Tag Archives: schizophrenia symptoms

Health Care Reform, Lyme Disease, Mental Health, Prisons, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized, Violence

The Mentally Ill in Prison and Out-patient Commitment Laws

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Dear Pam,

Thank you for the link to the Dr. Manny Show. There are indeed many faces of mental illness. Some people have mild cases and are able to work and function at the same level as anyone else.

Congress passed mental health legislation in 2008 providing for workers who have psychiatric dysfunctions to be covered under their employers’ health insurance at the same rate as employees with physical illness (certain exclusions apply). That was a positive step. However, acute mental patients do not benefit by that law, because severe mental illness is often too debilitating for victims to work, especially without the psychiatric treatment they need. In fact, people with acute schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, and other conditions frequently resist treatment even when it is available to them.

Unfortunately, 1.25 million mentally ill Americans are currently imprisoned for offenses ranging from simple vandalism or disturbing the peace to murders. Last January, Rep. Eddie Johnson (D-TX 30) introduced H.R. 619, a congressional bill to resume Medicaid coverage for inpatient psychiatric care for patients in crisis and for people who require long-term containment in a secure treatment environment (such as patients who have done violence).

H.R. 619 is an important bill that deserves our support. It was largely the removal of Medicaid funding several decades ago that led to criminalizing mental illness. That in turn led to many other problems, such as overcrowded prisons and a burdensome prison budget. Hundreds of thousands of acute patients were “de-institutionalized” in the 60’s and 70’s only to become homeless and/or prisoners. Thousands of acute mental patients continue to be dismissed from mental hospitals and prisons without subsistence assistance and provisions for continuous monitoring and treatment under programs like Kendra’s Law.

Assisted Outpatient Programs like Kendra’s Law have been proved to reduce homelessness, arrests, hospitalizations, and incarcerations by up to 85% (among New York participants, compared to their circumstances three years before becoming program participants). The impressive rate of reduced arrests and incarcerations also indicates that community safety was improved significantly as less crime was done, and it also follows that the prison budget was lessened by helping patients with living arrangements and mandating continuous psychiatric care for ex-offenders and former inpatients who often lack the wherewithal to make wise treatment choices and avoid psychiatric crises.

Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill (AIMI) supports Rep. Johnson’s bill, H.R. 619, as well as NAMI, Treatment Advocacy Center, and many other mental health advocates who believe resuming funding for inpatient treatment is best for patients and for America. In fact, 100% of police officers I polled agree that prison is not the place for severe mental patients, where they comprise 60% of the inmates kept naked in solitary confinement cells.

I solute Congresswoman Johnson, a former psychiatric nurse, for introducing H.R. 619, and I hope everyone who is concerned about human and civil rights will support the bill and end the discriminatory practice of punishing Americans for being sick. I pray for another bill to be introduced to address the second cause of mental illness having been criminalized in America – the lack of continuous care and subsistence assistance for released prisoners and former inpatients. Kendra’s Law should be applied nationwide so that acute mental patients will be treated, not punished, for having a common, treatable health condition that requires monitoring and care just as diabetics and heart patients receive.

Inpatient hospitalization was not included under the national health care plan, so it is very important to pass H.R.619 as a separate bill. Please write an email to your representatives tomorrow and ask them to co-sponsor the resumption of Medicaid for psychiatric hospitalization and to institute Assisted Outpatient Treatment progams, which would not only be more fair and humane to sick people and their families, but would also save taxpayers billions each year as our prison rolls decrease.

Thank you, Pam, for this forum and for the useful information that WagBlog always has. I will share the link to the Dr. Manny Show with many people at my Care2 Sharebook and at FreeSpeakBlog, where we often publish mental health news as well as other matters that have to do with promoting human rights for prisoners.

Mary Neal
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.Care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI

PS Please VOTE for H.R.619 to replace prisons w/ hospitals for acute mental patients. The link below will take you to OpenCongress.org where you can use your voice to say to our elected officials, “We care about the least of these, His brethren: naked, sick prisoners.” (Matt.25:36) http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h619/show

While many Americans celebrate the health care reform bill’s victory, please agree that millions of citizens should not be left imprisoned or live under the threat of prison because their health care needs were omitted. Put the “NATIONAL” into health care reform by supporting H.R.619: Medicaid funding for psychiatric hospitals instead of prison cells for mentally challenged people – a change that will save money and restore lives!

Thanks in advance for voting. Please invite others!

___________________________________________________

Dear Mary

I think you know that I was quite ill until starting in 1996 when Zyprexa came out, but not truly until 2005,  when a complete transformation occurred. However, when I relapse, I “relapse good” — as my medical record from the October hospitalization attests, with nearly constant locked seclusion or restraints for 6-8 days etc. Nevertheless, I am with you, though reluctantly, as I also know how terrible the side effects are of some of the older medications are as well as the newer ones, and the horrible state of affairs when a harried or burned out psychiatrist simply rams them down your throat without consultation at least after the acute psychosis resolves and you are able to discuss such things.

When I was in Manchester Hospital, I begged to be put back on my anti-convulsants and the Abilify/Geodon combination that had served me well for many months, believing, with reason, that I was suffering from a flare-up of my neurological Lyme disease, an illness that had always and invariably produced severe psychiatric symptoms. I needed, I knew, an increase of those drugs rather than a wholesale change to the “old drug” Trilafon. But did the doctor listen to me? No, he did not, despite my  ability to say as much to him, my psychosis consisting not of incoherence but of paranoia and command hallucinations to  harm myself in order to atone for being the Devil…I could and did argue with him, vehemently, and steadfastly, refusing to take the Trilafon, until he instituted a standing restraints order for every time I was non-compliant.

These are the sorts of things that trouble me about  forced treatment and/or outpatient commitment laws. It is not that I think people suffering from severe psychiatric illness do not need or deserve treatment, only that the treatments available are not always effective or tolerable. And until they are, I am not sure that the only way to go is only to force medication on everyone willy-nilly, not, at least against their protestations of extreme discomfort. At the very least every effort must be made to find a medication or medication combo that keep the psychosis at bay while making the person as comfortable as is humanely possible…which is difficult when a psychiatrist is saddled with a hundred patients to see in a week. It took Dr O and me six years or more to find  the right combination of drugs, and to titrate them precisely enough to treat my symptoms,  reducing them significantly while keeping unpleasant side effects to a minimum.

There is much about the treatment of the mentally ill that is so disgusting I cannot begin to cover them all here, though your comment is very thorough, which is why I have put it up  as a regular post. I appreciate your links to sites that do so as well. You did not mention one horrific situation: where under-utilized supermax prisons now house “uncooperative mentally ill prisoners” whose lack of compliance or cooperation is due solely to their illness. Though it is well-known that such brutal conditions drive “normal” or reasonably sane prisoners to insanity, can you imagine the brutality of forcing a psychotic individual to reside in such isolation? (Note however that in years past, as you know, isolation and seclusion of disruptive patients in hospitals was also the norm, since “overstimulation” from the outside world was considered to cause their agitation…I have been in hospitals where, in bare seclusion rooms, I was not permitted access to letters or phone calls, visitors or even reading material. As for restraints, they too were inhumane as I was shackled SPREAD- EAGLE, to the four corners of the bed and not, as even then was considered proper, with my legs straight and my arms in position by my side. This treatment moreover was considered normative for agitated psychotic patients rather than cruel in the extreme  as recently as the 1980s in some municipal hospitals in Connecticut.

I  recommend the book, THE DAY THE VOICES STOPPED, by the late Ken Steele, who wrote of his experience as a 14 year old with the savage isolation policies in NY hospitals in the 60s and 70s,  treatment that today seems literally incredible.

Well, I thank you for your contribution to my blog, Mary. You are welcome here at any time. I will post as many of your comments as I can.

Sincerely,

Pam W

Mental Health, Recovery, Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia: Dr Manny Show on FOXNEWS.com (new link)

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This is a link to the Foxnews.com Dr Manny show episode that was filmed in January. I think it is self-explanatory. Credit goes to Jessica Mulvihill, who did the interview, which was one of the best I have ever been “subjected” to (I have not yet found a word that adequately describes the process of being an interviewee…What do you call it when you have been interviewed, besides subjected to it? Any suggestions?) Anyhow, it was, despite the word, a very interesting and enjoyable interview experience.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4056071/the-many-faces-of-mental-illness/?playlist_id=86899

Memory, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia

Seclusion and Restraints: Observations from the other side

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Here’s what my friend Josephine knows about what happened in October, having been my designated “contact person”:

 

According to Jo, I was admitted on Wednesday around noon. Apparently the nursing staff called her, as well as Lynnie, as my emergency medical sheet instructs.

 

She comes up to see me that evening, bringing with her some clothing and toiletry items etc. and while she is there she makes it clear to the staff that she is my “caretaker” and is to be told everything so that she can contact my family, when the need arises…(This seems to work, as it turns out, as she will be kept in the loop, thank god.) Anyhow, I am doing relatively fine, though the nurses say I refuse to take the medication the doctor prescribed, which concerns them. Apparently there are plans already being made for a hearing to force me to do so.

 

Before I fast forward to the weekend, when Josephine next sees me. I want to interlace here what I do recall, which is one conversation with the doctor, in his office, during which he tells me that he wants me to take Zyprexa.  “Have you heard of that drug before?” But then memory gets fuzzy, because I am back in bed,  in a bedroom I think is a double, though I am not sure, because I know that for most of my stay it is a single right off the nurses station where they can keep an eye on me, and just as he leaves, I raise up on one arm and scream, “I will NOT take Zyprexa, you F—ing bastard!” Dr Z stops in his tracks, looks back at me, and says, rather mildly, “That’s not very nice.” I finish off with, “Fu– you!” He has heard this before, clearly, turns on his heel and leaves.

 

The next memory I have must occur also before Josephine returns. I am sitting in a room with Dr Z  and someone I think is a judge or a hearing officer. A woman sits on my left, perhaps a patient advocate or a nurse, I do not know.  I recall specifically that Dr Z (whose name I only learn after I am discharged) seems to have spoken to the folks down at N hospital where Dr O practiced because he quotes what I recognize is their Axis II diagnosis, word for word.  This was created specifically for me by Dr O. in addition to paranoid schizophrenia and always struck me as  malarky but was a sore point too, and cruel as it seemed to blame my illness on me. (I had many words with her about it, and I challenged her  to prove it was true. She agreed it did not hold water, since it was only “true” in hospital, and so was just a convenience to satisfy  staff unhappy with my uncontrollable behavior — yes, there too, and equally unremembered!)

 

Nevertheless, it was written in my chart at N hospital and so now it is repeated as if gospel. In addition, the doc decides that he has seen, in two or threee days and five to ten minute interviews with me, “absolutely no evidence of narcolepsy, and no reason to treat for it.” He believes that my sister’s attempts to influence my treatment,  giving him my history of medication responses etc. constitutes improper interference and should not be permitted under any circumstances.

