Recovered Mental Patient: I was not sane but I am now--can i have a cookie?

I am a former mental patient (a female schizo-affective) who recovered thanks to a regimen of medicine treatment mixed with cognitive behavioral therapy. I got healthy enough to return to college, finish my Bachelor's degree, and currently I have been in a Master's program for nearly a year. I also volunteer on the side and I am a leader of an organization on campus as well. Originally, I had wanted to follow up with my PhD after completing the Masters, but now I feel (as my therapist so bluntly put it) that achieving a doctorate was nothing but a pipe-dream.

I  have kind of given up on my dream of achieving a PhD. I am doing above average in my field, but my mother and the Department of Rehabilitation counselor both told me to go get a job instead.

"We're not funding PhD's," said my DOR counselor. "Our goal is to get you guys to pay taxes." Tact might not be his forte, but I guess he has a point. I am supposed to earn money, not just grants.

Humorously, the DOR counselor asked me what made me think I was schizo-affective. He seemed skeptical of this diagnosis. I almost started to giggle.

"Nothing, nothing at all. In fact, I think I am totally sane, with no mental illness. It is total fact that I am being psychically driven by hostile countries through long-range, low-wave frequencies. The voices I heard are totally a part of the psychic warfare techniques used against me to discredit me and get me to commit suicide. I can, in fact, read minds, and the minds I read are always plotting against me. It is an injustice that I have been involuntary committed into psychiatric facilities on a dozen separate occasions and 5250'd each time. I demand lawsuits! Lawsuits and a UN stipulation barring psychic driving!!!" I really wanted to say all that. I really did. Instead, I just sighed.

"I have been hospitalized a dozen times and the psychiatrists all diagnosed me with the same illness--schizo-affective disorder. I used to get audio and visual hallucinations, grandiose delusions, and extreme anxiety. I am on medicine and the symptoms have all gone away. To me, this tells me I was really sick because the medicine made such a huge difference." ----That's what I actually said to the guy. It really bemuses and frustrates me that I have to assert myself to others and state "yes, actually I am a schizophrenic, no kidding," and the whole time they're like, "why is she faking?" I guess it is difficult for society to accept that a person who can be non-functional one year can be a high-functioning student/volunteer/organizer with no hint of positive or negative schizophrenic symptoms. But it's true!

It is tough being a recovered mental patient. Often, it is very tempting to agree with people who never met you before but who judge you based on how you are at that very moment (perfectly socially acceptable), and who decide maybe you were never sick, you were just mishandled by the system.

I was mishandled by the system; I experienced sexual abuse in the wards, death threats, cruelty by staff, use of restraints without having made any threats or suggestions that I was going to be violent or a flight risk----but I can honestly say they didn't misdiagnose me. They just horribly traumatized me.

Now I am getting so irritable. Every time I talk about the stuff I went through in the psych wards, I get a migraine headache.

I change subject now.

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Currently, I am the president of a campus organization. I did not start the club but I was recently nominated to be president and so I am president now. I  have a meeting with the administration today to discuss our upcoming event, which I am now in charge of, as the last president just left with the paperwork for the event incomplete and not approved by the administration. I like the last president. I am just a little nervous because the choice to switch officer positions was not her choice. I think she might be a tad bit bitter. I must use my diplomatic skills to win her over. I will then use the diplomatic skills to win over the administration and to hold this event, which is coming up next month.

I must go make promotional materials for the event, that is not approved to take place yet. Better to be over-prepared than to come empty-handed.

Usually, I don't wake up at 2 am, but today I did, so I might as well make some promotional materials. Thanks for reading!!

Ghost in the Machine

I have to admit, I'm not always happy with what I write here. Sometimes, I feel badly about what I wrote while in a bad mood, or while in a manic state. Then again, I try to promote understanding about mental illness by opening up my private thoughts to cyberspace. Not all mentally ill people are all horrible monsters, or incompetent people who cannot be trusted to work. Many of us live and let live, some succeed, others fail, some are only burdened by their illness, others find a special talent in it.

