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.

Who works at Mental Hospitals?

A criminology professor once told a class I was taking that people who have power complexes and want to dominate and control other human beings tended to flock towards jobs in mental hospitals. There, they could exert their power over an unwilling person with the justification that "they're just not like us." What do I mean by "exerting power"? One of the times (this is only ONE of the many times) that I was sexually abused in the mental hospital, the staff saw ---watched---an older male patient enter my room (I was not used to door locks in psych wards because many do not allow for even a moment's privacy, this will be pertinent later). They were not even five feet away at the desk, with my door practically facing them. The man came in and he was already stripped down to his boxer shorts. He pulled out his genitals and began to masturbate. Nobody stopped him, everybody saw him. I had to get aggressive by yelling at him to "get the f out" while kicking the air around him. Even though I was yelling, nobody came, nobody helped, nobody even feigned concern. I chased him away and went back to sleep (I can sleep through anything because I have been abused in the hospitals enough where it is not anything to lose my sleep over anymore).

The next day my doctor came into my room (everyone, EVERYONE can go into your room. This is supposed to be just for staff to check we're not dead, but in reality this means other mental patients, ex-felons, whoever happens to be detained at the moment).

"Why didn't you go to group?" the doctor asked. Silly question. Once my psychosis stops, I realize that my major psychological issue is being cooped up in a psych ward with a bunch of predators (be they the rare, hostile mental patient or the more common sociopathic employees that do the checks). How exactly will group treat the fact that I hate the mental health care system and see it as an archaic throw-back to lobotomy days? I can just imagine being told to go back to my room because my ideas were "disturbing to the other patients' well being".

I muttered something to my doctor about hating group and then I blurted out that I was boycotting everything outside my bed to protest that old male who trespassed and was probably about to rape me.

"WHO?" Yelled the doctor. See, doctors really are not in charge. They think they are and they should be, but they are not on the ward nearly long enough to understand the dynamics that exists behind locked doors.

"That f^$ right there," I yelled, pointing my finger at the offender, who had been moved to a room directly visible from my own bed. The doctor fumed, but again, doctors don't have nearly as much power over my day-to-day life as the mental health technicians. He chased the offender, who went inside the bathroom. I went back to sleep, knowing KNOWING I would wake up and the offender would be on the same ward as myself, STILL. He did not get moved to another room, they just "had a talk with him." "We'll handle it," they said. One of these days someone is going to lift that rug off the floor and see the dirty horrors that you swept under the rug for decades.

Nobody came. Nobody saved me. That is what it is like inside the mental hospital. Here is a link to a video that is pretty close to what I have personally seen going on. Staff do tend to magnetically gravitate towards one patient in particular (someone who they see is easy to control). They can get verbally abusive. They are clever predators though: they are guilty of neglect and cover-ups but they keep their hands "clean" by not physically leaving marks on the patients. They have other ways to make a person suffer. At this hospital where a reporter went undercover as a mental health technician, it was revealed that there had been physical and psychological abuse of autistic, suicidal, and other marginalized groups.

In some country (name forgotten), the recovered mental health patients are hired to treat their own kind--so that a schizophrenic who is medicated and recovered, can work in the hospital alongside those like him who are still very, very sick. This model is beautiful because Normals have no idea what it is like to hear voices, or to feel hysterical fear for days on end. Other schizophrenics know what that is like, and we can feel a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those of our ilk who are still in their psychotic states. I would really much prefer to have a medicated schizophrenic looking after my well-being and protecting me than these Normals. They keep forgetting we are humans who feel pain when they hurt us.

BELOW: LINK to a 15 minute youtube video showing the inside of a locked ward (BBC took down the entire episode, but it might be floating out there in cyber-space). The title is "Undercover care: Abuse Exposed" by BBC panorama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqg_UjWhmOM

Off the Grid for a Semester

I started this blog with the intention to share my personal experiences with what I thought was paranoid schizophrenia (now it is either schizo-affective or bipolar with psychosis, depending on which doctor you ask). Since then, I  have graduated from a CSU as a returning adult student, had a couple of menial jobs, entered graduate school for a Master's degree, volunteered at fundraisers, taken my medication almost every day, kept my doctor's appointment, and started working on my Master's thesis. At the age of 23 I was given a life sentence of chronic insanity: paranoid schizophrenia. I was told to go on disability and avoid stress and driving at all costs. I guess you can count me as one of those mental patients who did not listen to their doctor's advice. My doctor was actually pretty adamant that I stop driving because he thought I would think that other cars were following me. How outdated is that?! I am a modern, contemporary paranoid and we new paranoids know (yes, we know) that if any agency or shadowy figure really, truly wanted to follow us, they would do it via satellites. One cannot outrun the satellite. Why my former psychiatrist could not wrap his head around that logic is beyond me. But the point is now moot---I am neither on disability or taking the bus to get around.

