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!!

Society's Lowest Caste: the Mentally Ill

The following is a true story, one of many, about how the mental health care system ignores, rejects, and hates the mentally ill. I am schizo-affective, a member of the lowest caste in society; the Untouchable. The following story takes place in a city in California about 4 years ago. I have no criminal record. I don't even have a speeding ticket. And no, I would never hurt anyone who isn't physically in the process of beating me up or assaulting me. I am well-behaved. I am schizo-affective. I am an Untouchable of this society.

4 years ago------

"I need medicine," I told the woman behind the plate glass barrier.

"Talk to your doctor," she said, turning away.

"I missed my last doctor's appointment and they used that excuse to kick me out of the county program."

"Talk to your case worker," she said.

"I have no case worker. I have no doctor. I have no money because nobody will hire me. I am too manic to work, been manic for a while, no sleep the whole week. Please let me in, this is the only way I can get medicine," I pleaded.

"There's no room," she said.

Mind you, she is behind a plate glass barrier in a psychiatric triage room. I am on the Outside, two feet away from the door to a barren world that despises me and makes me feel that my persecution delusions are not delusions at all but reality. 

Behind her, a male nurse shook his head. 

"I know her. She just needs her doctor. She's fine," he said. Turning to me he said, "GO TAKE YOUR MEDS."

"What meds? I haven't had meds in months. They won't see me, they won't give me treatment and the pharmacy won't give me the pills either because I have no insurance and doctors always prescribe the 700 dollars a month anti-psychotics," I told him. I then began to jabber on about what the voices were telling me. I told them all the horrible names they called me, the fact that I believed I was going to be renditioned, tortured, killed, brought back to life, tortured, killed, my whole family would be tortured and killed, the entire constitution had been overwritten, there was a mass conspiracy to psychically drive me into committing hara kiri....I told them that I was going to kill myself by slitting my wrist with a knife I bought for the purpose of slitting my wrist.

"Jesus Christ just TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR," the male nurse shouted. I walked out into the World, unmedicated, floridly psychotic, suicidal, and abandoned by the medical system and by doctors and nurses who vowed to uphold the Hippocratic oath. 

Later that week, I was still psychotic. I went to the outpatient treatment center that had previously been treating me. They sent me to a county mental health crisis center. The mental health crisis center was humorously located behind a "WALK INS ONLY" sign. I walked in. 

"We don't take walk ins."

"How do you get an appointment," I asked, apparently an idiot, as the women behind the counter were rolling their eyes.

"You walk in," she said. I was starting to feel like I was in backwards land.

"Okay. I'm a walk-in. I need to see a doctor."

"We can't take walk ins now." I was biting my lip. I was dealing with voices, visual hallucinations, thugs on the streets who were very aware that I was vulnerable and probably wouldn't be believed by cops if they robbed or assaulted me....here I was, I could see that jerk doctor in his room, shuffling papers, his Rx pad only feet away....these women were part of the Evil System. I began to realize that the only people getting treatment were the ones who walked outside naked to get their coffee from the corner store. Seeing as how I preferred to get my coffee fully clothed, I chose the next best option. I went back to the outpatient center.

At the outpatient center they attempted to turn me away, again. I decided to die. In fact, while I was killing myself, why not do it like that Buddhist monk who set himself ablaze in front of cameras as a form of protest to an unjust system?

"I am going to kill myself if you do not put me on anti-psychotics right now," I said. The woman grimaced, shut the little window, reopened the little window, and said, "You have to go through the county crisis center."

"Okay, I just wanted you to know that I am going to be slitting my wrist right here now." I was in an empty waiting room. The nurses were all behind glass barricades and doors with alarms. I didn't want to hurt anybody except myself because I was tired of the Catch-22 that is the Evil System. So I started to slit my wrist. My intent was to get to the bone and be done with this life, with this hateful Evil System...with everything. I just wanted the staff (SAFE behind the barricades, mind you) to remember the day they turned away that schizo patient who then lopped off her hand right in front of them and died a terrible death. It would be my hara kiri. My way of setting myself ablaze. I had actually thought of self-immolation but I was afraid the fire might get out of control and damage the building. So, I opted for wrist slitting.

They watched. They finally called an ambulance once the blood started to appear. I put the little cutting utensil through the slot below the window and watched it slide into the staff's side. Most times, a pen or a paper is slipped below the window. Today  it was my life.

The ambulance guys then came, tied me up to the gurney, and complained that REAL sick people had to go to the hospital and that all I needed was to see the DOCTOR who was right in that same building. They looked at me with scorn, derision, and barely concealed hatred. Whatever, I thought. I am Untouchable. I am a disgrace. I am a sore on society. So be it. As they drove me to the psychiatric facility, still talking about what a waste of an ambulance trip it had been, I started giggling. They shook their heads with unspeakable disgust.

"WHAT?"

"You wouldn't understand," I said, trying really hard not to laugh hysterically. To this day, I will not say what made me laugh. 

Believe me, reader, if I could go to the moon and start a colony with my schizophrenic and bipolar brethren, I would. I do not like being an unnecessary burden to you or the rest of society. I did not go into my own DNA strand as a fetus and make my own DNA defective, nor did I commit any felonies. I was just born with DNA that causes my brain to perceive what is not there for the rest of you.

I suggest that society either make jobs for the nutcases so they can afford their pills or craft a gigantic spaceship to send us all into outerspace so we can start a planet of our own, because obviously affordable health care will never be a reality, at least not in the next 75 years. No, euthanasia is not an option.

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4 years after the previous story:

I get medicine

I get therapy

I complete my Bachelor's degree

I volunteer places

I get a little book of erotica published

I get a boyfriend

I get a 3.6 my first semester in my Master's program

I get ready to move to Sweden as an emigre if worse comes to worse. Why Sweden? They seem sensible, which ironically, the current state does not appear to be.

I get a little blog up and running where I can leave my cyber footprint for everyone to see. This is my biography. This is my graffiti markings. This is my ultimate retribution---I can be disgraced but my soul is intact. Plus, I have a plasma TV. That is more than a lot of people have. I earned my plasma TV by studying so hard I was honored with merit-based financial aid. 

Now if you will excuse me, I will now watch PBS on my Plasma TV and devise strategies to make a living and donate half my earnings to NAMI. Tata.