 

After that, I lose all interest in the discussion, knowing it is not going to go in any direction that will be in my interest, that I am being treated by someone who neither knows me nor cares to learn enough to treat me properly. Furthermore, having been taken off all the medications I have come in on (except oddly enough for my Lyme disease antibiotics) as having been “ineffective, by definition, otherwise you would not be here,” I am already feeling drowsy and distant, at a remove from the proceedings and not quite caring what happens. The proceedings come to an end when the hearing officer, or whoever he is rules in favor of the doctor, who wants to force me to take, not Zyprexa but Trilafon, 8 mg BID (twice a day) or Haldol by injection if I refuse. I may object and say I will not do so and will only take the damned Haldol kicking and screaming. Or perhaps I say nothing.  I don’t really know.  I may  only think this, but it is a prescient remark, or thought, in any event.

 

Memory becomes a series of refrigerator-dim flashes. I vaguely recall one incident: literally kicking and screaming while being held down for an injection by any number of security personnel…But even this memory constitutes no more than just an impulse of light on the confrontation, as if I am looking down on my body as I struggle with the guards, no more. Then just blankness.

 

What Joesphine tells me next is that she returns on Saturday, bringing my poetry book. She is appalled at the change in me and asks the nurses, “What happened to Pam?!” I am not merely irascible, she says, but explosive. I am mean and I am violent to the point that I will not let anyone  come near me. If they attempt to I lash out, not just verbally but physically as well, any number of times actually slapping, smacking or in some fashion hitting the nurse of aide trying to take my vital signs or give me medication. She tells me that even when I appear to be deep in thought, sleepy or sedated, I can in an instant rouse myself to fury and explode, launching into a tirade of invective and even physical abuse.

 

At the same time, I am ataxic ( one nurse gives me red  slipper sock to warn staff that I constitute a “risk of falling” but these are soon lost and not replaced) and while I can be wild and have the strength of a rabid animal, at times I have trouble simply getting myself out of a chair. Once, a big security guard, seeing Josephine struggle to help pull me up from the recesses of a deep armchair, comes over to help and I go berserk. Suddenly violent, I take a swing at him, swearing  and screaming at him as if he were the one to have attacked me, rather than the other way around.

 

Once Josephine looked into my bedroom before she was shooed into the day area with me, where all visiting was supposed to take place, she saw that restraints — big leather cuffs — had been placed on my bed. According to her, they were used as frequently as every time I got medication or even every night in order to keep me from — well, I do not know what! But I can only imagine, given how she tells me I behaved. I do know that restraints are only supposed to be used in cases when violence is imminent or uncontrollable by any other means. Now she does assure me that they were, so far as she could see, only two-point restraints, the wrist ones, but that they were actually placed on my regular bed horrifies me, since it implies that they were to be at the ready and expected to be used, i.e. they were not simply an emergency appliance to be acquired from a rarely used, locked cabinet unopened for months at a time.

 

As an aside, I discovered when I arrived home, many just healing scars on my left leg that were not there before I was hospitalized. Yet I also remembered telling a nurse at the hospital that of all the places I had been, their unit was definitely the most safe, the most secure. I felt that it would be most difficult indeed to hurt myself there, as there were very few opportunities and almost no chances were taken…So how can I square that with these scars? I cannot remember when or how I acquired them. I only know that the summaries of my chart mention that I did injure myself, early on, which resulted in four-point restraints at least once (another being the slip-knot episode already described). But with what, and why I have no idea. Probably because of command hallucinations, and self-hatred. But that is only my surmise.

 

I “came to,” I rose to the surface of my insanity only once or twice that I recall, once to see my father sitting by my bed (why was he allowed  to visit in my room?) and Josephine standing there while I screamed something. I remember she abruptly left. After that, the darkness closed over me again.

 

The only other time I surfaced was when they dropped me on the seclusion room linoleum…about which I have written in some detail. But even then, I cannot really remember if it was one whole incident, or two or three amalgamated by a trick of the brain’s confabulatory instinct, and  the passage of time into a single coherent tale.

 

Then there is my journal , which tells a story that in its own way corroborates this one. Usually when I am hospitalized at least in recent years I  keep a detained record of everything going on around me for reasons of paranoia if nothing else. Because of this, I can read back afterwards and understand what I was thinking or doing. This has not always been true, and during some hospitalizations, further back, I was unable to do so,  and thus do not have such a record, but I am glad when I do because it helps me piece together what happened during times that I otherwise experienced later as blanks.

 

However, during the two and half weeks and longer during which I was  literally out of my mind this past October (Josephine insists that I wasn’t “right” even when I got home, and that it took a good two weeks before I was truly myself again)  there is no written record, not in my journal. I wrote a little during the first few days,  going from a self-loathing that speaks of a desire to burn my face (“deface my face and face up to my sins”) mingled with psychotic ramblings to utter confusion. This is almost indecipherable and devolves suddenly on Thursday to nothing at all, represented vividly if accidentally by two blank pages. It is only on briefly on Saturday and then on Sunday, October 18th and Monday the 19th (which may have been only a continuation on Sunday, as I was still confused as to the date and time), which I firmly believe all day is “Monday the 20th,”  that I apparently find the strength and clarity to “steal” a felt marker from OT and then a memo pencil to write with. All writing utensils but crayons have been denied me previous to this, I remember that much, though I also have not been able to, have not wanted to write either or I would have done so even with a crayon.

 

Now, to my pleasure this marker and then the pencil is not  taken from me as too dangerous for me to have in my possession.d I begin to write. I write all day, literally. I write and write, 41 pages in one or two days. I write down everything that happens, and I write as if I know what has been happening, but really without the slightest inkling. It is clear that I have no idea what I have been through, nor what I have been like. I write of a nurse, one I clearly like, telling me I am “doing great” and my consternation at this, because I do not understand why she is telling me how I feel rather than asking me…

 

I write of my impending discharge, and I believe I write about how I don’t remember the last two weeks, but it doesn’t seem to bother me much. What does bother me is why no one on staff will talk to me, why people seem to avoid me, and why one male nurse seems bent on being nasty to me “for no reason.” (I may have made a point of hurting him during my weeks of insanity, that is all I can surmise as a reason for his animosity…).  I am paranoid — at one point I interpret the constant opening and closing of the weekend Dr H’s door, which I can hear from my room near the nursing station, as deliberate torture, intended to “get back at me.” When I finally get a glimpse of Dr H, I scream at him “You think I don’t know what you are doing, but I do, I do!”  He gives me a truly bemused look. I am thrown into confusion, not sure how to read it.  I  remain fairly certain, however, that he is “doing a number on me.”

 

(End of Part 1. I want to reread the rest of what I wrote during my last three days on the unit before discharge — then I will continue with Part 2.)

Memory, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia

Seclusion and Restraints: How it feels

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I remember, I remember, well, I remember very little, except in flashes of dim light, like a candle held up by which to read the fading pages of an ancient diary. I remember a sign with my name on it, taped to the door of a room, and how hard it was to find my way back, no matter how many times I made the trip. I remember a nurse with blond hair named “Patty,” whose real name, Lil, I learned only the second to last day I was there. I think I liked her, or that she treated me with kindness, and another nurse named Mary Ellen, who was kinder still, but not always there to save me.

I remember too, but again in uncertain flashes that tell me only that something happened but not exactly what: Being carried by arms and legs into a cold, empty room lined with linoleum, dropped onto my back on the floor, dressed in just two hospital johnnies and pajama pants and locked in there alone. I remember begging for a mattress, then screaming in outrage when I was refused.

This is how it goes: There is nothing in the room but me and air conditioning turned on full bore, though it is October and in the 50s outside. Why do I need johnnies or the huge pajama pants that are falling off me without ties to hold them up? Alone in that room, I take them all off, then squat to pee and take a dump. Good, that feels better. Blankness. Cold, cold. Again I scream for a blanket. Of course, nobody answers. I try to push the johnnies under me to cushion my bones so I can sleep, but the shivers prevent me from relaxing. I have to do something.

I make a long rope of the silky acetate pants then form a slip-knot and put the O over my head with the knot to one side. I pull tight, figuring it won’t take long. I sit to one side of the little window in the door, so no one sees me immediately. Finally they come running. But they don’t understand it is a slip-knot and that pulling at it only tightens it  more. I am struggling for air. A nurse yells for scissors, bandage scissors the only ones available and they cut the pants free. Still, I am in big trouble. I would tell them I only wanted to get their attention, that I just wanted a mattress and a blanket, but what good would that do? Still, do they really think their act of violence, which will follow, will solve anything? Blankness. I have been thrown onto a bed in another seclusion room. As staff and goon squad wrestle my wrists and ankles into padded cuffs, I kick and bite in protest, all of which will be written up as my being “assaultive.” In the end, it is no use.  I scream and scream until the usual injections – 5 mg Haldol and 2 mg Ativan – take the scream out of me and I finally fall asleep.

That should have been the end of it. “Wake up calm and they take you out of restraints.” That’s the name of the game. But this time, I wake and I am still in full 4-points. I ask the nurse why. “Doctor’s orders,” he says. “But that’s punishment!” I answer, shocked. “No,” he says, “restraints are therapeutic. We never use them as punishment.” “Bullshit! Dr Z is punishing me because he doesn’t like me and you know it. He is a sadist.” The nurse doesn’t answer immediately and when he does, he just says, “Go to sleep.”

I remember how they kept me in restraints for 12 hours that time. The chart summary tells me more, that I spent a good part of 5-7 days in seclusion and/or restraints, so there is a lot I do not remember. Am I better off for not knowing? That’s what some people tell me. How would you feel? Would you want to know, or not to know?

————————————————————————————

I realize that the above is simply a restatement of an earlier more detailed post, so it must be obvious that I am still very troubled by what happened. Indeed I am. I am even more troubled by my lack of memory the rest of the three weeks there…which fact was noted even in the summary of my stay, which Dr B (Li) got from the hospital the other day (in lieu of what he requested, which was my entire chart.) Memory loss has dogged me for many many years. Only now can I acknowledge it, and only because Lynnie and others witnessed it. But for so many years I felt desperately  troubled and, well, desperate to hide it, afraid lest anyone know how little I could remember of what happened from day to day. This was especially extreme when I was in hospital but even afterwards it was troubling to me; sometimes I felt I was missing half my life! People — that is to say,  doctors. nurses,aides — expected me to remember ordinary happenings, because they obviously  thought that I was responsible for what I did from one day to the next, which you are not, not in the same way, if your memory is impaired. This expectation was so stringent that I dared not admit how little I did remember of events after they passed. I thought the scant trace they left would somehow prove my evil, prove that I was a shameful deficient person. So  I desperately took cues from others about what they wanted me to “remember,” tried to “pick their brains” about whatever it was that had happened, or that I had presumably done, whatever it was that they expected me to recall. Sometimes a concrete clue might help me piece things together – say for instance if I had scars or wounds that hinted at recent self-injurious behaviors or if there were scribbling on the walls that suggested another sort…But if there were no cues, it was much harder to ferret out what was wrong. Sometimes I might have to come right out and ask, “And you are referring to…?” But I didn’t dare do that often or it would have given my lack of memory away, something I didn’t dare permit…

Now here is the other side of the story, which I find hard to square with my experience in October: one  psychiatric nurse’s account of how situations involving restraints can look to staff.

