My Diagnosis: AKA Just to clarify I am not a sociopath

To recap my diagnosis: I am schizo-affective. I even have my own printed out copy of the main file of my on record with the county mental health office. I am not a sociopath. I have to say this with half a smile because I keep seeing "female sociopath" and "sociopathic women" in the stats area for this blog. I smile because of all the decades that mental health workers have cared for me, they have never ever said I have sociopathic tendencies. It is the one thing I am not (thankfully).
These are the things that I have been diagnosed with (soociopathy not being one of them):
bipolar
schizophrenic, paranoid sub-type
schizo-affective
dual diagnosis (diagnosis + cannabis abuse)
ptsd (don't ask me why)

Humorously, someone out in the web must have decided I was a sociopath and linked it to my blog, which is fair, I guess, except they got the diagnosis wrong. Arm chair psychiatrists, what can I say?

Anyways, thanks to those who read with an open mind. The world out there for people like me is very unkind and society is quick to label those of us with a mental health diagnosis as violent, or potentially violent.

I can assure you that I am indeed a graduate student who has no criminal record whatsoever (and I don't even cheat on taxes or speed while driving!). I am indeed disabled cognitively when having an episode. I am not a sociopath. It would offend me except that I recognize the deep-seated hostility and fear of those who would decide I qualify as a sociopath -- it is not sociopathy, it is a furious wrath that has built up over years of both abuse and negligence in the mental hospitals. If you were me, you would be pissed, too.

Mundane Life of a Schizophrenic Grad Student

I have not written anything lately because I am a pretty uninteresting person. I wake up, feed the cat, go to campus, attend classes, do assignments, meet and greet people, and go about my way. I don't walk around talking to myself or shouting at the voices. Yes, I have heard voices, but they are abstractions of my fear that I recognize as Not Real. I just really cannot stand to listen to them, which is why I have been so good about keeping up with my anti-psychotic medicine. With anti-psychotics I become anti-psychotic, which means that I have no delusions of grandeur, no ideas of persecution, no audio or visual hallucinations. I can blend in with the Normals. It's been about 5 years now since I was last in the mental hospital. I have worked very hard to keep myself out. I meditate, I am always questioning my perceptions, I stay busy volunteering or working or going to class, I make social bonds with Normals. I have a boring life. So boring everyone accuses me of faking mental illness! The last disability evaluater called my doctor an idiot and said I couldn't possibly be schizophrenic. My current therapist does not accept my schizo-affective diagnosis and says instead that I am only bipolar. Society has become confused as to what to do with the crazy woman who has been in and out of hospitals since age 19 (I'm 30 years old now). Now that I seem better people are too eager to assume I was misdiagnosed. I was not. I am partially schizophrenic. I have excessive amounts of dopamine. I cannot filter out everyday stimuli like the rest of you and my mind gets flooded with input---all of it somehow meaningful and cryptic. A car that drives by is not just a car it is a message of some kind, some kind of decipherable message that I must decode. That is the nature of psychosis: we live in lands of coded meanings, everything jumbled, word salads, neologisms (made up words), clanging words (nonsense rhymes).

The loose associations, the ever-present paranoia, the moments of manic euphoria, the unwavering certainty that my webcam has been hacked---this is my schizophrenia and I am okay with that. I am learning to live with the coded meanings, to ignore old habits, to build new habits based on concrete reality. However, despite being a recovered mental patient, I am still that dehumanized mental patient, roughed up in the hospitals, mistreated, hurt, attacked, restrained. There is no undoing what was done to me in those hospitals, but I can redo myself and my attitude and I chose to do so.

I want a new life with hope and financial stability. Three years ago I wanted a new life with a college education and I achieved that in 2012. Now I am expanding my hopes and dreams. I want to have a real career. I want to travel the world. I want to make so much money I could buy the expensive pharmaceutical drugs I need to maintain. I want to donate money to impoverished schools and help make the world a more educated place. The worst thing anyone ever did to me was steal my hope by telling me that I had a grave disease with no future. It was worse than the sexual assault I experienced in the hospital. Nothing is as depressing as being told that nothing will ever, ever get better and that you will always, always be on government aid. Yes, that is what they told me was my future.

