Because of the stigma of mental illness I went for ten years undiagnosed and untreated. My acne was just beginning to clear up when I started experiencing the first symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can come on fairly suddenly in late adolescence or it can have what is termed an insidious or gradual onset. Insidious is an appropriate word because you gradually lose your ambitions, your relationships, your possessions, and your skills. You can lose everything and end up a homeless person completely alone in the world and that is what happened to me. And typically in schizophrenia the last individual to realize they are ill is the person who has the illness.
I fell in love when I was 17 and over the next four years that relationship slowly disintegrated as schizophrenia took over my life. I lost interest in school. I actually scored in the top three percentile in a province wide Mathematics contest in Grade 11, and never finished another mathematics or physics course again. At university I experienced a lot of emotional turmoil and was incapable and uninterested in long term romantic relationships. I was also incapable of planning my future, of choosing a career path, and applied to graduate school because I had so much trouble getting work of any sort.
I became friends with this guy at graduate school in Halifax. We had both gone to Trent university for our undergraduate degrees and didn't know very many people in Halifax. We liked to go for a few beers at a bar and watch the CBC news and then discuss world events. His name was David Rae and his brother Bob was running for his first federal seat that year. David invited me come visit him at the family cottage in Ontario sometime. Bob went on to become the Premier of Ontario. I had what I thought was a nervous breakdown in that year of graduate studies, and was hospitalized briefly. Nobody mentioned schizophrenia unfortunately, to me or my father, who is a physician.
Within two years I had relapsed and was homeless on the streets of Calgary. I was sleeping in the single men's hostel and weak from hunger. I didn't' t get to eat anything at all for over a week because I had no money. I was being watched and followed by this World War Two character who demanded I get a job in construction and shape up. Tibetan Buddhists were reading my mind everywhere I went in Calgary because I had caused the Mt. St. Helen' s eruption earlier that year. They were training me to become a great Buddhist saint which required a life of abject poverty and isolation. I went for ten years more or less like that, completely alone, living five years out west and five years in Toronto, marginally employed, homeless for periods, with no friends, no lovers. At first I was going to be a Tibetan saint, then I realized I was a pawn in a secret war that would determine the fate of humanity, then I was the chosen one that the aliens would rescue from the earth before the great nuclear war. I was having a lot of trouble taking care of myself because I was experiencing a lot of reality distortion and disorganization, prominent symptoms of schizophrenia.
I had imaginary friends and powerful enemies and I got a lot of messages and was in constant telepathic contact with someone most of the last five years. I discovered antigravity and understood human evolution and my imaginary wife and I were going to become an aliens and have eternal life travelling to the end of time where all matter had turned into energy and all that remained was music and space. I knew I was going to become an alien in 1991 because I saw a book written by Nostradamus entitled 3791. I turned 37 in 1991 so that was obviously his message to me from the 1500's. I was living in a cockroach infested illegal rooming house and changing light bulbs as they burned out in the Hudson' s Bay department store, afraid of my enemies who wanted to take my place as the most important man in human history.
A number of things happened. I got in trouble with the law, as happens fairly often in untreated schizophrenia, I became alcoholic, which also happens fairly often with untreated schizophrenia, and I lost my job. I had convinced the aliens to transfer my mind to another body, an easy thing for them, and a statement of how miserable my life was at the time. When I woke up, still in my body, I became furious, and started breaking windows in the rooming house. Someone called the police who interrupted my rampage and I spent a couple of nights in jail. Actually one night in a holding cell, a day in court, a night in the Don Jail, another day in court and I was free.
I was sentenced to three years probation with the condition I see a psychiatrist for those years. It marks a watershed in my life, and after that point I started to get increasing levels of psychiatric care. At first though I didn't tell the psychiatrists anything because they wouldn't have believed me. After I paid for the windows, and making over $11 an hour I could afford to become an alcoholic although I didn't actually set out to do that. The beer was medication for celibacy, especially the hops which are a botanical relative of marijuana.
My behaviour became increasingly bizarre as my drinking progressed, and I was fired from my job. At first this was great. The aliens obviously had listened to me and I was going to win the Provincial lottery, at least $10 million and have a vacation. I didn't win though and my income went from $11 an hour to Unemployment Insurance, to Welfare. By the end I was brewing my own beer in plastic pails unable to quit drinking. I was eating at the Scott Mission to afford the ingredients and missing rent payments. I could see the men sleeping on hot air vents nearby and knew that that was where I was heading. The aliens controlled everything that happened to me and I made one last attempt to argue against them.
By that time my probation was almost over and the psychiatrists were suggesting I become a patient at the a psychiatric hospital for alcoholism, and I agreed to go. I had to wait something like six months before there was a bed for me. As I sobered up my delusions, or at least my faith in their validity faded and I started on anti psychotics and took up residence in Guelph, still unconvinced I had schizophrenia. The next three years or so I was very unhappy slowly coming to an awareness that I had schizophrenia and aliens weren't going to rescue me.
My mood slowly came around, I made a few friends, eventually tried some volunteer work, then some paid work. Each year has seen an improvement in the quality of my life. Each year I have been able to be a little more productive, a little more comfortable with people, a little less anxious. I've tried a lot of things and quit a lot of things. I've had to manage my symptoms and illness, trying to balance my life, budgeting for essentials and desires. I spent most of the last nine years counting my pennies but lately I have been quite comfortable.
My friend Susan says there are two kinds of people. You get on a plane that is supposed to go to Hawaii and instead the plane lands in Siberia. Susan prefers to use Arizona as the alternate destination. You can either learn to enjoy Siberia or forever feel bitter that you didn't land in Hawaii. I also have a lot of unpleasant memories in which I've done things I now regret. Its difficult to know how much I'm responsible for and how much schizophrenia is responsible for. I think its important for me to focus on enjoying life as much as I can and not dwell on the past.
I went to Schizophrenia 96 sponsored by Eli Lilly. I was mistakenly booked at the Vancouver hotel as Dr. Chovil and the next day at the conference in my sports coat and dress shirt I was just another psychiatrist in the crowd and it was pretty neat. This was the life I should have had. But the first keynote address by Dr. Weinberger, world re known researcher in schizophrenia, compared finding the cause of schizophrenia to finding the cause of the TWA flight explosion that was in the news at that time. There was no evidence that it was a bomb. Finding out what happened when all you have are the twisted pieces of metal scattered along the ocean floor was causing difficulties. Over the three day conference I became very depressed realizing how appropriate that image was for me. I could empathize with the psychiatrists who were looking at their patient in front of them and asking themselves "why doesn't this person have the same lifestyle that I enjoy?".
There is hope on the horizon in the new atypical medications and early diagnosis, and schizophrenia seems to be attracting much more public interest and compassion. I expect and hope that the next generation won't have the experiences that I have had.
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