 

Lyme Disease, Memory, Narcolepsy, Psychiatry, Recovery, Schizophrenia, Violence

Hospital, Hypomania and How Hope Eventually Returned…

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Pretty tame for a seclusion room, but this one is in a school so it has carpeting not linoleum...The thought that little kids are held captive inside is pretty disgusting through.

I wrote in the post below that for three weeks in October I was in Manchester Memorial hospital (a new unit for me. To explain, the hospital you are sent to in this state these days is a total crapshoot. Sometimes the ER can admit you to theirs, but if it is full, as it so often is, they can send you literally to any hospital in the state that has an empty bed.. With the governor having decided to close one of the few state facilities still open and the municipal hospitals so over-utilized that an average stay was 5-7 days only, you can imagine how inadequate any attempts at treatment are. I do not mean to diss the hospital staff in general. Some do mean well and are appalled at what their jobs have devolved into, others however seem not to care that they are no more than warders in double-locked secure psychiatric units where few are admitted truly voluntarily or at least only on an emergency basis and yet no one can stay until healed. Generally speaking, one stays only until such a time as they are either no longer acutely suicidal or no longer a danger to others… That said, I have to be somewhat circumspect about what I say and the judgments I make as I was and tend to be when in any hospital so paranoid that I simply cannot draw any reasoned or reasonable conclusion about the staff or the treatment there, since it is always more or less (and usually more) through the lens of my sense of  personal attack and persecution. In truth, I scarcely remember any of the details or even the gross facts of this particular hospital stay. In fact, I have had to be told second hand, or even third hand, most of what I did there and/or of what happened.

I can say a few things from memory, though, and the picture I posted above is relevant to that: I remember being hauled off to the seclusion room and more than once. (I do not have even the slightest scrap of memory why…which is unnerving, and yet also a relief, as it protects me, possibly, from memories I might not wish to have…I hasten to add however that my lack of memory is not psychological, but neurological: we were warned by my Lyme neurologist that I should not have ECT while I still had CNS Lyme disease as it was likely to produce untoward CNS effects that could not be controlled or predicted. Since then, my short term memory has been particularly affected, among other things (e.g. olfactory hallucinations).  IN other hospitals, the seclusion room usually had a mattress in it, something upon which you could lie down, and were expected to, in fact, since you were given medication and expected to calm down and sleep in general. At other hospitals, I stayed in the seclusion room for an extended period of time, either because I was extremely disruptive (NOTE: see posts about Natchaug Hospital regarding this) or extremely psychotic. At those times I was usually permitted other items in the room, such as magazines and some small personal things to pass the time with…But during the month that is ending, I was literally manhandled into the room and dumped on the floor — hard linoleum — stripped, forced into a johnnie coat (I had to beg for 2), and summarily left behind, the door locked decisively between me and whoever was posted at the observation window.

I remember screaming, I remember begging for a mattress to sleep on, I remember begging for something to cover myself with for warmth or at a minimum for the heat to be turned up as I was thin and it was notoriously cold on that unit, and there was nothing whatsoever in the seclusion room to buffer the air conditioning. No deal. They just told me to be quiet; actually, I do not believe they even said that, but just, No. I do not remember much more than that. In fact, though I have been told the next, I do not actually remember it: there was of course no bathroom facility, and not even a bedpan in the room. Someone told me later that I defecated into a cup…But I do not see how that is more reasonable than that I did so into a bed pan…Why would I have a cup in there  if I did not have a bedpan…No, I believe that in both instances I have been told about, I peed and defecated directly onto the linoleum. If I did so, I cannot explain it. Perhaps I was simply desperate and they did not provide any other mode of relief. Maybe I was angry at them, and did it to “get back at them”? (This was suggested to me as a motive by the person who told me that I was not the first and would not be the last person to do this in that room…which was both a small source of relief, to not be unique, and yet to have done it as a kind of revenge?!  I did not want to believe that I would or could be so primal in my anger…But then, I have done it before, if you recall…

After that — and my memory wants to “see” this, feels it almost can and almost does, but I cannot be sure that it is memory rather than a mere confabulation  after the fact, having been told the bare bones of it by Carolyn (Lynnie) and others, who themselves only heard about it but did not see it either…after that I believe I crossed the room to , hoping there was no slant in the floor that would make the puddle slide towards me, and lay down in a heap and fell asleep.

Or did I? Did I? Or were there consequences to my act? I know that at some point in my “stay” — seems so mild to call the brutality of my hospitalization merely a “stay,” as if at a spa —  I was put into restraints and kept there a very long time. Was it for a separate incident, or was it connected to…Aahhh, wait a minute, yes, I do know, I do know…I remember now…For some reason, and I do not quite remember why, except possibly I was just so sick of everything that was happening, and so…I remember taking off the hospital pajama pants that were way too big for me anyway, and never stayed up and had no ties to pull around my waist and so were useless. I pulled them off and wound them into a narrow rope, which was easy as they were made of very thin material, then I formed them into a kind of slipknot,  fitted it over my head and around my neck and pulled on the  one end that had to be pulled for the knot to tighten, holding the other  like a kind of ballast (I don’t remember entirely how I did this only that it felt dreamlike, how easy it was to accomplish). I have forgotten what I was thinking, if I thought at all. Probably I did not think, I was that far beyond any rational thinking, even beyond any rational “wanting” in the sense of really wanting to die or not.

In any event, it seemed to take a long while before anyone noticed, and then a whole crowd of people were suddenly upon me, and they didn’t seem to know how to get the noose off  or how to loosen it. I held the end that slipped tightly in my fist, having no desire to relinquish it, though at the same time having I suspect no real desire to die either, that they could not easily free it. I heard someone yell to cut the knot. I remember thinking that was silly, why didn’t they just untie it? But it seemed that that was not possible, or at least that it was taking too long.  Then there was a pair of scissor up at my throat where the knot was — it seemed that  only bandage scissors could be found and those were not easily accessed — and someone was ripping at it, and then it was torn away and my neck was freed.

Stop. I have to stop here. Memory now fails me. I can only speculate what happened after that, because it literally blurs into nothingness. Goes blank. Goes back into the vault wherever all my lost memories go, perhaps never to be retrieved, if never fully or adequately formed. All I can do is try to reconstruct what might have happened next. I am pretty certain that it was after this that I was put in restraints. It would make sense. After all, what else could they do, and what would make sense? If I wasn’t safe in a seclusion room, in a hospital that in fact DID resort  to seclusion and restraints, it seems only likely that restraints would be the next measure taken. So I have to assume that it was for that reason I was put in four point restraints. Also, since the doctor I had been assigned to, thought a sadist by many on the unit, was  also the director of it, it was likely his call that led me to being kept there for more than 12 hours, and maybe as many as 18…I honestly have no idea in the end how long he kept me in such a fashion, only that I was not released even after I had fallen asleep…

That is almost the sum total of what I can, as a kind of “hard copy” memory, remember on my own. As you can see, even with those few memories, I had trouble and some help in recalling them.  I have some vague sense that a great deal went on during those 2 and a half weeks when I was largely insensible to what I did (at least to the extent that I did not recall it from moment to moment). During the last half week when I finally cracked the paranoia that kept me imprisoned, my memory did not improve, only my temper and the distance I kept from and my anger towards those who I had earlier felt were working in cahoots to hurt me. My impression then was only that some people were angry with me, but I did not know why, that some people resented me…But I could not figure out why. The ones who seemed to brighten when I smiled and help nothing against me told me gently a little about what I had done or how angry etc I had been, but only vaguely. They did not seem to understand that I had literally no memory of the previous 2 and a half weeks, or if they did, they did not seem to want to refresh my memories, perhaps feeling that it would be unkind, I dunno.  In any event, I learned a little about the “Pam” that some thought they knew, or that some people thought they had met and known for those 18 days…and that others had believed was in there all along and were now  glad to see emerging…But it was very confusing. And in all that confusion, I also had to deal with the fact that the new doc who had taken over after the sadist doc was removed from my “case” thanks to Lynnie’s intervention,  had decided that his philosophy of short hospitalizations would take precedence over whether or not I was fit for discharge, and so I was to leave on Tuesday…I had no choice, and so as I prepared to leave, I also had to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” (a quote from “The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot). But I was also growing more and more revved, more and more anxious. and I had no one I trusted enough to talk about it with. I certainly could not tell the day nurse. (I don’t think I did, but I do not actually recall one way or another). I knew she disliked me intensely, for all that she tried to pretend otherwise.

In the end, I did leave that Tuesday, though even as I got into Josephine’s car and she pulled out into traffic, she told me I didn’t seem right to her, that she didn’t think I was well or ready to leave. That fact seemed clear to almost everyone I saw that day. And not long after that I grew so talkative and revved that no one could get a word in edgewise…This was so emphatically not like me that thank heavens everyone put up with me, and no one, NO ONE, rejected me or gave up on me for it. I do not remember anyone being cruel or saying, GO away, you talk too much, or you are being too egocentric etc. I recall in fact only kindness and some humor injected into the situation, but mostly kindness. They all, my friends, as well as Elissa, the RN, seemed concerned as I rocketed higher, and yet seemed to feel uncomfortable and not at all happy with how fast I was speeding. Sure, Dr B diagnosed it a hypomania, but I  had thought hypomania was an enjoyable state, not this unpleasant adrenalinized racy state that felt so terrible to me. I hadn’t taken Ritalin in 3 weeks, but I didn’t even want to now. No, taking stimulants for Narcolepsy was nothing like this. This felt terrible and  neither Ritalin nor even Adderal had ever felt so terrible. There was no pleasure or even alertness that made me want to do things and study and write involved now. I got a little more cleaning done, true, but only because I was trying to exercise off anxiety, not because I had pleasureable energy. In fact, had I been able to slow down, I would have gone to bed to sleep it off!

Eventually, Dr B upped the Topomax and I think we had already increased the Lamictal and eventually over the course of the next week, I came down to my usual state of semi-sleepiness and was able to restart the Ritalin (after some discussion about why I take it…He is still new to the situation and my narcolepsy)

Well, that is about all I can tell you about the hospitalization just passed. But there was more to it, and what I know about it, though the facts are vague, is that there was something massively wrong…It felt like the Y2K meltdown in some ways, esp in my lack of contact with — reality, memory? Is there a difference? I feel that this was very different from my usual post-lyme hospitalizations, that I was in a different state, and so did others. It frightened me more, and it was more violent. Certainly the treatments were more violent, but that also implies that I was too. Lynnie keeps telling me she will talk to me about it. But so far, she has not… Do I really want her to?

Mental Health, Narcolepsy, Recovery, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized, Vision, Zyprex

Disorderly Vision Produces Disorderly But Productive Thinking? (Or am I just Imagining Things?)