Now I am a Master's degree student in my last full semester (I have to finish up my thesis next semester). I have a social life with Normal friends. I was working a part-time job as well and volunteering on the side, but I quit so that I could design a thesis study. Things are different, mostly in good ways.

If you have ever been told by a doctor, counselor, social worker, or anyone else that your life will not change, that you will always be unable to take care of yourself, and that you need nothing but "rest" and no stress, you're not alone. I was there, too. My doctor advised me to drop out of the community college to avoid the stress. Obviously, I didn't listen to him, as I transferred to a University and enrolled in the post-grad program. I want you to know that there is always hope, there is always something new, even a good night's sleep will alter your brain chemistry for the better. Don't let anyone make you feel hopelessness. That is the greatest crime the system has done to us mentally ill patients. It is not the patient dumping or restraints, it is the psychological destruction of a person's precious hope that is the worst torture of all. 

Networking with Schizophrenics Online is Hard

At some point, I will have to find an actual career. Until then, I am going to blog for a little while, just to let others know that it is possible to have a part-time job, go to graduate school full-time, while being a former mental patient diagnosed as schizo-affective.

The main idea people have of schizophrenics is that we go on rampage killings or that we are homeless or in boarding houses. According to the nimh site (national institute of mental health), 1% of Americans have been diagnosed as schizophrenic. According to the schizophrenia.com website, around 2 million Americans have schizophrenia. Where are these 2 million people? Homeless? With family? Independent? Incarcerated?

I go on youtube and forum boards, trying to network with other schizophrenics. The thing is that a number of us are paranoid subtypes. This can mean we are naturally distrustful, suspicious, cautious, and reluctant to reveal too much of ourselves. Or it can mean we think you, the reader, are a member of a shadowy secret organization intent on patrolling cyberspace, if I am to be totally honest. But usually our paranoid tendencies don’t manifest in totally outrageous conspiracy plots like that one, but in more mundane settings like being afraid of getting “outed” on the internet as a person with a mental health diagnosis. This can make us generally leery of chatting with other schizophrenics or about sharing our experiences as being schizophrenic.

I think I am different because I feel slightly more comfortable than other schizophrenics talking about my mental illness on the internet, where I have a fragment of anonymity. Also, I have taken my cocktail of pharmaceuticals regularly since 2009. That was the last time I was in the hospital, if I remember correctly. Being on medication regularly makes me feel almost normal. I will always have a paranoid streak, but at least now it is not a handicap.

My quest for kinship with other schizophrenics is at a standstill. I can’t find too many others who have benefited greatly from medication and can be reintegrated into society. I know they are out there. They just don’t post publicly online, which makes them difficult to network with.

If you are a schizophrenic, please network with others! We can share experiences, learn valuable lessons, and help the mental health system to evolve into a compassionate model of decent treatment services!

Lions, and Tigers, and Finals Week.

When the only thing that separates me from the other former mental patients is that I can perform well in school, finals week is a stressful, coffee-indulging, binge-eating festival of intellectual carnage.

I am schizo-affective. Most of my kindred schizophrenics are busy talking to pigeons in the downtown park, or rocking themselves in their drug-induced stupor. Some of us lead “normal lives,” though. I am apparently one of them. I work part-time and attend college as a Master’s program student full-time. Nobody knows what I am: a former mental patient who spent the ages of 19 – 25 in and out of mental hospitals before I finally stabilized on meds and took them consistently.

Now, I must study and prove that I am more than a delinquent set of brain chemicals called dopamine and serotonin. I am more than a mental patient. Or at least that is the way I must train myself to think or else I will plummet into a fit of self-destructiveness. My entire essence is wrapped up in how I can differentiate myself from society’s image of a schizophrenic: the bizarre, violent, freak of nature that needs to be detained indefinitely. I try to think of myself as a student, as a laborer, as a creative thinker, as a writer. Deep down, I will always be that girl locked in solitary confinement in the triage center of the hospital with three security guards monitoring every movement, but it’s worth a try to act like I have a chance at a happy life. I deserve that. On that nice thought, I will take my leave. Have a great day!