Myself, I love to paint, but I only paint when I am mentally ill. Painting allows me to express myself in a way that relates to my horrifying experience of hearing voices or feeling persecuted. Talking about these things would be deemed as "freakish," "bizarre," or "scary." But when I paint what I want to say rather than say it, I get praise and compliments from even total strangers. Painting allows me to communicate, to escape my mind for a while, and to establish a connection with the outside world, within the "appropriate" parameters. If it were not for my schizo-affective disorder, I really doubt I would have ever picked up a paint brush.

Now that I am "sane," and have been out of the hospital for the last 3-4 years, I find that I am not really compelled to paint as I once was. I find instead that I gravitate towards technical books on science, math, and computer programming. I can no longer tolerate the uncertainty of a blank canvas. Now that my head is clear and some of my personality has returned (note: mental illness can often cause disruptions in one's personality and the development of one's personality), I am more interested in the art of programming rather than the art of Picasso. I am still eternally indebted to the world of art for maintaining me through my ordeals, but now I can go pursue the goals and passions from before my mental illness struck in my late teenage years.

It is tragic that schizophrenia often hits right at the onset of adulthood. Likely, the pre-psychotic symptoms have been in the individual through their adolescence, inhibiting their true personality from proper development.

Sometimes I still feel like I am only 18 years old. That is around the time when my mind started to mutate, to become unbalanced. Sometimes, when I laugh at something hysterically funny, I forget how old I am (29). In that moment, it is like I got my early years back and I'm a new, young adult again. Then, I remember that I'm almost 30, and I have to keep from feeling let down.

Despite this, I can feel proud of myself because I have found some measure of stability in a time when little treatment is available to people like myself. There is no magic wand, no magic fairy that can turn back the clock or make you a success overnight, but the fact that I have accomplished some of my goals on my own without the help of a magic fairy ---like. earning my Bachelor's degree, entering a graduate program, taking science classes, volunteering, and earning financial aid and so forth ---- that is enough to get me through the hard times I know I will have down the line. At some point, my illness will no longer be the "ghost in the machine," the apparition that haunts me while I type into cyberspace, it may very well become a reality, but until then, I am happy. I hope you are happy, too!

The Future as Bright and Promising

Well, I improved my grade in that graduate class that I had gotten a C on the first exam. From a mediocre, failing C to a perfect score on my second exam! Now my grade is an 85%, up 15%. I got a perfect score! I am still proud of this. My future in the graduate program seems to be promising.

Also, I inquired to my Department of Rehabilitation counselor, my out-patient service providers, and my therapist, if a 5150 or a 5250 appears on a background check. They all said no, it is part of my confidential medical records. I was so scared before, thinking that my chances of employment were marginal, at best. Thank goodness for that one medical legislative measure that ensured our privacy! God bless the USA!!

The only thing I cannot do is serve in a position that requires a firearm. I accept this. I do not want a firearm anyways, those things are dangerous. I do not mind not being allowed to work for the police department, that is alright.

I am so grateful that I can be a teacher! I will take my medicine as prescribed, no missing, and I will monitor my mild symptoms. I vow to keep up with my regiment. :)

I am very happy. Only criminal charges show up on background checks, and I have no criminal record whatsoever. I do not even have a single speeding ticket on my driving record, and I worked as a delivery driver for around 3 years.

I now have a car I bought used. I spent hundreds of loan dollars fixing it up, but it runs reliably and more importantly, it is a Kia that is good on gas.

Yay! 

Sugar Cookie As Symbol of my Recovery

It was two years ago, maybe even longer. The staff on the psychiatric unit were doling out my favorite snack: two soft, sugar cookies with white frosting and little colored sprinkles on top. These cookies were treats on the psych ward. We got some only at intervals, sometimes at lunch time, sometimes at snack time, never on a regular basis.