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Glasses, glasses, glasses, but none to help me see through the confusion of dancing and doubling of sites, scenes and texts!You would think that one of the many different pairs of glasses, with some specialized  lenses or prisms or bi-focal, or tri-focal or something would help me see through the confusion as I state it in the title above of “dancing and doubling” of images and scenes and texts, oh, especially text, both on-line and hard copy…Or perhaps it simply matters more to me that I cannot read, especially because in two weeks or so I have three or four readings coming up in the space of one week and I fear that I will not be able to simply see my poems on the page. If that should occur, and I do not manage to have each and every poem by heart, what will I do?  It so happens that Dr O, or Mary will be at two of the readings, so I can alert her to the problem and ask her to be prepared to (hmmm?) take over for me, at least until it seems that I might be able to resume — though why I could resume I don’t know, since the problem simply recurs immediately and it is only my ability to cope that matters, and by coping I mean my ability to navigate a page of text that has literally gone wild on me, with one line rising up upon another, obliterating it or merging with it, or most commonly simply interspersing with it so I cannot quite make out either one separately and can only try to peer at the paper sidewise as if that could help me parse them out. It of course does nothing, and the words do not separate themselves into readable lines. No, more likely, the words themselves interact and disperse into bits of words or letters, which themselves dance and double and shimmer.

Oh, it feels hopeless to discuss the matter of vision and what to do about it should I have trouble two weeks from now. So much could happen in those 14 days that nothing is predictable. For instance, I am managing to write this now, without a great deal of tortuous movement and agonizing, though not without trouble — so at this very moment, I could see myself getting through a poetry reading without surrendering to virtual blindness — at this hour of, hmm, at 1AM is it morning or nighttime? Well, I slept from 7:30PM until 11:30PM...Half the night, enough to “take the edge off” my sleepiness. At 11:30 then, for the first time all day,  I took a Ritalin, though I had gotten through from 6:30AM -7:30PM of the previous day without any (why? just to prove I could, but without accomplishing anything too). So why now, at 11:30PM? Why in the middle of the night, which to most people would seem the least logical time?

Why? Because I wanted these hours, my time, to be productive, and for that I had to be truly awake and alert, not merely marginally so. (My touchstone of true alertness for years has been how interested I feel…I now know that in my natural state I am never bored, so when I feel a sudden lack of interest in my usual pursuits, that’s when I know I’m getting sleepy. There is no earthly reason why I should have suddenly lost my ordinary passion or fascination, no reason, except that I have become sleepy and sleepiness persents itself as a lack of focus and interest, i.e. as boredom. I am not really bored, I mean only that as a younger person I associated boredom with sleepiness and so whenever I fell asleep doing something I thought I liked, I took that an as indication that I “didn’t really enjoy it after all,” that obviously it bored me. Otherwise, why else would it make me fall sleep? Despite my initial feelings of interest, I evaluated each choice against the proof positive of my falling asleep (which happened whenever I did anything sedentary, including studying), “proof” that I was — the greater truth — bored by it, “proof” that as John Berryman’s poem about “liking valliant fine art” suggests, I had few “internal resources.” Each time I went in for something I thought might spark an interest or fascinate me, as indeed the initial consideration of it did (I cannot give only a few examples, because even just starting in college the choices overwhelmed me, like a penny candy display before a child who has only five pennies to spend. Likewise, there were too many courses and directions I wanted (passionately) to explore, rather than too few. And I could see myself enjoying every one of them, from philosophy to geology!

That was true for me the unexperienced but so far as I knew or thought about it, alert freshman. I still believed that my falling asleep at the movies and during classical music concerts and even simply listening to music I couldn’t sing along with, or in classes where I was not allowed to knit while I listened to the teacher…

For me the senior, there was no longer any penny candy in the display, only a few largely indigestible rounds of “hard tack” that were the very few requirements my “major” required for graduation. I’d actually chosen my major (“Ancient and Medieval Culture” because of its very few requirements and because I’d already fulfilled most of them without meaning to. But the fact that I graduated at all in 1975, that remains a mystery. I had only 27 Brown credits, with a 28th I was fighting for for Spanish taken at the Yale Summer Language Institute, which Brown had warned me in advance it would not grant credit…no matter how well I did. This was their policy, and since Brown only required 28 credits, one credit per full course, rather than most schools bare minimum of 32 or 36,  they felt they had a right to insist upon all 28 credits all coming from Brown. I don’t want to go into this here, but I did graduate, and I do not know how or what happened, only that a friend called me after my advisor told her to, and while I had no cap or gown and did not attend, I recieved a diploma, Phi Beta Kappa and my advisor’s encouragment (so much for how well he knew me) in my new life as a pre-med student…More sedentary than ever, more proof I was bored, and more ambivalence about what I had chosen for my lifetime career…

But for the most poignant example, because for me the most painful, take that for years, in fact for as long as I remained an active, if amateur, field botanist  (from age 19 until age 39 or even 49 or so, when Lyme disease laid me low), I assumed that while I was devoted, enthusiastic and extremely, even uncannily talented, someone who could recognize and spot a plant I’d never seen before and know everything there was to know about it that one could possibly learn from a glimpse at a guide book, then later a taxonomy chart, and any brief, say 2-page, description as to its medicinal or gustatory uses. Yet I also “knew” that I could never learn plant physiology, or anything technical o biological within plants, such as  genetics (important if I want to explore taxonomy) or biochemisrry (important for just about everything else). I knew this was true largely because they “so bored me, they put me right to sleep.” And so, despite an IQ of around 165, so I’d been told, I felt I could not study botany more deeply than the literal surface of plants, because  it would put me to sleep…i.e. I was so inadequate in my internal resources that a deeper pursuit of understanding bored me to sleep…

Can you can imagine how I felt, coming to self-understanding of such a dismal sort? And believe me, I was devoted to honesty, at least about myself, to myself.

But I have strayed widely, and perhaps have so diverged from my inital topic, which I vaguely recall started with an image of glasses, as to have rendered it irelevant… Hah! But let me see if I can wend my way back. My discussion of glasses no doubt was in reference to whether or not I could successfully accomplish the poetry readings coming up in 2 or 3 weeks. Which somehow lead to a discussion of my being up at — well, it is now nearly 3AM, so I am awake and alert, having taken Ritalin 2+ hours ago, and I do not feel I have mis-used it, writing this. A discussion of being up and taking the Ritalin, no doubt. Taking the Ritalin… and  (althought what follows seems relevant, it was in fact written earlier than all that precedes it) –>

feeling for the first time all day (meaning the entire 24 hour cycle), during the hours when I usually am the most alert and productive, I could not bear wasting time, not even in service of proving to Li that I could in fact forgo Ritalin. (Sure, I am able to do without it, I am not addicted to it I can prove that, if necessary (though to combine doing without it, along with taking Zyprexa is  singularly cruel and unusal punishment. The Zyprexa is incredibly sedating for me, so I could never use the intellectual powers it endows me with, simply because I am too sleepy taking it (this has ALWAYS been the problem, and was one reason why Dr O always increased the Ritalin when I took Zyprexa, rather than attempted to decrease it. Another thing that Li does not understand was that Dr O never decreased my Ritalin or made any effort pro forma to do so. For me it was simply one medicine in her armamentarium, and if it worked the best, so be it. She was not even averse to giving me Adderal when and if I told her I wanted to try it. She was completely agreeable to anything I needed in the battle for alertness, and never once accused me to abusing drugs or worse absusing her willingness to prescribe for me. In point of fact, she was right. Why should she accuse me of anything, when all I wanted was what she wanted? As much alertness and “on” time as possible, within the limits imposed by my narcolepsy coupled with the super-sedating effects of Zyprexa. It was because of her absolute trust in me that I felt I could trust her, i.e. trust that if we lowered the Ritalin dose when I did not need it that would not preclude raising it again, if I needed it again.  Because of that trust, I could tell her when I no longer needed the dose she was giving me and it was in that fashion that we cut it down from a high of some Adderal plus both ER and regular Ritalin five times a day — this was when I was taking some 35mg of Zyprexa — to only 20 mg of regular Ritalin PRN, of which I rarely take all 5 pills. And she was right, I never got addicted…In point of fact, I was not even habituated, as we discovered as I went on cutting back and back.

One thing Dr O always understood was my need to feel secure in terms of this medication, not to feel that I was ever in danger of its being taken away from me because a new doctor had decided I was either addicted or for the umpteenth time and without proof decided I didn’t have narcolepsy. I do not know how to convince anyone but Li at a minimum ought to listen to the taped Voice of Narcolepsy at the New York Times Health section…These patients speak well on behalf of those ordinary people with my condition, Narcolepsy without Cataplexy. So many docs are unwilling to grasp the notion that many many people suffer — and suffering it truly is — from TRUE narcolepsy, even though we do not have cataplexy. Despite the numbers cited, I myself believe that the reverse is true, that N without C is far more prevalent than N with C…And that better tests, shorter and more discriminating diagnostic tests than long stays at a sleep center will find that Narcolepsy is more comon than people ever thought. (Every time I tell someone I have narcolepsy, they tell me of a ceertain person in their family who falls asleep “just like that”…but was never taken to a sleep specialist etc). Few people and fewer doctors are aware that the falling asleep with one’s face falling into a plate of spaghetti is just a myth, and that narcolepsy has many different faces, just as anxiety, or ADHD or schizphrenia does…Why so many seem satisfied with that myth, and do not question it is beyond me, but they don’t, or it is the rare internist or primary care doc who bothers to question the received wisdom that questions the patient’s motives in asking for Ritalin, rather than the doctor’s compassion in failing to  so much as take a sleep history or approach the patient with an open mind…

Dr O knew that I had for way too long been treated as a drug addict when in fact I needed the precise medication other docs considered merely placative. She refused to go that route, and never made it an issue. Even in the hospital, every hospital I went to, she was able to persuade them to give it to me…It was only Li who was not committed to my taking it, disbelieving perhaps that I have narcolepsy (again, again! Why must I put up with this? Is it worth it, or should I go elsewhere, perhaps to a sleep medicine clinic to handle my Ritalin instead of trusting Li to do so…because clearly he cannot be trusted to believe me, to believe Dr O, to believe anything, or even to want to find out!). Why now, when I could have/should have (except that I have spent all the day in a kind of avoidant daze) gone back to sleep, if necessary by taking a dose of Xyrem, as prescribed, why did I take Ritalin at 1AM and stay up writing especially since Li is trying to “wean” me off the Ritalin?