"Whoever told you you're schizophrenic was an idiot," --disability evaluator

I saw a disability evaluator last week. She was a stocky African American lady with a polished, clipped voice and a skeptical look to her.

“Whoever told you you were schizophrenic was an IDIOT,” she said, “There is NO chance you are schizophrenic. I know schizophrenia, I evaluate it all the time, and you are NOT a schizophrenic.”

I started to cry. She just glared at me. Having shattered my identity she went on to tell me how I was not entitled to disability, that I was not schizophrenic, blah blah blah. I sat there for 30 minutes listening to her wail on me. I hated her. I hated her from the deepest part of my soul. It is not nice to try to dismantle somebody’s identity. Schizophrenia is part of my identity. It is part of what defines me, and I don’t like people trying to wrestle out my soul with brittle disgust, like she did.

Two days later was my doctor’s appointment. I told her my Master’s program was going well. Then I asked her what my official diagnosis was.

“Schizoaffective,” she said, double checking with the computer’s information. My mind was restored, in a sad way. I knew I was different, sick, ill, not normal. Now, it was re-confirmed. I had spent two days wondering what I was, why had I hallucinated and heard voices if I was not schizophrenic? But everything was okay, or rather, it was back to being not okay--I was schizophrenic. It made me feel happy, in a weird way.

Note to self: Don't trust anyone. DTA.

I hope you have a nice day! Thanks for reading!

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!

Empty Summer Days

My classmate died this week. He was a very kind man who spoke to me in a gentle voice. I miss his presence already. Next semester will be a little difficult not having him in my graduate classes anymore.

I still have no therapist to replace my last one. I am slowly adjusting to the new cocktail of medications my psychiatrist put me on. I have no job and all I do is care-take my grandmother during the day and take walks in the evening.

Some days the reality of having a public blog makes me feel doomed. "What have I done," I think, "I am too exposed." But, I cannot help that I am mentally ill. Maybe my little wails and rants in cyberspace will make somebody else feel a little more normal. Also, it is healing to feel so emotionally stripped. I have nothing to hide anymore, my deepest secrets are posted online for people to root through and pass judgment on. Well, I always did want to be a confessional writer. I just never wanted to actually confess. I guess I wanted to be a fiction writer but that did not pan out. None of the writing panned out. Instead, I have milled about in academia, making friends who have no idea about my mental illness, feeling both accepted and alienated at the same time, struggling to come to grips with how society perceives me, and back in mourning after another classmate passed away.

In case you have been reading throughout this blog's timeline, I have actually experienced quite a bit of loss these past few years. My cousin committed suicide a few years ago. That was actually the impetus to start writing online. Next, my classmate whom I was secretly infatuated with passed away at a young age. Later, my grandfather passed away from a heart attack. Now another classmate has died at a young age. My mother mentioned to me that it was strange that so many people close to me had died the past few years. I really wish she had not mentioned that, because it actually is true. Three out of four of my close contacts died before the age of 40. That is far, far too young.

Now, I feel mortality like a chiffon dress that is delicate, transparent, and quick to rip. I wear my mortality like my new tattoo-- on my sleeve and open to the elements.

Tragedy always brings to mind the shame I feel over my own anger. Anger in words, anger in print, anger in general makes me self-loathe. I feel like anger is arsenic, slowly devouring my insides until one day I will stagger into the desert and die. I don't want to die with anger. I want to live. I want to be free of anger. How to escape the anger of being hurt, traumatized, alienated---that is something I have yet to answer. I try to find positive things in life to focus on. I try to accept that I will get angry and learn to control it so that it transforms into a butterfly and not some mutant caterpillar.

