There have been many stages to my recovery since my first hospitalization at age 18 and really since age 31 when I was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia. While there were countless hospital stays, sometimes 6 in a year, or  2 three-month stays practically back to back, I managed to climb back up to a place where I could go back to the world and function well enough to write poetry, all that I asked of life. With better drugs being available and also better treatment of the mentally ill and improving attitudes towards us, I experienced what you might call a breakthrough each decade. It never quite made me whole or happy, but each mini-recovery lifted me a little higher out of the muck of depression, despair and anhedonia (loss of the ability to feel pleasure)– for a time at least. And each breakthrough gave me lasting tools to deal just a bit better with the next onslaught. I can’t say I learned very well or very quickly, and insight gained with great difficulty abandoned me time and again at the very moments I most needed it. But I became able to write about these episodes after the fact and to learn from them later. At the very least, I felt I could teach others from what I was able to put into the written word.

One of the hardest to learn but most useful tool in my recovery tool box even to this day is what I call: The Reality Test.  It sounds so very simple, consisting of the need to challenge a delusion or hallucination by asking the people involved a question pertaining to the matter, such as, Did you say such and such? Or Did xyz actually happen?or Did you hear what I heard? The key thing is that after you ask the question you must listen to the answer and trust that the person’s answer is the truth. Often I would do everything except for the last part, where I balked, and simply accused allof lying to me unless the other person corroborated my paranoid assumptions.

Until I learned it, and could do it fully, including the trust the truth part, I had no idea that I was living in something other than consensual reality. Even though people told me again and again that I was paranoid and delusional, I figured they were just using such words against me, to hurt me, insult me because they did not like me, because they had hated me from the minute we met. But once one especially frightening delusion dissolved in the light of reality, it became clear to me how much time I had been spending in a fictional world and how often I needed to use that reality test, which is to say, all the time.

Lack of insight. That was the fundamental difficulty. I did not know that I had  a problem. The reality test gave me insight, but it often took me a month long hospitalization to understand how to use it and why. Some people with schizophrenia are fortunate enough never to lack insight; others like me seem to have it, then lose it; have it, then lose it.  This is as true for me in 2009 as it was in 1984. But we all know some who remain unaware of being ill all their lives. If there were a magic wand I could wave to change this, I would tell you where to find it. I have only found insight in the accident of using it. Perhaps it is different for each individual. If you or your loved one cannot understand that there is a problem, do not force it, it will not do any good: you cannot see colors if  your eyes have no cones. What you can do is find a way to have them agree to take medication anyway — as a condition of something else more desirable. Knowing that I stayed out of the hospital for 18 months while on all the meds, I once decided to force myself to take them and started doing so in the hospital where I had been refusing them. I wrote up a contract, signed it along with the charge nurse, and gave it to the staff. It said that if I refused any medication all my writing materials would be confiscated for 24 hours. Since I wrote up to 15 pages in my notebook every day, it was the only threat I knew that had teeth. With that contract in place, the thought of not being able to write so terrified me that I did not refuse medication even once.

          Of course, there has to be some basic alliance with a person for such a contract. It seems to me to be cruel to arbitrarily impose such a thing without consent, though I tacitly agree that where medication is a matter of life and death, or jail versus staying at home, or in other critical circumstances sometimes this can be necessary. I understand that some people with schizophrenia will be horrified by this suggestion, but I, have been around, done things that I wish I had not done, and know this should have been done to me a lot earlier for my own good. In fact, it was. I have been under court order, in the hospital, to take medications I hated and even to accept ECT. But here in Connecticut we have no mandated out-patient treatment law, and so no one could force me to take medication once I was discharged, to my great detriment. So in and out of the hospital I bounced, on and off medications — whether Thorazine, Prolixin, Clozaril or, worst and best of all, Zyprexa, I would never stick to any proposed regimen –about which I was so ambivalent. They should have taken me off Zyprexa and put me on Haldol once and for all. But I loved Zyprexa as much as I hated it, and could never decide to simply give up on it altogether. 

Now I am on 17mg of Abilify twice a day plus a full dose of Geodon. Two antipsychotics. Two anti convulsants. An antidepressant. A stimulant for narcolepsy. A beta blocker for side effects, specificially Geodon induced akathisia, and two antibiotics for Lyme disease. But I take them, supervised by a morning and evening visiting nurse and wow, what a transformation. They are not like Zyprexa, no, my world is not suddenly Imax, or HD compared to the ordinary. I have difficulty reading, for one thing, though I am able to do so and enjoy it for short periods. But I used to struggle to write and found it hard to get over the initial hump that blocked my way.

Now, though, now I write like wild fire. I write and write — pages a day, in my journal, in email, even here, in my blog. I write more often than I ever did and have to control the urge to write here more often than once a day. I even have to curtail the desire to write every day, lest I not do anything else! But it is a wonderful feeling to be so freed up, to have words surge like an electro-chemical river from my brain down through my fingers and pour out into the world!

So I see how medication can have active benefits now, not just side effects. It helps me want to stay on them, insight or no. It is what I wish everyone with this illness could see and understand: that their lives could be better, that they could be less confused and frightened, less tormented by voices and visions or terrifying intrusive thoughts that others label delusional, that the world could offer some happiness with other people in it, if they would but surrender a tiny bit of what? freedom to be crazy? to suffer? and agree to swallow medicine. Then, I must add, it behooves the doctor, knowing this momentous decision has not been taken lightly, to work to find the least uncomfortable most effective regimen, not simply slap on some all-purpose drug or long-acting injection with no regard to the individual taking it.

There has to be an alliance. Let me say this again: there has to be an alliance between the doctor and the patient, and the alliance must be a two-way street. If the doctor wants to trust the patient to take the meds, the patient must be able to trust that the doctor is prescribing the proper medication and is willing to listen to him or her if it proves to be not quite right. If the patient cannot trust the doctor in this, how can he or she learn to trust enough to “get” rather than forget the reality test?