WHY indeed? Why the f–king hell is he trying to “wean me off the Ritalin in the first place, when it was helping me function so well that most people had no idea I had a disability at all? Why question my meds when they are working so well? I’d say to anyone who wants to then interfere, merely for the sake of not using a “potentially addictive drug,” for Chtist’s sake, don’t break what is nicely repaired already. It doesn’t seem necessary, given how well things were going in general. And when they fell apart, I told everyone and him what was wrong: the ABs needed to be changed. I have said that again and again, ever since the hospitalization in February, but nobody is listening to me. I told Dr L then and there that the Bicillin and the Minocycline was not a good combination, that for some reason the two ABs were inadequately treating the three toughstone symptoms, cardinal symptoms in my case, in the sense that if they are taken care of, I seem to be safe from a relapse, but if they are still present, I am not. In point of fact, every single time one of these three symptoms appears or fails to disappear, I eventually wind up in the hospital, either in the spring or in the fall, without fail! (Did I make it through this past spring, or was that when I was in St F/Mt S and trying to tell them that the Minocycline/Bicillin was not aduquate even then? I’d have to look back to see…)

Anyhow, stopping the Ritalin may seem to be fixing something that wasn’t broken, but instead is rather to be breaking something that was functioning extraordinarily well…I mean, if I was writing and doing art and relatively happy and content, why ruin that by stopping one of my essential medications as an outpatient, just because the in-patient docs thought I ought not to take it there? I think Li is in fact trying to stop it for just that reason, because it seemed to be unnecessary inside the hospital, just because there, under those hothouse conditions, having no requirements but sleep, I “did okay.” But doing okay “inside” which is to say, within the protective walls and given the constraints (to say “constraints” is barely a euphemism) of that  sort of an institution is scarcely the same as to do okay or even well outside those walls. I didn’t need to stay awake there, or do anything there, and in fact could sleep at will. And so I did, much of the day in fact, every day! If I then needed to sleep at night, well, I could ask for “something for anxiety” anytime, though in point of fact, I mostly could sleep then too. Much of the three week stay was spent sleeping, and when I did not, I was so paranoid that sheer fear and that adrenalin rush kept me going. Near the end of my stay, I became somewhat manic, hypomanic clinically as Li diagnosed it when he saw me. I couldn’t shut up and my speech was — and I felt this as well — pressured. That is a very good word for it, indeed. There was an internal feeling of pressure to get words out in a rush, an unpleasant need to say things, as if they had especial importance and absolutely had to be expressed, even though if I thought about their content, which of course I could not really do in such a state, there was in fact nothing particularly urgent to them.

Well, I am getting tire finally of writing here, and yet I have not finished. I quickly then let me summarize. Because of this recent pressure of speech, coupled with some manic energy put into actually cleaning up this place, and getting more painting and such done, though still hypo manic not truly manic, Li felt something ought to be done to “bring me down” — I am not quoting him so much as quoting the idea…Anyhow, first he suggested stopping the Ritalin, which was okay temporarily, since I already felt enough adrenalin and did not want to add more to my own felt pressure of speech and heart beat. But I had and have no intention of this being anything but temporary…Then he wanted to increase the Topomax, which he said would also decrease the pressure and help hypomania, at the same time that it might help any appetite increase that came with our adding back some Zyprexa, which in his opinion, and of course Elissa the RN’s insistence, was the best drug for me…So far they have only gotten to 2.5mg but even Li has suggested 5mg if I will agree.  Now that I have summarized the pharmacological plans for me (including with this, the ultimate decreasing to 0 of my Ritalin) Let me say right here and now, that I will not stand for a rigid “fixing” of the Ritalin problem…

Below I have summarized a few absolute requirements for a psychiatrist, if I am to trust him or her, or continue to see him or her:

One requirement of any psychiatrist I see is that he agree the Ritalin is a necessary medication for an illness, which is narcolepsy, with which I was diagnosed by a sleep specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at Norwalk Hospital (records available) and it needs to be understood between us that he will not in the middle of therapy decide suddenly to meddle with it (unless I agree and do so not under duress, or decide myself not to take it); it needs to be understood absolutely and without any fishiness or unspoken mistrust, that I am NOT a drug seeker, and that I have narcolepsy, a genuine neurological disease, which needs to be treated, independently of any other illness I might suffer from, so that my being given Ritalin is not dependent on whether or not I agree to take any other drug like Zyprexa etc. though taking Zyprexa might in fact influence the dosage of Ritalin needed.The Rx needs to be permanent as well as flexible according to my needs, which may increase as well as decrease as the ilness waxes, wanes and responds to other drugs and illnesses. Ritalin, however, is never to be used as some sort of bargaining chip…

Argh, Icannot write another word, and in fact, I feel as if I am giving up on a personal letter I was writing to a specific someone. If you are that he or she, you know who you are…I do not!

Rest assured, or at least rest. If I made too many typos and other errors of eloquence or diction, I shall clean them up tomorrow, so reread this then, if you read this today…Be forewarned, it will change between the two times.

 

Added on Oct 31.

 

I have decided not to redact the above, but to leave it as is, with all its typos and lacunae and infelicities of grammar and thought. I was writing spontaneously, as I believe was evident enough and I don’t see why that is not adequate for a post once in a while. I would just like to add a clarifying detail or two. What I think I forgot to explain was that between the post on Zyprexa/cancer treatment I experienced a three week hospitalization, which happened very suddenly, though of course, as I mentioned, my visiting nurse had been alert to the possibility of it, even perhaps the inevitability, for at least two weeks…If you understand that, some of this discussion and the one to come above, will seem a little more undersandable.

 

I will now go to a new post and continue there.

Mental Health, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized

Mary Neal Tells Her Story

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I am going to try to embed the youtube videos of Mary Neal telling the story of what happened to her severely mentally ill (but non-violent) brother Larry M Neal in Shelby County Jail, TN, but I am not sure if it will embed or not. Here goes nothing! Ah! It did work, So the top one is first and the second one is last. PLEASE WATCH. and then go to the website mentioned in the post below this one and see more details of what is going on. This never ought to happen in the United States, it is evil, but it does, and it happens far too often. I think Johnnie Cochran would turn over in his grave if he knew what had happened to and within his firm after his death…

Thanks, everyone!

Art and artwork, Mad Pride, Psychiatry, Recovery, Schizophrenia

The Icarus Project and Mad Pride

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This is how Newsweek begins its article about the Icarus Project and Mad Pride:

“We don’t want to be normal,” Will Hall tells me. The 43-year-old has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and doctors have prescribed antipsychotic medication for him. But Hall would rather value his mentally extreme states than try to suppress them, so he doesn’t take his meds. Instead, he practices yoga and avoids coffee and sugar. He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet, his half Native American ancestry evident in his dark hair and dark eyes. Cultivated and charismatic, he is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still.“ http://www.newsweek.com/id/195694

Readers will note two things immediately: It is not common for someone diagnosed with schizophrenia these days to be “delicate and thin” — despite articles claiming to prove a supposed link between schizophrenia the illness and obesity, most of us would say that weight gain went right along with taking meds from the get go. And that most of us were originally either of normal weight or even thin compared to “normals.” the other striking thing, I think, is Will Hall’s level of energy. Most of those with schizophrenia, at least those on meds that I know, have a much lower level than normal of energy and motivation, which again is attributed to the illness itself. Now of course negative symptoms might be an effect of the illness, yes. But I also know that at least when I took the older drugs, like thorazine and mellaril, they added tremendously to any inner listlessness I might have felt. Indeed, what else is the infamous Thorazine shuffle but a drug side effect that practically screams medication-induced psychomotor retardation?

In any event, it may be that some of my readers with schizophrenia, and many of the mothers (and in my experience when caregivers visit this site it is often mothers who do though sometimes fathers do as well) of those with schizophrenia, may well disapprove of my posting this link. But I feel it deserves a viewing. Too many of us suffer the effects of medication without benefiting from its advantages not to offer another form of hope. As long as someone is not a danger to him or herself or others, why should they not be offered the experience of Mad Pride, should they prefer it? In these later stages of my own “condition” I too long to be off meds and to experience my experience, to do art unencumbered by the effect of meds that fatigue me if nothing else. But if I feel enabled now, and emboldened by some inner force to do art, I just might be liberated to unknown heights once off the meds, and if I can control the dangers I used to put myself in vis a vis cigarettes and such, why should i not be permitted such an experiment. Alas, no one here would ever allow it. I would have to endure such remonstrations and scolding and worse from relatives and others it is simply not worth it, or else I simply could not bear the bitterness of fighting with them…SO I am stuck, stuck on these deadening and dangerous medications until such a time as I feel free enough to move away, leave town and move elsewhere. Until such a time as universal health care enables me the freedom to leave the benefits Connecticut so generously provides me as a Medicaid/Medicare patient, and live elsewhere, I am simply forced to live in my same old tiny apartment and change nothing.

But some of you might be wanting to make that change and be more capable of it, be more able to maintain 1) stability and 2) a family support network, rather than a state of constant resentful watchfulness and remonstrations of such bitterness that make it not worth the effort. I know my friends would definitely support me, but I need my family to as well, or feel I do…I am not yet ready to say I can do without it at any rate…And so I remain in thrall to their demands on me, despite the fact that for many years I had no ties to them at all, and neither help nor obligations bound us. If it is good now between us, and I love that part of it, it also means that I feel that I must live up to expectations I could disregard before…and that is so hard, and often such a burden.

Nevertheless, I love them, insofar as I am capable of the emotion of love (see posts below for an explanation of that caveat). And if I am not, then I feel for them as mu9ch as I am capable of feeling for anyone…which is all they can ask.

But I have diverged from my initial subject matter which was Mad Pride. Tomorrow I give a talk and a poetry reading at the House where I live of 250 residents, though only a handful are expected to attend.  IN the talk I finish by answering the question, do I link mental illness and creativity, and my answer is, Maybe, but even so, in most cases the best work, mine at any rate, is done “best when I am better.” I mean by this that deep in psychosis I cannot write anything decent, if I write at all nor do any decent art, because I am no longer motivated nor able to concentrate well enough to do so. Perhaps in a manic state I have been able to, but those have sadly (yes!) been too few. Otherwise my more extreme moods  have been called a mixed state or major depression. In any of those moods, and certainly when extremely or even moderately paranoid, I do little work at all. And when hearing “bad voices” ditto, since that is when I am most likely to be concentrating on acts of self-harm and least on self-nurturing activities such as art. So you see why I say what I do, that only when I am at least getting better do I do my best work?

Moreover, I believe this is true of most people. It seems to me that even in the case of the Mad Pride artwork at the Newsweek site, those artists were not in fact psychotic at the time they did their art, Oh, perhaps they were depressed, but clearly not catatonicly depressed, by definition. And I cannot believe that they were disorganized even if their diagnosis was schizophrenia, because however weird the artwork, there was recognizable order and ordering in each and every one…

Welp, I am getting fatigued just writing this, so I will leave you with that short disquisition and the link to The Icarus Project. I am not endorsing or not- endorsing it, only expressing my interest and indicating my plan to continue to read up and find out more. Somewhat not surprisingly, there is an active ? branch in Northampton,  MA, which is the town I have wanted to move to for a number of years, but have not yet had the nerve. Nor has there been the financial or medical feasibility. Now there might be, but it is still not possible. Oh, I wish I could move, but there is Joe to consider, and I would not leave him now.

That said, here is the Icarus Project Link. Enjoy? Comments will all be read and appreciated. I will respond if I can.

http://theicarusproject.net/

Book, Poetry, Schizophrenia

Poems by Pamela Spiro Wagner

3 Comments

Here are a few sample poems from my new book WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS, (which, despite what many have been told IS available from Amazon and B & N and upne.com so keep trying if you have been told it is not…I know as I just got some extra copies from amazon). Here is just a teaser to get people interested:

These first two are from the first section, which concerns my childhood and the first intimations of illness. Here are the first indications that touch is difficult, even threatening to me. In the second poem, I describe my twin sister’s wholly different attitude towards her body, how in a more innocent time, wolf whistles by teen age boys were considered harmless, complimentary even, and wearing tight jeans was not an invitation to anything but, as in this poem, pleasure on the part of both young men and the young woman described…

AMBIVALENCE

Touch me. No, no, do not touch.