I will now list positive things about my life for balance and peace of mind:

I knew two great and kind men who were fond of me and whose memory as classmates I will hold in my heart for the rest of my life.
I am half way to earning my Master's degree.
I am sticking to my new diet of raw vegetables and I am not weighing myself obsessively.
My grandmother and mother spent the majority of their lives taking care of me and I will become a better person so that they will be proud.
John Nash is awesome and a genius whose schizophrenia did not stop him from winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite having schizo-affective disorder, I achieved a B.A. and entered a graduate program.
Puppies.

Between Mind Medicine and Mind-Control: Forbidden Emotions of a Bipolar

I am highly irritable this week. Everything ignites irritability. I know it is because I am a schizophrenic-bipolar woman who is currently stressed out and broke. Knowing the underlying cause for this feeling does not help the irritability. It fact, it makes it worse because I am forbidden from expressing this irritability.

I feel irritable. Some random person posts something fiercely ignorant about race. I keep my mouth shut because I know I will over react due to my underlying mental illness. Somebody without a mental illness would have snapped and had some psychological release.

I, being subjugated to extreme scrutiny by psychiatrists, doctors, family, mental health technicians, and therapists, cannot express normal anger anymore. I have been denied the right to feel angry or depressed. These are "mental" issues that need to be addressed. In many ways, I feel emotionally spayed. I must remain neutral in mood for the rest of my life or risk being institutionalized or put on dangerously high doses of psychotropic medications.

There is a fine line between mental health treatment and mind-control. I have had my continuum of emotions deleted through medication and hospitalization.

These are emotions that are forbidden to me:

Anger
Irritability
Expansive Mood
Exhaustion
Resentment
Fear of persecution
Fear in general
Hatred
Introversion
Sadness
A combination of these that shift from one to the other rapidly.


I understand that it is "beneficial" to me and to society to put these restraints in place. It is just a bit like mind-control, that is all. I will live under constant scrutiny, constant monitoring by mental health professionals, for the rest of my life, and that is alright with me. However, if there is a better alternative, that would be awesome.

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!

Am I Normal Yet?

Dear public, online diary,

today I was walking on campus when I realized that I didn't stand out from the crowd. I  mean that in a good way. I was not sticking out like a crazy sore thumb. I just was one in a thousand on campus. It felt surprisingly freeing to not feel stigmatized, degraded, devalued, and hated. Just for a moment, I envisioned a society where the talents and eccentricities of non-violent mentally ill people can be appreciated. One can dream....
****************************************************************************

I am doing just fine in my classes. I am pursuing a Masters degree. I am also taking several undergraduate level science courses in my secret pursuit of a Bachelors in Science. I have not officially declared that I am attempting a second Bachelors, which is why it is secret. Also, if I fail miserably, only my graduate mentor and myself will know about it.

In my private life, I am very private. I have no significant other. My previous boyfriend had no idea that I was schizo-affective. I kind of liked it that way. Well, maybe I didn't like it that way, but I had done a pretty good job convincing myself that I liked it that way. I just told myself it was because I liked my privacy. However, I believe that being honest is a very important to the mental health movement. I want to live up to the kind of life that Elyn R. Saks created for herself. I also seek to pursue higher education despite my illness.

Education is like a safe-haven. In academia, one can engage with people in a field and they would rarely question your private life---all that matters is how much you know in your field. One can hide illness there. Or at least I have convinced myself that I am able to hide my illness. Who knows? Either way, I guess I'll never know what my professors and fellow classmates are really thinking. It's probably for the best, because if I can't know what they are thinking, then it is likely that they can't know what I am thinking and that soothes my paranoid mind.

I still have to complete one homework problem for precalculus. I spent forty minutes on one problem, after breezing through the other 14 problems. Once I got to that problem, I get getting everything except one number right. It was really irritating. The professor gives us infinite attempts until the deadline, but it was to no avail, as I attempted so many times it is nearly the deadline and I still haven't answered question 15.

In my illness, there was a lot of unreality, a lot of fear, a lot of uncertains. In math, there are only facts, logic, symmetry, structure, and calculated asymmetry. There are no uncertains. Everything is hidden under layers of proofs. Kernels of certainty embedded in what appears to be ciphers. It is kind of relaxing to take this precalculus class. Or it was relaxing until I got to question 15.

