#MentalAs kicked off this week and I think
everyone does and should feel proud of what they achieved. Although, all the
Twitter handles involved seemed to make the point that #MentalAs finished on
Friday night, this does not mean that the conversations around mental illness
should ever finish. We need more of the ABC’s style of awareness raising but we
also need so many more things put into action around these conversations. As
was mentioned on #qanda, as they kicked things off, the national and federal
government’s have increasingly gutted this countries mental health services. That
HAS to change.
I don’t want to focus on health care
services in this particular post, however. Instead, I would like to focus on a
mental illness that, for me, seemed a bit like the weird kid in the corner at
the party during all this conversation (believe me I would know a thing or two being
the weird kid in the corner). The mental illness I am referring to is schizophrenia.
I am fortunate enough to have someone close to me in my life who has
schizophrenia. To clarify, when I say fortunate, I mean simply that I am able
to look at the mental illness from a slightly more informed lens than,
probably, most. I feel the need to clarify this because I don’t want to
insinuate that is in anyway easy to have someone close to you who has
schizophrenia or that schizophrenia is some superpower for those affected –
it’s not. Schizophrenia does severely impact on every part of a person’s life
and those who love them (I’m just dropping the realness, guys).
For the purposes of this blog, I am going
to talk about this person’s experiences using a false name as both of us would
like to protect this person’s identity. So, the person I am going to be writing
about will be called Jessica. Please feel safe in the knowledge though that she
is a real person and I have not changed anything else about her experiences
with schizophrenia. I first learned that Jessica had schizophrenia when I was
in my first year at uni. A friend called me up and exclaimed over the phone
‘Jessica’s in hospital.’ Looking back at this, the most disturbing part was my
reaction, because the first thing I thought was ‘OMG she probably went in
trying to convince them she was physically sick and they thought she was crazy
and stuck her in the mental ward.’ I really wasn’t far off the mark. Jessica
had a tendency to be a hypochondriac on a very extreme level and they had put
her in the mental ward. I later found out though that Jessica had collapsed
after what seemed like an anxiety attack at her church (she’s a fundamentalist Christian) and
her pastor had called an ambulance. At the hospital, they decided she wasn’t
talking sense and boom! Mental ward – population overmedication and shock
therapy (that’s right, kids, this tired and fucked up practice still exists.
Jessica told me it was one of the worst things she’s ever experienced in her
life).
Jessica had always been a bit odd in her
behaviour to an outside observer. She is smart, well-spoken, well-read and can
converse with almost anyone about almost anything, which I personally see as a
innate skill she’s always possessed. However, once you get to know her better,
it becomes slightly more evident that she had somewhat unhealthy behaviour
patterns. She wasn’t a very stable person – she changed her job at least once a
year and moved house A LOT. She was also emotionally unstable, although, being
emotionally unstable and generally unstable usually go hand-in-hand. She would
become profusely angry over very little things and she would become desperately
sad often crying for hours on end for, seemingly, no reason.
I still remember vividly a time when she
yelled at me for 20 minutes for leaning against a counter bench because she
thought I was being lazy. Most of us just assumed she was PMS’ing (I now
realize how sexist that line of thinking is).
She first began to shows signs of psychosis
several weeks before she was admitted to the mental ward. For those of you who
don’t know what psychosis is lemme break it down: psychosis is a period of time
for people with mental illness used to describe “a loss of contact with
reality.” For most schizophrenics, psychosis usually involves hearing voices, hallucinating
or severe personality changes. A friend living with her told me that she had
not been sleeping and we later found out she was suffering from long-term insomnia.
She had been spending most nights pacing up and down her hallway muttering to
herself.
Another friend living with her told me that
she had told him that she thought he was an angel “sent from heaven to rid the
world of evil.” I would later learn that a lot of her mental illness made
itself known through her Christianity and that, in fact, religious
fundamentalism is a very common symptom in schizophrenics. She told me that her
mental ward was filled with schizophrenics that thought God was talking to
them. There are honestly so many important points to be made on that topic
alone but I’ll try to stay on schizophrenia itself for this one. After being
released from the mental ward, she began a very rocky road to recovery.
