Doing Well in Graduate School

I am getting good to excellent grades thus far. I have studied so much I barely have to time to fit in my exercise regiment of walking and using my stationary bike at least 3 times a week. It has paid off, though! I am doing good. I just need to keep up with my readings and work on my term papers. So far, I have had a positive experience in the graduate program.

I feel like I am doing something noble by continuing with my higher education. Not only am I a first-generation Mexican-American to finish a B.A. in my extended family, I am also a person who lives with a genetic mental illness. This makes me sort of a double minority in Academia. I try not to see this as a thing to feel bad about, but rather something that I can be proud of---I am paving new ground!

One of my heroes, Elyn R. Saks, a schizophrenic who completed her law degree at a prestigious University, was featured on "TED." If you have not heard of TED, it is a program that you can download to your cell phone or tablet. It is a database that is filled with geniuses talking on various subjects, from the law to the internet. It includes many leaders in various fields (i.e. techno-geniuses and others). Elyn R. Saks is video taped on TED giving a speech on her struggle with mental illness, her success as a lawyer and professor, and how this relates to our policies and views on people with a mental illness. I highly recommend this talk!

Thanks for reading!

Why Paranoia Makes Me Shop Online

I entered the store and a security guard greets me. Not quite a smile, his expression was more like civil, rigid, minimalist politeness. He eyes me up and down. I can feel his X-ray vision entering my purse, my pockets, and scrutinizing my empty hands. He reeks of paranoia, as do all the other store employees who walk down aisles checking in on customers with fake smiles.

Being a paranoid schizo-affective, I am hypersensitive to the paranoid states of others. It's like sensing a kindred spirit, call it Pare-dar. Like a paranoid radar, pare-dar allows me to detect paranoia, fear, and suspicion in others from a distance, without having to interact with them (though a brief interaction allows me to confirm my assertion). During holidays, stores get lots of shop-lifters so they alert their employees to be on the look out.

So I entered the store to find a fog of suspicion inside. My little paranoid antennae went up as well, as I respond to paranoia with paranoia. I grabbed a Diet Coke, a pair of earbuds for my IPOD, dropped these items onto the cashier's area, paid, and ran out the door.

Hence, why I shop online. No paranoid employees asking me how I'm doing while eyeing my purse. No little trail of employees following me down the make-up aisles like spooks from the Cold War era. Just a couple of clicks and a two-day wait, and poof---a package on my doorstep. When you're paranoid, avoiding other people's paranoia is a good way to keep healthy, so from now on I shop online for items like flash drives, books, appliances, and so on.

Just a side note, what's been bugging me lately is that a lot of people don't understand that schizophrenics aren't criminals. There are lots of schizophrenics out there and only some of them are CRIMINALLY insane while the vast majority are just nuts, with no criminal tendencies at all. That's why we have the words "asylum for the criminally insane" versus "psychiatric hospital". In theory, a psychiatric hospital is just that---a hospice (in reality it's like a little behavioral modification unit equipped with Middle Ages era restraints, sadistic employees who secretly detest their wards, and a model of bed rest and group therapy that is as outdated as the stacks of magazines in the group room).  The CRIMINALLY insane usually end up in jails or hard-core state facilities with even more Middle Ages era style techniques.

In case you're wondering, I am the plain version of schizophrenic, not the criminal variety. Still, due to my  delusions of impending torture by secret agents and my fear of assassins, the county workers (well, some of the poorly trained and unscrupulous ones) deemed me as a threat to self and others (code=5150). Does that mean I am a threat to others? No. What it meas is that there are rigid requirements for forced hospitalization and unfortunately, people are willing to lie on my charts in order to get me into a psych ward. No, I'm not being delusional. This has been my experience, the experience of others I was roomed with in psych wards, and it's even been the case for Elyn R. Saks, author and legal expert, who penned "The Center Cannot Hold."

I am now almost done reading Saks' book. I have postponed finishing it because it was so exciting for me to read about her academic successes that I dreaded not having to read the book anymore. Since I am a college student about to apply to my University's graduate programs, Elyn Saks' story means the world to me. She proves that we can achieve while psychotic. We can achieve while on medications. We can achieve, regardless of how disabled we are, and that is gold to me. 

An Excellent Book On Schizophrenia by Elyn Saks

I just ordered this book, The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks, through amazon dot com and it arrived yesterday. I have read all of 24 pages and I'm hooked. It's the kind of book that gets me so excited I can't sit still. 24 pages into this memoir of psychosis and I had to set it down and take a long walk while listening to industrial techno music. I felt the euphoria of someone who had just found somebody who was like myself.

Yes, 24 pages is all it took to make me endorse a book I barely read. From the opening scene at the Yale Law school library's rooftop to the admission of early drug use to her parents--- that's as far as I got before I realized I was reading a book up there with An Unquiet Mind and Prozac Nation.

I am so excited about this book I felt like promoting it before I even finished it. True, only a few people visit this blog, but to you, the random one person who accidentally stumbled here, I encourage you to purchase this book and give it a read.

Due to the nature of schizophrenia it is difficult to find a writer who can detail her/his illness with clarity and insight, as the illness can rob us sufferers of clarity of thought. Many of the memoirs on schizophrenia are written by the close relatives of people who suffer from the disease. There are some notable exceptions, such as the son of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who wrote Eden's Express (Mark Vonnegut).

Elyn R. Saks really comes out as a major prose writer, as well as a memoir writer, which makes her writing all the more powerful. At one point, she writes that she felt like an "insect on a pin" while being admitted to a psychiatric facility. This is too true. Sad, but honest and well-written.

Please purchase this book! It is a good way to see that a schizophrenic is just a person with a cognitive disability, someone who can nonetheless achieve goals in life.

Here's a link to the book on amazon dot com.
http://www.amazon.com/Center-Cannot-Hold-Journey-Through