Moody No More-More Meds

Reading the last entry made me think about what my shrink once told me:

Don't let your fear and paranoia stop you from doing what you want to do. I want to play Killzone 2 darn it. Just not online.

I mentioned my unnerving fear of being sent viruses and trojans to my psychiatrist who kindly recommended upping my dosage of almost every medicine I take. I happily obliged. I don't like feeling nervous, agitated, and paranoid.

So here I am, day one into my new regime of medicines. I feel quite at peace! I am taking a higher dose of mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety medicine. My anti-psychotic dose stayed the same but I think that was only because I confessed to spending a week off the meds due to some unknown motivation on my part (something I DO NOT recommend). The result=paranoia, fear, sleeplessness, and once I started taking the med consistently again---total sleepiness. Seriously, I slept until 2 pm today.  I feel asleep from 8 to midnight, stayed up until 1 am (only one hour), then back to sleep until 8. At 8 I managed to make some coffee in my french press, but then I wandered off and fell asleep on the couch where I remained in some zombie sleep until the late afternoon.

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I am watching the documentary on John Nash, "A Beautiful Genius." I really like it thus far. It focuses on Nash's time at the University. The film is well told and interesting.

Returning to Life

I'm done with term papers. Now I have nothing to do but exercise and sit at my computer reading through the comments on news websites. They really, really depress me, those comments. Whatever.

My mother told me stop reading the comments. I really cannot help it; I need to know the level of ignorance my fellow skitzes and I face. Believe me, the comments are not pretty.

I was going to quit blogging but I thought better of it. I've been blogging about my life and struggles with schizo-affective disorder for about a year now. I feel that I will be more productive to society if I prove that not all skitzes are sadists. Plus, if there is some skitz who is sitting at home, contemplating  suicide because of what society is telling him about himself and his medical condition, I want him to know that there is a path towards hope, healing and regeneration.

I was 19 when I had my first psychotic episode. It was my first year in college. I am 29 years old now. I still have the condition but it is in remission and has been for the past 3 years. I have my bachelor's degree, as of this spring. No, it's not from some shady online course. It's one of the Cal States. I worked periodically through the past ten years---no real careers, just cashier, pizza thrower, that sort of thing, but I held on to my jobs for years at a time. I have had a variety of romances, maybe one too many. I've also lost 25 pounds since last year, and I'm 158-160 right now. I am not defined by my mental illness. I am a graduate student, a laborer, an artist, a loyal daughter, and a supportive friend.

If you feel like you are having trouble with positive self-identity, please take the time to do what I just did: list all the positive things about yourself then write your name above the list. That list is you.

Good luck.

Grad School : 5 Hours of Sleep, 5 Hours of Study

I had an interesting chat with my psychiatrist last month. I relayed my level of stress as a first-semester graduate student to her and she placed me on an additional mood stabilizer. The mood stabilizer acts on a different set of neuro-transmitters (brain chemicals that regulate mood). This new drug is supposed to moderate my level of depression. So, far it has worked. But anyways, back to our conversation.

"Oh, you are in grad school now," she asked.
"Yes, it's really different. There's a lot of journals to read and they're all really technical," I said.
"How are you doing so far?"
"I'm doing good, but I sometimes don't study for as long as I would like to because I get sleepy around ten o'clock, right after I take my medicine," I said.
"Oh, yes, it is better to stay up and study. Less stress in the long run. You should stay up and study as long as you can," she said.

I am taking her advice to heart. I scored high on my tests after our conversation. I did indeed stay up late, by drinking two cups of strong coffee around ten o'clock. I also tend to do work in the grad study room on campus after my evening class. I get home around 10. I either spend some time with my boyfriend afterwards or else I go home and pass out, exhausted, but ahead of the game.

I still have to write two term papers before the semester is over. Three of my classes are easy for me. Two require analyzing raw acoustic data, translating it into plain English, making graphs that show the results, and applying the appropriate theories to the data. I feel overwhelmed, but I am confident that I can type out some reasonable analyses in time for the deadline. I am less confident about getting an A on these papers, but I will try my best.