The first step on her road to recovery was
her friends, family and counsellors trying to ensure that she took her
antipsychotics regularly. The thing about schizophrenia is that when you don’t
always have a great grip on reality, taking antipsychotics doesn’t always seem
like a rational decision to the sufferer. She is taking them regularly now. The
second step was learning to realize and accept as reality that the voices she
heard in her heard were disconnected from everyone’s else’s reality except her
own. Jessica told me that her voice was the voice of a man. She told me that
the man had a scary, but authoritative voice. She now accepts that, that voice
is a creation of her own mind.
I asked Jessica a few days ago what
schizophrenia was like to live with. Her response: “You know that movie A
Beautiful Mind? Yeah it’s exactly like that. Except the voice in my head still
isn’t as bad as Russell Crowe.” She’s very to the point these days, which, I
believe, is a side effect of her antipsychotics. Just by talking to her, I can
tell that her speech and thoughts have become, somehow, elucidated. There were so many factors in her
recovery though including more struggles with insomnia.
When Jessica had just been diagnosed, I
remember waiting to go into one of my journalism classes at uni and talking to
some of my fellow students as we stood outside. One of the students was telling
a story about how she visited a mental ward for a story and all of the students
gasped with responses like ‘you’re so brave!’ She quipped ‘Don’t worry. They
didn’t put me in with the real crazies like the schizophrenics or something.’
Bile rised in my throat and I just felt so deflated. That anecdote brings me to
the first lot of stigma I have noticed though:
Schizophrenics
are dangerous:
In responding to this, I don’t want
underplay that schizophrenia IS a dangerous mental illness. Jessica told me
that one of the voices in her head was telling her to kill her flatmate and if
she had, had less of a grip on reality at the time, she may have actually
killed him. I also have an acquaintance with schizophrenia who’s voice told him
to jump off a bridge. I want to make the point, though, that you aren’t
necessarily inclined to kill people at every point in your life just because
you suffer from schizophrenia.
As I have already said, there is still so
much that psychologists don’t know about mental illness and, in fact, the
people who diagnosed Jessica still aren’t sure if it’s not bipolar disorder or
schizophrenia although she’s been treated for schizophrenia. Yet no mental
illness is permanent (not even schizophrenia) and everyone who suffers from any
mental illness will be at different stages of severity. Jessica has now stopped
hearing voices for long periods of time and even when she did it, she managed
to reach a place where she realized she didn’t have to do what the voice told
her to. Furthermore, schizophrenics in mental wards are usually heavily
medicated, often to the point of being barely conscious, and are likely at a
period when they are going to be the least dangerous to anyone.
Schizophrenia
is the same as sociopath or psychopath:
Seriously, just look up the definitions of
each – it’s not that hard. Yet, this is still one of the most common
misconceptions about schizophrenia. One of the biggest differences between
schizophrenics, sociopaths and psychopaths is that the latter two are unable to
feel empathy. Jessica is capable of empathy and is, in fact, one of the most
empathetic and emotional people I know (which by the way I do not view as a bad
thing. Emotionality is a sign of strength not weakness). One of the symptoms of
her schizophrenia was that she became obsessed with charity work and helping
people in need. A sociopath and psychopath’s behaviour is more likely to be
self-interested due to the symptoms of their suffering, Of course, you might
think a lot of people do charity work land it’s surely not a sign of mental
illness, but it did prove to be a problem for Jessica as she was putting
everyone else before her own needs or even survival.
I know from personal experience and the
experience of Jessica, that the only way anyone with mental illness can look
towards recovery is by accepting that what they have IS an illness. Knowing
that Jessica had schizophrenia helped me learn how to treat her and simply be
around her. I now understand that her behaviour is often defined by her mental
illness and, as a result, I can be compassionate and understanding rather than
harsh as I might have before she was diagnosed. In particular, I no longer
become frustrated with her when something seems obvious to me and not to her
just like I wouldn’t become frustrated with someone with depression for not
being happy and JUST like I wouldn’t become frustrated with someone in a
wheelchair for not being able to walk.
I want to end this blog on a happy note, so
I’ll leave you with this thought. I once heard a comedian say: “I’m so sick of
stigma around these old words. Why don’t we just call schizophrenics 'over imaginative?'”