My friend from high school recently came back into my life. At the moment, she is the only person alive who knows my secret (I'm a former mental patient) and who is not a member of my family. She finds it a little unusual that I "went off the grid" for about a decade, to return at the age of 27, newly rehabilitated from an outpatient center, to enter college, finish, continue with post-post secondary schooling, and ultimately, exhibit totally normal behaviors all the while proclaiming that I was a charlatan who was a mental hospital escapee and nothing else.

Mental wards are not day spas. They are co-ed deprivation tanks (when you are lucky, when you are unlucky they are torture chambers). The damage inflicted by other mental patients, mental health technicians, and fishy nurses has been done and, sadly, it looks permanent.

I would give my left pinky finger to ensure that the sexual assaults that happened to me in the psychiatric hospitals never happen to anybody else. But what can I do? I am on the outside, which technically makes me a success story. Some success story! I hide in my little room inside my family's house and type these private secrets to anybody with an internet connection. I still have all consuming anger at the way my sexual assaults were handled by administration (namely: ignore it, let it happen, pretend it didn't happen, minimize it, shuffle it under the rug, refuse to press charges, etc...etc...etc...).

The mental health care system in this country sucks. No other word explains it as succinctly. Imagine this: you get yanked out of bed, strapped to a gurney, restrained with leather cuffs on your wrists and ankles, silent people poke you (they don't talk because they don't see you as quite human) with various medical instruments, needles, blood pressure cuffs. Everything is supposed to be for your own good. Enter the triage center and all the police officers who think it is their job to interrogate people whose brains are already haywire. They just want to make sure you are not the next Sandy Hook killer, or the next James Holmes, or whichever sociopath you choose that may or may not have a dual diagnosis with a mental health issue. They leave you a little more screwed up then when you came in. Spend anywhere from 2 days to months in a "hospital" which is more like a detention center with designated arts and crafts time. Navigate around sociopaths who were dropped off by police who decided they were just nuts when they threatened to shoot up everybody (note: every other mental patient on the ward will not have this death-threat issue because we are NOT VIOLENT, except for the sociopaths who masquerade as one of us). Spend entire time avoiding certain mental patients with anger management issues. Spend entire time avoiding mental health technicians with anger management issues and power complexes. Take pills that have massive side-effects. Hand over civil rights, or rather, have them violently taken away for a period of time under the banner of "mental health treatment."

What should be done? What must be done? I cannot just go back into my day-to-day life and ignore the plight of my kin; those bipolar, schizophrenic, anxiety-riddled, depressive nutcases who are tormented not only by internal stress, but are also victimized in a detention camp with no human rights (aka the mental ward). I will continue to blog about all my experiences and when I have none left I will just ask other mental patients about their experiences and blog about that as well. It is time that the world knew how much contempt and neglect mental patients face in America.

This is the next civil rights movement. The right to equality for those of us who have had our rights taken away without committing a crime. Say no to unfair detention of mental patients! Say yes to transparency in how the mental health system runs in terms of administration! Say no to police murders of mental patients when it is avoidable!

 Our kind is neglected everywhere. However, with new medicines, those of us who are well want to treat our own kind with the respect and empathy they deserve and we don't want predators abusing our vulnerable population; be they sociopaths or mental health workers. Soon, we will rise, globally, in unison, in hospitals and in our places of employment or schooling---we will not be silent anymore. There may come a time when I have to be outed to the world in order to stand for what I believe in (equality and justice) and that scares me but I deal with it. I don't want to be treated like an animal, like a monster by people who don't understand mental health issues. I have two choices: fake normalcy and hide my condition, or drag my condition out into the open and demand reparations for the grave atrocities that occur daily to mental patients.  This blog is my attempt at the latter, in my own, modest way. Thank you for reading! If you are (or know anyone who is) a person with a mental health issue, spread this message: There is hope. People tried to steal our hope. Sometimes all our hope got stolen. But hope is like a plant that grows wherever you plant it. My hope is that our kind will be treated equally and with empathy. In fact, I demand that my hope get realized. I think you should demand that as well!

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!