I mean: be careful —

if I break into a hundred pieces

like a Ming vase falling from the mantle

it will be your fault.

JUNIOR MISS

Cool as Christmas

plump as a wish

and simonpure as cotton

You stroll the avenue

mean in your jeans

and the boys applaud.

You toss off a shrug

like a compliment

with a flicker of disdain

Catching the whistle

in mid-air and

pitching it back again.

“Eating the Earth” is more or less a true story insofar  the little boy in a nearby neighborhood did rub a certain little girl’s face in dirt for telling him where babies came from  and she did dream the dream descrbed. What this all means is up to the reader to decide, however.

EATING THE EARTH

After Tyrone, the little boy next door,

makes her eat a handful of dirt

for telling lies

about where babies come from

her father says it will do her no harm.

You have to eat a peck of dirt

before you die, her father says.

He also says she hadn’t lied:

babies do come that way.

She cries after her father

leaves the room and she sleeps

all night with the lights on.

Her father tells her other things,

that earthworms eat their own weight in dirt

every day and that their do-do

(he says “excrement”)

fertilizes our food.

She makes a face over that

and doesn’t believe him.

Besides, she says, we’re people

not worms.

And we’re so great, huh? he says.

Well, I’d rather be a girl than a worm.

He says nothing.

He is grown up and a doctor,

he doesn’t have to worry about

being a worm.

But she does.

That night she dreams that Tyrone

dumps a jar of worms down her shirt

and that their dreadful undulations

become hers and she begins

eating dirt

and liking it,

the cool coarse grains of sand,

the spicy chips of mica,

the sweet-sour loam become her body

as she lives and breathes,

eating the darkness.


FUSION

It was a frying pan summer.

I was playing croquet by myself,

missing the wickets on purpose,

rummaging my pockets for dime-sized diversions.

It was a summer of solitaire.

I laid the cards out like soldiers.

I was in command.

Then you came out

with a mallet and a stolen voice

that seemed to rise disembodied

from the gorge of your black throat

and you challenged me to a game.

You ate me with your mosquito demands

though I, I didn’t want to play with anyone!

I hid my trembling in my sleeves

refusing to shake your hand.

I thought: this is how the Black Death was

transmitted, palm to palm, hand to hand,

a contagion like money.

You smiled the glassy grimace

practiced for boys all summer in front of a mirror.

If I looked you in the eye I would die.

I knew then all the sharp vowels of fear.

It was late in the afternoon

and I was frightened

when our shadows merged.


OUR MOTHER’S DAUGHTERS

I dreamed my mother cut off

my baby toes, the suturing so perfect

she left no gangrene, no scars, just a fine line

of invisible thread and four toes on each foot

instead of five. The job done, she left me

at the “crutches store” on Whitney Avenue

where I could find no crutches to fit

and so hobbled back toward home

alone and lopsided.

This is true, and she was a good mother

most of the time, which meant

that I never lacked for anything

she could buy, yet still I grew up lame,

disfigured (though not in any

noticeable way) and always with the sense

I had been abandoned before my time.

This has all been said before: our mothers

leave us, then or now, later or sooner,

and we hobble like cripples

toward the women in our lives

who can save us. Or else we limp homeward

knowing we will never make it back

before we wake up. And when we do wake up

we find we, too, are mothers, trying desperately

to save our daughters’ legs

by amputating their smallest least necessary

toes, taking the toes to save the feet

to save the legs they stand on

in a world where we ourselves

are not yet grounded.


PARANOIA

You know something is going on.

It is taking place just beyond the range

of your hearing, inside that house

on the corner needing paint and shutters,

the one with the cluttered yard

you always suspected sheltered friends

in name only. It may be in the cellar

where the radio transmitter is being built

or the satellite. A cabal of intelligence

is involved, CIA, MI-6, Mossad.

It is obvious plans are being made;

didn’t your boss arch his eyebrows

while passing your desk this morning,

grunt hello, rather than his usual

“Howahya?” There are veiled threats

to your life and livelihood. Someone

is always watching you watching

and waiting for whatever is going

to happen to happen.


THE CATATONIC SPEAKS

At first it seemed a good idea not to

move a muscle, to resist without

resistance. I stood still and stiller. Soon

I was the stillest object in that room.

I neither moved nor ate nor spoke.

But I was in there all the time,

I heard every word said,

saw what was done and not done.

Indifferent to making the first move,

I let them arrange my limbs, infuse

IVs, even toilet me like a doll.

Oh, their concern was so touching!

And so unnecessary. As if I needed anything

but the viscosity of air that held me up.

I was sorry when they cured

me, when I had to depart that warm box,

the thick closed-in place of not-caring,

and return to the world. I would

never go back, not now. But

the Butterfly Effect says sometimes

the smallest step leads nowhere,

sometimes to global disaster. I tell you

it is enough to scare a person stiff.

Brain, Schizophrenia, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Uncategorized

Schizophrenia and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (cont.)

1 Comment

In my further reading on TLE I have learned that while “TLE hallucinations” can be ecstatic visions or the sight of threatening people or actually hearing voices, usually they are of brightly colored lights or visual distortions, like objects appearing larger or smaller than usual, hearing music, feeling insects running under one’s skin etc. In addition, there is the awareness that these are hallucinations, though not always. A personality seems to be associated with TLE, some people think, though it is not clear to me how established this is as fact. And some with TLE and without it claim that creativity is directly related to it. Hypergraphia, the compulsion to write, write, write is definitely associated with TLE, along with a compulsion to draw or do art or think/talk about religious subjects. Heightened emotional state but reduced sex drive. Something called “stickiness” is described, which I construe as a kind of tendency to glom onto a person or to exhibit an extreme loyalty. Also, there is seen irritability and gross personality change, rages, a tendency to fly off the handle or perform outrageous acts like stripping in public etc. 

 

In TLE you can have feelings of euphoria and floating as much as feelings of impending doom. A feeling of “rising into something” or of something rising through one’s body is a common concomitant of a TLE seizure or aura. An indescribable feeling according to many.  And you can have psychosis, chronic or acute.

interestingly, while EEG is notoriously poor at picking up TLE, there are often  punctate  signal hyperintensities (precisely the abnormalities I have had at least since Y2K) seen on MRI in those with TLE in the book I am reading — SEIZED, by Eva LaPlante.

Now I do not want to jump the gun, because too many of my symptoms have been chronic and disparate, not following a single pattern of seizure, whereas at least one authority claims that once you have one seizure, all others look similar. Indeed, while you might say that Grey Crinkled Paper arose from a seizure, and the jacksonian seizure with Novocaine were definite, and too the feelings of impending doom were also seizure activity  while I was taking Clozaril and other antipsychotic medications, the others, with different patterns yet, could not have been,since they were more varied even than those. The olfactory hallucinations had to have been seizure  associated too, but then where does it all stop, and where does the notion that one seizure sets the pattern for all others go?

 

And yet even conservatively I myself would count all those instances as seizures even if I were not going to count anything else as seizure-related right now…So  what to make of them, and the fact that ALL were so distinct and different from one another:?

 

Does it make the whole thing, the whole illness over all TLE or schizophrenia? Can you in fact have both, or does having TLE  suggest that the schizophrenia was a misdiagnosis all along?  And how does one know? Certainly, I have one trait that points towards the TLE diagnosis: I do well inbetween “attacks” of either illness, and seem to have not suffered any deterioration in brain function cognitively. Not massively. Though my memory and such is faulty, that is often the case in TLE itself!

I don’t have the slightest idea, but I suppose I will find out as the weeks go on and I continue to discuss it with Dr C, as I anticipate I will. I do plan to  see him once Dr O leaves… I liked him enough to do so at any rate, and I liked this idea enough too, to want to pursue it too. I    t will be very interesting to find out what happens, where it leads…If it redefines me entirely, I wonder how I will feel or deal with it?

 

 

 

Brain, Schizophrenia, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Schizophrenia and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

11 Comments

I want to begin by quoting two websites on the symptoms of each. First the Mayo Clinic on the symptoms of schizophrenia and then Richard Restak’s excellent article on TLE.

 

Schizophrenia Symptoms

By Mayo Clinic staff

In general, schizophrenia symptoms include:

* Beliefs not based on reality (delusions), such as the belief that there’s a conspiracy against you

* Seeing or hearing things that don’t exist (hallucinations), especially voices

* Incoherent speech

* Neglect of personal hygiene

* Lack of emotions

* Emotions inappropriate to the situation

* Angry outbursts

* Catatonic behavior

* A persistent feeling of being watched

* Trouble functioning at school and work

* Social isolation

* Clumsy, uncoordinated movements

In addition to the general schizophrenia symptoms, symptoms are often categorized in three ways to help with diagnosis and treatment:

Negative signs and symptoms

Negative signs and symptoms represent a loss or decrease in emotions or behavioral abilities. They may include:

* Loss of interest in everyday activities

* Appearing to lack emotion

* Reduced ability to plan or carry out activities

* Neglecting hygiene

* Social withdrawal

* Loss of motivation

Positive signs and symptoms

Positive signs and symptoms are unusual thoughts and perceptions that often involve a loss of contact with reality. These symptoms may come and go. They may include:

* Hallucinations, or sensing things that aren’t real. In schizophrenia, hearing voices is a common hallucination. These voices may seem to give you instructions on how to act, and they sometimes may include harming others.

* Delusions, or beliefs that have no basis in reality. For example, you may believe that the television is directing your behavior or that outside forces are controlling your thoughts.

* Thought disorders, or difficulty speaking and organizing thoughts, such as stopping in midsentence or jumbling together meaningless words, sometimes known as “word salad.”

* Movement disorders, such as repeating movements, clumsiness or involuntary movements.

s

Cognitive symptoms involve problems with memory and attention. These symptoms may be the most disabling in schizophrenia because they interfere with the ability to perform routine daily tasks. They include:

* Problems making sense of information

* Difficulty paying attention

* Memory problems

Complex Partial Seizures Present Diagnostic Challenge

Quotes from Richard Restak’s article in Psychiatric Times (Sept 1,1995)

Since the condition [Temporal Lobe Epilepsy] may involve gross disorders of thought and emotion, patients… frequently come to the attention of psychiatrists. But since symptoms may occur in the absence of generalized grand mal seizures, physicians may often fail to recognize the epileptic origin of the disorder.

In most instances, the emotion experienced as part of the seizure is a disturbing one variously described as dread or a feeling of impending doom; in others, the emotion may be experienced as pleasant or euphoric…Descriptions such as “a wave,” “something flowing upward” are often employed.

Controversy continues as to the validity of a so-called temporal lobe personality… Outbursts of irritability, rather than frank violence, are hallmarks of TLE.

[R]are presentations include anorexia nervosa (Signer and Benson 1990), multiple personality (Schenk and Bear.

