood, is monitored/controlled by them. I was attacked by a sexual predator last year as I walked along a street (in broad daylight as I tried to walk away quickly because I sensed danger), so now I am even more controlled at home because they are afraid something worse will happen to me.

I can't walk unless I inform someone, am not wearing a pair of shorts or a low-cut top, am not without my cell phone, and it is an "appropriate time of day." My limit is 50 minutes for a walk to the store and back or else I get a call on my cell phone to come home ASAP.

I cannot come home after 9 pm, ever. I drive, but I have a curfew about when I leave the house (8 pm is the latest) and when I come come back (9 pm). Sometimes I  have to sneak out to meet a lover.

I have never lived on my own. It is an experience I wish I had. I have always lived with family, even though at some points, I was a paying tenant in their homes.

One day next year I will secure steady, full-time employment and I will go look for an apartment of my own--no family, no roommate. The place will be mine. I will wash dishes at my whim, and come home at midnight if I am studying late into the night at a friend's house. :) I am looking forward to next year!

"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

Comments on Mark Vonnegut's memoirs

I grew up on Kurt Vonnegut's literature, having stumbled upon "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" at the age of 13. To this day, I still possess 10 Kurt Vonnegut books and an additional 2 copies of Welcome to the Monkey House. What does this have to do with his son, the illustrious Mark Vonnegut? Well, just imagine how much I admired Kurt Vonnegut...now transfer that feeling to his son, a man towards whom I feel a particularly kinship to due to his bipolar/quasi-schizophrenia disorder. Now, multiply that mushy Hallmark feeling times 10 and that's how I feel about his newest memoir, "Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So."

My favorite sentence thus far has been where he states that you can tell who has the mental illness in his family by pointing at the people who look ten or more years younger than their actual ages. I had to crack up. All of my classmates originally thought I was mid-twenties or younger until I laughingly confessed I was pushing thirty. "Must be all the laughing and crying...it keeps the facial muscles toned," says Mark Vonnegut on the subject.

I also had to crack up at the part where he states his new, post-psychosis goal of becoming a doctor: he had all of a 1.8 GPA in the math and science field going into college again. "It seemed natural," he said, then cited the optimism of mania. Thankfully for his patients, Mark Vonnegut was stable for the period during his medical schooling (take THAT Stanford professor who thinks no mentally ill person should bother to apply to med school because we shouldn't be allowed to be in the medical field in the first place~!! Ha ha, counter-evidence to your biased discrimination!). He is now an M.D. That's right, M.D. Capital letters and everything!

If Mark Vonnegut MD had typed up a bland, melodramatic memoir, I still would have been inspired. But his memoir is littered with wit, charm, self-deprecating moments, and a tendency to organize paragraphs slightly more loosely than one of those Normal writers (if there exists such a thing as a Normal writer, aren't writers generally moody? See "Touched by Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison for a psychology study on the prevalence of depression and mania in successful writers). This turns his book into a mental playground where the swings are sentences, the monkey bars, paragraphs, and the sandbox, whole chapters! I love this book.

It is not enough that he has accomplished so much---this is something he says---but what came in between all those accomplishments that is really the soul of Mark Vonnegut. I agree. Was it really my "intelligence" or "aptitude" that got me into graduate school despite my mental illness, or was it those years I spent lugging trash bags to the dumpster outside the pizza joint I worked at, delusional and convinced that my boss was plotting to kill me after everyone else clocked out? Horrifying, yes, but it helped put things in perspective. No injustice in academia is as bad as lugging restaurant trash into the night rain, checking behind me for the angry boss who probably really did hate me, wondering if there was anything in life outside of a pizza joint. There is, not that there is anything wrong with working in a pizza joint...I just prefer to write essays, I guess. 

Unspeakable Tragedy in our nation this week. I haven't blogged at all lately because of what happened. I think everyone across the country is in a state of shock.

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When my cousin committed suicide last July I did all my homework as a means to cope. Rather than dwell on the pain, I read British literature and wrote expository essays. The pain never went away, but I managed to cope. I think that is what I am doing right now by blogging: coping with something horrible that never should have happened.



Just to put something in perspective---  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and every other person responsible for atrocities and genocides, were not afflicted with genetic mental illness; they were sociopaths.

I read on a yahoo comment board that "all it takes is one psycho so we should.....to all the crazy...." (he was referring to mental patients and the mentally ill). I am afraid that is your train of thought as well, reader. I once told my psychiatrist that people were conspiring to put me in a death camp because of my defective DNA. Allegedly, I was floridly psychotic at the time.

After 9/11 there was a lot of pain too. There was a lot of blame aimed at people of Middle Eastern origin, regardless of innocence. In these volatile times it is easy to punish 1.5 million innocent people than 1 dead, guilty person, but it doesn't make it right.

I obey the constitution and I hope you will as well.
~Antigone

So much caffeine it now puts me to sleep

I haven't pulled an all-nighter in grad school---yet. I did try. I pumped my body full of caffeine through various methods: Red Bull, Monster, iced coffee with a shot of espresso, and over-the-counter headache medicine that is mostly caffeine. I did all this so I could memorize a short story in a foreign language. It did not work. I must be building up a tolerance to caffeine. As soon as the caffeine kicked in, my anxiety let up and it felt perfectly natural to put my head down on the bed and fall asleep until 9:30 a.m the next day. How late did I stay up? Barely midnight. It was alright though, in a state of panic I managed to memorize 10 sentences and regurgitate them for my oral exam.

My doctor has added a mood stabilizer to my med cocktail. It made me grumpy the first few days. I was working on installing car speakers into the used car I recently purchased, and every so often I would get totally irritated, throw my hands up, and retreat into the quiet domain of my room. Usually I have a lot more patience than that. Then, about four days into the new treatment, I felt wonderfully enthusiastic about life. It finally kicked in!

I really needed that boost because I got a horrible grade on the first exam for one of my grad classes, a C!!! Yes, that's right, I failed miserably and got a C. In graduate school, a C is like a D-, maybe even an F.  The feedback said I should write in a more organized manner but that my arguments were convincing.

I cannot help but wonder if my schizo-affective thought pattern surfaces when I am writing essays. Maybe my thoughts come out out of sync with logic and that is what ends up in my essays. For the next class exam, I am more prepared. This time, I started early (she is letting us do a take-home exam so long as we do not communicate with our classmates). If I start early I can re-read it before submitting it in order to catch the little slips of disorganization. This is just part of my cognitive disability---leaps of ideas, from topic to topic, without clear associations. It is a notorious symptom of both my bipolar disorder and my psychosis. I really have to watch myself. I am going to request a piece of scratch paper for my upcoming in-class midterm in another grad class. I will need it to sort my thoughts prior to scribbling my answers.

Anyways, I feel much better. Some jerk's comments about obese people does not send my into conniptions anymore (see :Trolls on youtube suck). I feel more balanced, more mellow, and a little sleepy. So it goes (to quote Kurt Vonnegut Jr.).

In other news, I highly recommend that series "Homeland." NAMI nominated the cable show for a NAMI award for its touching portrait of a C*A officer with bipolar disorder. It is a little interesting to me that the character is only on an anti-psychotic, or at least that's what was said during one episode. Usually, bipolar people get cocktails of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, or mood stabilizers. They go up, they go down. Treating only one end of the continuum can cause the other end to spiral out of control. But mental illness comes in all shades, in all manners, so maybe taking just an anti-psychotic makes sense.

Watch it!       :)