Sigh. I fear that if I don't perform well I will have no chance of entering a PhD program. I really want to earn a doctorate in my field. It is the pinnacle of education. I am willing to work hard, do research, work at a real job on the side, and stay in school an additional 5-6 years in order to earn a PhD.

Part of me is motivated because I have a severe mental illness that hindered my progress for so long. I was too busy curled up in bed, experiencing troubling symptoms, to study or to go to class. Now, I have medicine, a therapist, and a chance at a decent future. I want to prove society wrong about mentally ill people, not by surrendering to a fate of disability checks, but by improving my status in society and being a mentor to the mentally ill people who are talented but too insecure or troubled to reach for their goals.

Here are some tricks I learned that helped me earn my belated B.A. despite suffering from a mental illness:
1) Wake up early, take a walk, come home, and write out the main objectives for the day. For example, item 1: complete homework assignment before 10 a.m. item 2 : eat lunch, less than 400 calories. item 3 : go to campus early. item 4 : work on lit review for term paper (at least one hour)....and so on.

2) participate at least one time during class. Participate less than 4 times during class, just in case I am manic and too talkative.

3) When in doubt about participation, doodle on notes. Doodling makes it look like I are totally bored and uninterested but at least nobody will know that I am socially awkward at that moment.

4) engage in 1 minute, trivial chit chat with classmate after class, just to practice social skills and to connect momentarily with another human being. Avoid long periods of eye contact, when person physically steps away, cut the conversation short and excuse yourself politely.

5) Drink coffee.

6) Keep a diary to vent personal self-doubt, campus gossip, and general fear of society. Don't share it with anyone except therapist.

This last point should be crucial for me, but here I am; divulging my personal struggles, dark secrets, and horribly out-of-reach ambitions to total strangers. Well, that's the internet for you. :)

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!       :)

Need More Coffee

Graduate school is a new experience for me. It requires stamina, endurance, mental prowess, and a lot of caffeine.

I have decided I prefer to call myself bipolar with psychotic features rather than schizo-affective. Why? Because, for the last two years, I have not had schizophrenic symptoms. I have had slight manic and depressive episodes. That is more how I would characterize myself, as a bipolar person who risks becoming schizophrenic if I go without sleep for more than two days. Unfortunately, it is really common that I do not sleep for extended periods once my mania sets in. However, I have been free of schizophrenic symptoms for the last two to three years. My bipolarity, on the other hand, seems to come more frequently.

For example, any time I miss a dose of Zoloft I feel sad, hopeless, and like my efforts in academia are futile. Of course, once the doctor pumps me full of refills, this tends to go away rather quickly (as in, within two hours!). Sometimes, if I drink too much coffee followed by energy drinks and diet Cokes, I can become too extroverted. It is not just the caffeine, it is how my brain chemistry responds to caffeine. I can effuse over my peers, insisting that they are magnificent people who can change the world. If that sounds really nice, well, you've never seen me manic. I just cannot shut up! I hear myself talking on and on, sometimes jumping from topic to topic, but I cannot make my mouth shut. I fear how I must come across.

Well, hopefully, I can keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the term papers. :)

Grad School---coffee, zoloft, & Monster energy drinks

The one thing I have noticed is that I tend to gravitate towards liquid caffeine whenever I am feeling nervous. Isn't that reversed? Shouldn't I drink green, decaffeinated tea and listen to mellow sitar music? Instead, I play industrial electronica music, pop my zoloft (all 200 mg), and run out to get myself the following: a grande Starbucks iced coffee with a shot of espresso and creamer, followed shortly by a Monster lo-cal energy drink, followed by perhaps another large regular coffee, all the while walking around listening to hard-core, heart-pumping industrial beats. That's graduate school for you, I guess.

Barrista: "Hi what can I get for you today?"
Me: "A grande iced coffee with cream and a shot, please."
Barrista: "How many shots in that?"
Me: "What's the maximum number of shots allowed?"

Thanks for reading! More to come! :)