I liked to wrap my cookies in a napkin and smuggle them out of the cafeteria for later consumption. Often, I would lie awake listening to the never-ending noise in my head and reach over for one of the little cookies which I stock-piled in the dresser beside my assigned bed. They were a comfort food on the ward--sugary, fattening, sweet.

Later on, I would abhor the sight of those cookies. Once I was outside and no longer an in-patient, I was vehemently opposed to eating that specific type of cookie. One time, my mother brought home those soft, sugar cookies from her workplace. I took one look at the two cookies she generously offered me and my stomach churned. It was THAT cookie---that exact brand of cookie. I shook my head and refused it. It was not because I was trying to lose weight and avoid sugar (which I was, but one cookie would have been okay). It was because that cookie represented confinement. It represented a locked ward and horrible memories. It represented my illness.

 For two years now, I have avoided those cookies. They seem to be everywhere, at Save Mart, Target, Food Co., they are stocked in every major grocery store! I would shop for food and sigh as I passed the bakery. There, amongst the brownies and tiramisu cakes, that specific type of sugar cookie with the white frosting and the sprinkles. Those cookies haunted me for two years. Like decaf coffee, they are two fixtures in the psychiatric hospital that I can depend on to be there each time I am involuntary hospitalized.

This last week I turned it all around. I was approved for graduation from my University on July 3rd. My degree will be posted on August 10th. My admission into the graduate program was cemented. It was a great feeling. After 1 year at the University I had achieved my goal of obtaining my Bachelor's degree from an accredited University. I had gone from being a chronic hospital basket-case, in and out of psychiatric facilities and community college classes, to a full-time University student with no major psychiatric relapses. I decided to celebrate....I bought the sugar cookies with the white frosting and the little sprinkles on top. I took them home. I sat them on the tabletop and opened up the little plastic container. My mother came in and I told her the story of the sugar cookies.
"So why did you buy them?"
"Because I want to taste them. They taste like victory now. I want to taste them as a graduate student not as a mental patient. From this point, the cookies are symbols of my recovery." She smiled, I chewed. The cookie tasted delicious. :)

Empty

Dear online, public diary,

today I feel empty. My cousin died last week and I still haven't gotten over the shock that he chose to leave his family and friends by committing suicide. I was close to that abyss once, but I chose life, family, friends, uncertainty, financial insecurity, unemployment, and this: a futile attempt at making a connection with random people on the internet. I wish I could have been there at the last moment of my cousin's life to bring him back from that horrible wasteland of despair. But I wasn't. I feel from the bottom of my being that I have to do something; there is a terrible urgency pushing me out to seek people, to seek change, to seek help. What helps, though? This helps--writing to nobody, posting it online for anybody to find. Baring my soul and telling my truths are the only things that give me the courage to take my psychotropic medications nightly and wake up in the morning still myself, still flawed, still aching from grief.

Today I feel blue. I've been surfing the internet in my spare time and I realized how insignificant I am and how my beliefs and values are not shared by the majority of people. I would like respect, progress, peace, joy, social integration, equality, fairness, and lots of money. I get none of these things. This makes me feel blue.

Today I must find one good thing to write about. I'll write about learning.
Being in summer school has saved me from a potentially lethal combination of intense mourning and isolation. I wake up, I shower, I go to class and I participate. It takes my mind off the horror of death, and the pain of life. Instead of weeping again I pick up a book and learn new words in a foreign language. I'm learning the Arabic alphabet right now at the University, and I have to say it brings me serenity to puzzle over each word. There is no greater joy in my life at the moment then trying to figure out what the letter "Baa" will look like in initial, medial, and final position in a word. I can practice my cursive for hours. In this learning mode, I am firing synapses, strengthening my concentration, progressing in life, and experimenting with another culture. I get little boosts of serotonin naturally after a 2 hour session of struggling to recall the alphabet. I lose myself in the language.  I study, I train, I memorize. I heal.