Most common is a global hyposexuality (deficit of desire and feeling]…

TLE also may be responsible for chronic rather than just acute psychoses. While any of the symptoms of schizophrenia may be encountered, paranoid traits are the most common. TLE patients can be distinguished from schizophrenic patients by the maintenance, when not acutely ill, of warm affect and good rapport…

The treatment of TLE is complicated by the fact that many times improved seizure control via anticonvulsants leads to deterioration of the neuropsychiatric status. Schizophrenia-like epileptic psychoses often emerge when anticonvulsants are normalizing or improving the seizure activity…

While the illness is an epileptic one and treated by neurologists, many neurologists remain unfamiliar with and even uninterested in its neuropsychiatric components. But by ignoring the experiential symptoms, the neurologist deprives the patient of the opportunity to coherently integrate all aspects of the epilepsy. It may also cement the patient’s misconception that in addition to the epilepsy, he or she suffers from a “mental illness.”

—————————————————————————-

I was going to go into a deeper discussion of this, but cannot at this hour (11:15pm as I must go to bed now. But I plan if I can to do so tomorrow. And if not then, well, then ASAP. Meanwhile, I would have told my schizophrenia.com readers to think back on all that I’d written over the years, and tell ME what is going on…but you cannot do that, not knowing me as well as all that. Needless to say, however, I do think there is reason to suspect that the second diagnosis might have some possible validity, though it is hard to see how all of my symptoms can have been only TLE…But wow, would I be relieved to have a name for it if they were!

TTFN

There is an interesting discussion about schizophrenia and TLE etc here: Schizophrenia and spiritual experiences: Is there a link? http://livewithwonder.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/schizophrenia-and-spiritual-experiences-is-there-a-link/

Recovery, Schizophrenia

Changing Therapists and Current Concerns

1 Comment

When I was in the hospital this past February, I made the tentative decision to leave Dr O, despite having seen her and indeed depended upon her for nine years. At the time, I was feeling, I dunno, burned? Not in the sense of angry but in the sense of, uh, oh, I’d better cut out while I am not too hated, because soon she really will be sick of me and won’t remember anything about me but how much she hated me…Where did that come from? Well, you might laugh, but I did not. It came from having called her on her cell phone, as she has encouraged me to do, on a working day, and reached her instead of her answering machine. I had wanted to know if she had informed the book publisher about my hospitalization. I was taken aback by the sharpness and peremptory note in her voice as she answered. It did not sound like her .

“I, uh, it’s me, Pam, I was calling to –”

“Yes, Pam, what do you want?”

“It sounds like you are sick. I’ll call back later. I was expecting your answering machine anyway.”

“Tell me now. I don’t want to have to answer my machine or call back later.”

“But it is clear you are in a bad mood. I don’t want to talk to you now…”

“I’m not in a bad mood, I’m ill and you are calling me at home.”

“How was I to know that. It is a work day and this is your cell phone, you shouldn’t have picked up if you are sick. You are allowed to be sick you know…”

“Why did you call?”

So I told her, then when she said she would call the Press, I hung up. But I felt terrible, because it was clear that she was angry and it felt personal, felt as though she was angry at me. But I didn’t know why, could only imagine, and so I did, I came up with 100 reasons why she might be angry with me, hate me, want to get rid of me or leave me…This is important, that reasoning, because is lies directly beneath my first impulse to leave her, though it is not and was not in the end my primary motivation. Because I feared she wanted to leave me, I determined to leave her first. It was an old old story, and not a healthy one at all.

But as I said, in the final analysis, it was not really the reason I wanted to find another doctor. No, that was for two other more reasonable, um, reasons: one was that I did not want to have to traverse the state to see her any longer. It took me all the morning and part of the afternoon to do so, which ended up exhausting me for the rest of the day. That, plus the fact that I did not even drive myself, so it cost me extra to pay Josephine to drive me there and back. But more than that was the fact that the doc at the hospital was so – what? not into power, not into authority, or at least played it that way. He would ASK me what drugs worked for me and at what dose. And then proceed to prescribe precisely those drugs, not just ask me and then ignore what I said. Dr O never asked me what drug I wanted or what drug worked for me, simply decreed what I would take and then asked me to take them. She only listened to me when i refused to take them, perforce.

Now, this is not to make Dr O seem like any sort of dictator, because in fact I was very resistant and noncompliant, and often refused any med at all that seemed to help, so I could be infuriating. Also I was in and out of the hospital when not taking her meds. It was only she who had the patience to work with me for 6 years to finally find a combo that worked for me without any undesirable side effects (except a little sleepiness) so that I’ll take it willingly. Nevertheless, I think she is so used to my being ill that she cannot actually treat me like an equal, and someone who might be getting better..For instance, I really need to be able to call my shrink by his or her first name, esp if they call me Pam, which i would insist upon (because I cannot feel comfortable sharing personal information with someone who still calls me Miss Wagner!). It is patently ridiculous at my age that I should call someone twenty years younger than me by a title when they do not use one for me…But I would rather be Miss W than Pam if he or she is going to be Dr so and so at age 35-45!

Anyhow, where was I? Reasons why I was leaving Dr O. Yes, well, be that as it may, I had a feeling as well that she herself was not going to be staying. Don’t know why, but I just had this strange niggling feeling that somehow it was time, or would be. Then I mentioned, in my first appointment post-hospital that I might need to have some help finding a local therapist. She did not seem surprised or if she did, did not object at all, mentioned in fact that she was leaving her sleep practice in June, which precluded my continuing on as her sleep patient in any event. That gave me the first indication. Then when I returned two weeks later, which was last week, I said to myself, I know she is ending her practice of psychiatry as well, because she is moving, moving away, moving, well, inland…I knew this with absolute conviction, not delusionally. I knew I could be wrong, and I was hoping I was. But somewhere deep down I suspected I was not.

I was so exactly on the money it was uncanny. She was moving, was ending her practice. I asked her if she was moving inland. She made light of it, said she wasn’t going closer to the coast if that’s what I meant, but that wasn’t the point of moving. I said I doubted that…And she said nothing. But it scared me, as it always does, because I still feel that I will drown when Antarctica and Greenland melt, as they will MUCH sooner than any scientist now predicts…

I will not continue on that path at this time, however. I was speaking of changing therapists. So now I have made an appointment to see someone new, and only 10 mintues away from me, close enough that I can actually drive there myself. Very close, in fact, to the Vision Therapist I used to see. I do not know how to interview a prospective psychiatrist, or to doctor shop. All the other switches have simply been handed me, and they stuck, or I stuck with them as they seemed reasonably good, and i liked them. But this time, I have no one to hand me someone with their imprimatur and am on my own. I don’t know how to do this. Will I know who is good, who I can trust? I am very bad at that, trusting all the wrong people. Well, this person at least comes recommended by someone Dr O knows well, or at least knows. That ought to count for something. But it is a he, and I have not seen a male shrink in many years, nor had a good experience yet. Dunno how that will go.

But things change and so do people. The doc in the hospital was male, both of them were, and I liked them both. So maybe this time I could tolerate it. Dunno, but we’ll see. If I can, I will write again on April 1, which is when I have the consultation. Will let you know how it went, if it turns out to have been productive in any fashion.

Note: All the information that I have been reading points to two things that I find very disturbing: one is that Inderal (propranolol) which I take for akathisia, a side effect of many psychotropics but for me of Geodon, apparently and quite effectively “blocks traumatic memory.” Now this would be fine, except that it seems to block the formation of emotional memories of ALL bad events, or at least block the bad emotional memories of the events, such that if you recall the event, you cannot actually go back and feel the way you did at the time. Now I imagine that this would be desirable for most people, who usually do not want to suffer from their memories, but I feel deprived of so much of my life, having been on Inderal or a beta blocker (the same class of drugs) for thirty years. I never knew why i could not quite feel the memories I wrote about the way others seemed to be able to feel their memories…I can see them, but I am outside of them, looking on. I feel nothing. I literally look in and see myeslf from the outside, that is how detached I am from the person I used to be, all because, as i believe, I have no emotional recall of the event. Which is why I want to stop taking the inderal…If my blood pressure rises (it is also effective for that) then I will deal with it another way, but I need to see if not taking the Inderal brings back something vital to my memory.

Number two is much more problematic, because it involves the very medications that keep most of usw with this ilness sane and this side of an institution: most antipsychotics and even the SSRI antidepressants block dopamine to a greater or lesser degree. Now no one knows where or even if people with schizophrenia are actually suffering from an excess in dopamine. That is the theory and it may be that dopamine is involved in some fashion but it is not the whole story, The newest drugs are now working on glutamate, another neurotransmitter entirely. Either neurottransmitter may not affect the entire brain the same way. What is certain is that the drugs tamp the dopamine levels down. Supposedly this is only down to a “normal” level, but who knows what a normal level of dopamine is? We know that dopamine is the pleasure molecule, that without enough of it people become thrill seekers, needing highly exciting situations in order to experience pleasure. But what does it mean that many SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction and/or loss of interest in sex? It implies that with suppression of dopamine (and cure of depression?) the dopamine falls below “normal” producing this lowering of normal pleasure and pleasure-seeking.

It is well known that many fewer people with schizophrenia marry, have children or even fall in love…I myself feel detached and cool, feel no particular sexual urge or even the desire to meet a significant other, let alone pursue someone with marriage in mind. Now I’m wondering if this was not me, not really, so much as the anti-dopamine drugs I’ve been taking most of my life…What a tragedy if the reason I feel no love for anyone is the lack of dopamine the drugs forced on me! What a pity if the coldness I feel towards all of my life and all people in truth, is due more to my drugs, the inderal as well as the anti-dopamines than to any deficient genetic make-up . It’s like the wind farms and the sonar of nuclear submarines etc. We build them as if they are reasonably green, having zero effect on the enironment. only to find out years later that the effect was devastating. (I suspect that the wind currents and subsonic vibrations given off by mega-windfarms might be discombobulating our honeybees and even undermining the vitality of our bats (both dying off alarmingly in 2009). What I mean is, we have developed all these so-called miracle drugs for schizophrenia and depression etc but do we really know what they do to the person, quite apart from the alleged antipsychotic effects? What about other costs to the individual? What are they and has anyone thought to look for them? Does anyone have a choice in the matter? Is it fair? (Obviously no, it is not fair, but then life isn’t fair, so that is a silly question…) Should they have a say, a choice?

These are notions that currently concern me. I wonder if anyone else has been pondering them…If the honeybees and bats and dying whales and dolphins deserve our attention, as most surely surely they do, the highest priority, I would hope that somewhere down the pecking order we with schizophrenia might deserve someone taking a good hard look at just what the suppression of dopamine might be doing to us in the larger picture as well as the smalller one. Just as schizophrenia, I am convinced , does NOT condemn one to obestiy, but the drugs do, just so I believe that the drugs do a number on us the full nature of which we have no inkling of.

