Comment on NY Blog about Succeeding While Mentally Ill

I don't think I am a good role model for people who have a mental illness. I have had rough periods where I associated with abusive men, I smoked marijuana, I partied. However, I'm not a criminal either. I'm human. A woman who grew up in a low-income neighborhood with all the stressors of gangs, drugs, school drop-out rates, and my own set of personal tragedies. There are people out there who have done much worse in life, people who are in jail, and many of them do not have a major mental illness. So that is a positive thing about me: I am law abiding. I try to be polite to people. I try to empathize with the pain of others.

The worst, most self-destructive periods of my life have been, ironically, when I was following doctors' orders to avoid stress. Alright, I will do nothing, I thought. Then I wound up tolerating the boredom and hopelessness by smoking marijuana and dating men who were unkind, to say the least. Not all the men were unkind, there were some gentle souls in there who were as lost and wandering in spirit as I was. We cared for each other, gave each other the support nobody else would dare give us.

I went through periods of unemployment because my doctor said I should not work. It made my life worse, as I could not afford the things that made me feel better: art supplies, music, internet, mp3 players, and books. I eventually found a menial job which made my life better but irked my psychiatrist. I lived with feeling like I had no right to put pepperoni on a pizza; who was I to make pizzas for money? This is a horrible thing to do a person, to make them feel so alienated from society that working a menial job makes them feel like they are doing something taboo. Don't tell me that to be poor and unemployed is in my best interest. Have you ever been penniless? How does that help me avoid stress?

Here is a link to a New York Times blog about people with a schizophrenic or schizo-affective diagnosis who are somehow high functioning and successful. I am in a bad mood right now because I read all the comments by readers following the article and the majority of these comments are lacking in critical thought. Many suggest that the mentally ill go back into the shadows and leave the real world for the "Normals." Many attack the study that proves schizophrenics can be successful. They suggest the results are a fluke, or worse, give "false hope" to the hopeless. False hope? If you are hopeless already, who is to say that false hope would make you anymore hopeless? I swear someone said this! Oxymoron.

Still, at least the New York Times is promoting equality, inclusion, and hope.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/studying-successful-people-with-mental-illness/

By Fall 2012 I will have my Bachelor's Degree. After I receive it, I will go job hunting or perhaps my application for graduate school will be approved. Either way, when I am stressed out with finals or mourning my recently departed love ones, I can always soothe myself by saying, "this could be worse. I could be lying in bed with nothing to do, with no reason to get out of bed, and nobody to believe I can succeed."

Thank you, New York Times Blogger! I am grateful to you for having the courage to post an article about a study that proves the mentally ill should not be treated like invalids!

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. 

On Schizophrenia and the Recovery Model of Treatment

My mother is a member of NAMI. NAMI stands for national alliance for the mentally ill. They promote mental health, recovery, reintegration into society, and they also battle stigma and discrimination against the mentally diagnosed. 

I found an article on yahoo's news page about NAMI's current battle to fight stigma. There was an accompanying tale of a man's struggle to find work as a person with schizo-affective disorder. He was told repeatedly that he couldn't work due to his illness. What a shame. Imagine if we had told John Nash he couldn't go to college because of his condition. The world would never have known game theory!

http://news.yahoo.com/virginia-man-wont-let-mental-illness-define-him-170410339.html

The outlook for mentally ill people used to be bleak. It kind of still is, but there is a movement towards a recovery model that can change the common fate of the current model (current model = disability paychecks and lots of bed rest). The recovery model promotes maintenance of mental health. By educating the mentally ill and their families about their illnesses, there is a greater chance that a relapse can be prevented from happening.

For example, if I start thinking paranoid thoughts (like my friend is really an agent sent to gather intel on me), I can stop this process from becoming a full blown delusion by asking myself what evidence I have of this thought, how can I counter this thought, and whether or not it is logical or cost-effective for the agency to do this against an ordinary citizen like myself. The answer is no, it is not logical or cost-effective and there is no evidence to support this. Now, instead of having a minor relapse, I have isolated a defective cognitive thought and quarantined it. Then I can relay this information to my out-patient care provider and they can assist me in further ways, such as providing verbal reinforcement about this thought being defective, or by upping my dose of psychotropic medication. 

Prior to very recently, this would not have been feasible. A therapist would give up, throw the towel in and possibly even send me to a hospital for in-patient treatment. The common thought was that therapy can't help psychotics, only medication and restraints help psychotics. However, those days are gradually dissolving. We now know there are positive symptoms of schizophrenia (delusions, auditory hallucinations, etc.) and NEGATIVE symptoms (apathy, loss of happy feelings, introverted personality tendencies, inability to socialize, scattered speech, etc.). Medications generally only provide relief from POSITIVE symptoms, though the new drugs on trial may be paving the way to change this. Therapy, coping skills, family interventions, friends, and self-maintenance are the ways to reboot the schizophrenic's cognitive state by treating the NEGATIVE symptoms as well.

What I hate the most about being schizophrenic is that the only media portrayal we have is of first-time psychotics going sociopathic and shooting people. Just because a couple of psychiatrists found 2 mass murderers to be paranoid schizophrenics does not justify labeling all of us as potential killers. First of all, there is no mass murderer gene. Schizophrenia is a complicated disorder that affects the genetic structure of a person's DNA. Some research even suggests it may be a misfire of how our DNA is activated.

science daily article on new findings about schizophrenia

Nowhere in the scientific literature does it state that schizophrenia is a killing disease. Even sociopathy isn't defined as a killing disease! Just in case you don't know, sociopathy is the personality disorder (as opposed to genetic disorder that is schizophrenia) that causes people to be narcissistic and apathetic about the feelings of others---extreme sociopaths include Ted Bundy, and lesser sociopaths include that control freak ex-manager of mine who followed me around with a nasty temper. I am not making this up, I took a class from a respected criminal profiler last January and he stated that sociopaths pose much more of a risk than schizophrenics ever will. He then held out his arms at his sides and said "my right hand is a sociopath, my left hand is a schizophrenic, two different hands, get it? They're far apart. There's probably a schizophrenic here in the room and you don't even know it! Raise your hand, where are you?" I pretended to look around for the schizophrenic while refusing to raise my hand (I'm the paranoid sub-type and I was too paranoid to expose myself in a room with 150 strangers. ; /  )But it was good to hear somebody finally dispel the myth that schizophrenics are violent, agitated people who need to be chained to trees and left for the elements. 

We need love! With that thought, I'd like to add that I found an opportunity to establish a NAMI affiliated club within my University. I just need 5 people and the okay from NAMI. I'd like to be part of the solution towards a recovery model for mental health. Cross your fingers and hope for the best for my idea of a NAMI campus club! I sent them an email yesterday, hopefully they'll reply before the new semester starts!

PS I am still reading "The Center Cannot Hold", I'm on page 100-something, and it gets better and better! I strongly recommend Elyn R. Saks as the book to read this month! :)

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