Note: this is NOT to encourage anyone to stop taking their medication. Obviously I still take mine, fearing psychosis and the return of the voices far more than I want some dopamine at this point. But I ‘d like some input in the matter, too, and wish they’d develop some better drug or treatment protocol than the present one. Surely I can still be human even with schizophrenia. What with Inderal and the antipsychotics etc I feel more like an automaton, or Mr Spock or Data.

Blog, Recovery, Schizophrenia

Three Schizophrenia Blogs plus…

2 Comments

Judy Chamberlin was hospitalized for depression in 1966 and then against her will in a state hospital, which she found horrific. That experience spurred her life work as an advocate for psychiatric patients and better treatment, gentler, more dignified treatment in fact. But I should not tell her story, because I only today found her blog, thanks to Bill W. No, you can read it in part at the Boston Globe here

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/22/a_talk_with_judi_chamberlain/

and then follow it in more detail at her blog here:

 

http://judi-lifeasahospicepatient.blogspot.com/#mce_temp_url#

 

A WONDERFUL blog is Yin and Yang, Kate K’s blog at http://wanderer62.blogspot.com  

 

Kate writes of her journey from schizophrenia down the road to become the person she is inside, the person she wants to be. This entails describing in her wonderful, meditative prose her efforts to regain her singing and songwriting, her ongoing painting enterprise and her struggles with weight and fitness, voices, and isolation. Along the way, there are forays into spirituality — both buddhist and otherwise, all laced together with Kate’s careful and exquisitely thoughtful reasoning. 

 

As for Christina Bruni’s website with articles, memoir and blog, let her speak for herself, because she says it best: “My goal is to be the Rachael Ray of the recovery movement. Have you ever seen this chatty, gregarious cooking expert and lifestyle show host? One day I watched her on TV while I waited in the doctor’s office. Her infectious good humor cheered me so much that I wanted to tape her shows and replay them at night when I got home from work.

It was then that I decided that I want everyone who meets me—whether in person or on paper—to feel good afterwards. I’m open and honest about what happened to me because I believe that people can recover. “Only silence is shame,” to quote the Italian anarchist, Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And if I kept quiet, what would be the point?

I seek to be a force of good in the world, because the illness destroys, and through my recovery I want to create things of beauty and show people a better way.  Quite simply, I couldn’t bear to see someone go through what I did and feel there is no hope, or worse, not get the treatment that works.  If I remained silent, I’d be complicit in perpetuating the stigma.”

 

http://www.christinabruni.com/index.html

 

 

Overcoming Schizophrenia, which is Ashley’s site, is also tremendous. She is in her 20s, an accomplished writer, and though younger than the rest of us, that is an advantage. She can talk about what it is like to recover from a first episode and the hope that recent diagnosis and rapid treatment now offers.

 

http://overcomingschizophrenia.blogspot.com 

 

 

 

Narcolepsy, Recovery, Schizophrenia, Xyrem

Schizophrenia and Sleep: Is Psychosis a Waking Nightmare?

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I believe that I have written before about having narcolepsy as well as schizophrenia, and while it is up for grabs whether or not this sleep disorder as well might be caused by Lyme Disease, at this point it seems moot in both cases. I still seem to need the psych meds as well as the narcolepsy meds, so what difference does it make if the Borrelia bacterium originally caused the disorders? It seems that I have them now, so I must go on from there…

 

Anyhow, ever since college, at about age 22, I have had a terrible time with daytime sleepiness, no matter how much sleep I got at night. I could never stay awake during the day unless I were walking or physically active. Once I stood still, and god forbid if I sat down, I was immediately subject to an overwhelming urge to sleep and it seems to dream, the latter not always coming after the first.

 

The dreaming before I feel asleep only grew worse as I aged, until in my late thirties and early forties I began to have to ask others whether I dreamed something or if it really happened, because I could not tell the difference. I did have a kind of a touchstone, the very fact that I had to ask the question, seemed to mean that it did not in fact happen, but I never quite trusted that understanding until after I’d gotten the denial. In my late forties, it was happening every day, and in addition I was hallucinating visually, not scary things, but hallucinations like stories that I could discuss with Dr O objectively, but bizarre enough that she was concerned. It wasn’t clear how much of this was REM-sleep intruding into the waking state, a phenomenon of narcolepsy and how much was schizophrenia, especially when the hallucinations spoke to me and told me to harm myself, and I obeyed them.

The reason I relate all the above is that we eventually solved the problem, at least this one, and while I told the tale on my other schizophrenia site I feel it is important to tell it here as well.

 I haven’t wanted to muddy the waters before now or get people’s hopes up for a drug that might help one person in a million. But who’s to say what might be helpful or not in other cases of schizophrenia. So here, forthwith, is a fuller story of how I recovered.

 

In 2004, I did something quite desperate. In response to voices telling me to immolate myself, and on an impulse to put an end to their tormenting me, I set fire to my left leg, with the result that I had third degree burns and skin grafting. I had burned most of my forearms before this, but incrementally, and had burned out cigarettes against my face too, but have never done anything quite so dangerous as this. I realized how close I had come, pouring lighter fluid over me, to setting myself on fire, not to mention the building itself. It could not happen again. So the first step, beyond choosing life over death, was vowing to take every medication I was prescribed as prescribed, without fail, until the doctor’s orders changed.

 

I made up a contract, after I got out of the hospital, and gave it to my visiting nurse, saying that I would not refuse a single dose of medication ever. And in fact, I did not. That certainly stabilized me to the point where I stayed out of the hospital, though I didn’t feel particularly well. Then, I finally agreed to try a drug Dr O had for a year been urging me to take. Xyrem, a night-time drug for narcolepsy, is meant to regulate sleep in narcolepsy, help the patient attain slow wave sleep, and thereby enable her to be more awake during the day. If I could be awake and alert during the day, the theory went, the spells of waking dreaming would  happen less often, I would need fewer stimulants, and the sleep attacks would cease…among other things. 

 

Xyrem is not a drug without a difficult past. Once known as the “date rape drug” it has faced bitter controversy. Hearing were held in congress over whether it had any therapeutic uses. Luckily, testimony by persons with narcolepsy convinced the powers that be not to ban the drug outright. Thanks to their efforts it is still available, under very special circumstances, and with careful supervision, from one central pharmacy in Michigan or Illinois, as an orphan drug, schedule III or IV.

 

It is however a difficult drug to take, and I admit that no matter how quickly I get it down, I dread it each time. A liquid, just a tiny amount, maybe 6ml, mixed with water or grape juice or non-acidic kool-ade and taken just before bed. It’s bad tasting — actually on the salty side — so you have to dilute it well, but not more than they say. Then, the worst part, you must pour a second dose, put it on your nightside table, set an alarm for 3-4 hours later, wake and take a second dose, no matter how deeply asleep you already were!

 

When I first started taking it, falling asleep terrified me, because I just tumbled into blackness after twenty minutes, and the plummeting off that cliff into unconsciousness was precisely what had always made me reluctant to sleep at night. I had a hard time falling asleep for weeks, feeling the bed rock beneath me, my body trembling and my ears roar, and all sorts of unnerving bodily sensations that turned out to be more fear than anything else. After about a month, though, I was able to take the drug without trouble, except for the middle of the night awakening, which bedevils me to this day…

 

I found a website, MyCalls.com where you can set up a schedule of recorded messages that they will play at a certain time at night when they automatically call you to wake you, but I find that I barely hear the phone after a certain number of calls, and when I do, I simply pick it up, press one, to cancel the call, and hang up, then fall asleep again. Even if I don’t manage to do that much, I know the phone will quit ringing eventually, and that the calls will cease after three repeats. I’m lucky if I manage even to hear them at all; if I’m in a really deep Xyrem-doze at the time I’ll simply sleep right through.

 

The effects of taking Xyrem can be felt within two weeks if you’re lucky, though it takes months for some, and for me it was a miraclous 12 days. My improvements however, had nothing whatsoever to do with narcolepsy, which was the strangest thing. Improvement in that sphere did take months to appear. What improved were the last symptoms of schizophrenia.

 

The last little but still important symptoms just fell away: I began to look at Dr O and finally knew what she, and certain other people, looked like; I began to gradually, shade by shade beome desensitized to the color red, which had terrorized me for decades; when the evening visiting nurse asked me if had been hearing any voices that day, I could honestly answer, No. I felt little paranoia, had no trouble distinguishing reality from non-reality, and for the first time began to understand why my delusions were delusions and that  the voices were only false perceptions inside my head.

 

Since we hadn’t started or stopped or changed any other drug in a long time, it seemed clear that Xyrem was responsible for this miracle. I really don’t have any idea if it would work for anyone else. Dialysis worked for Carol North, a former schizophrenic turned psychiatrist, who wrote WELCOME SILENCE. Since then, according to her,  it has worked for no one else and she does not recommend it. So I might be the ONLY one that Xyrem could help. Nevertheless, a nagging part of me reminds me that psychosis is often described as a waking nightmare, and perhaps this is for a reason. If Xyrem helped this go away, literally, for me, (it is part of narcolepsy), who’s to say what it would do in others with schizophrenia…

 

Now it is 2009, a couple of years after I wrote most of the above. I would like to add  the following: when I get my 8 hours of good Xyrem-mediated rest at night, with the proper proportion of slow wave delta sleep, I feel like a million dollars the following day.  That does not, however, keep all my symptoms at bay, nor does it enable me to cope with everything as well as I wish I could…My apartment seems to “fall apart” and it is hard to get it together by myself, so Lynnie pays my friend Jo to help me every two weeks (she is also a professional housekeeper) lest it get completely out of hand. My stamina is still limited, so I have to keep a careful watch on how much I commit myself to each day, and in a sense how far from home I go (lest I can’t get back before I get exhausted).

 

 

Exhaustion is my biggest fear…that and sleepiness. I am so afraid that I will end up somewhere, as I have, and suddenly find myself overcome with sleepiness, and have nowhere to fall asleep for a half hour. That feeling is such agony, and indeed can be overpowering. What then? is my worst nightmare…And the outcome has sometimes been negative to the max.  I do my best to take my medication both at night and on time during the day to avoid getting sleepy when I can least afford it. ( I’m always sleepy at 11am, and usually sometime between 3-6pm) I have my cell phone set every day at 11am, but too often I ignore it or find myself somewhere too incovenient to stop and take a pill, to my great detriment later when I find myself suddenly drowsy while driving, or feeling a sleep attack coming on while visiting Joe in the hospital…

 

Nevertheless, Xyrem has been a miracle drug for my schizophrenia (Lyme-induced or not). First of all, the other drug cocktail apparently treated my more florid positive symptoms, but according to my twin, a psychiatrist, the Xyrem treated the negative ones, made me seem normal: all the things I could do truly did knit together. She didn’t know I was on it, but when I appeared at her door after taking it for about a month, she opened the door, took one look at me, stepped back, and said, “Oh. My. God.” Then she rcovered a bit, “You look wonderful, Pammy, normal.” She says I looked her square in the eye, was wearing something colorful for the first time in decades, had curled my hair and was even wearing make-up, (never again!) as if I actually cared how I looked. She couldn’t believe it. She said my walk was almost normal, that I was less awkward in my body. She felt like she had her twin back.

Art and artwork, Book, Poetry, Recovery, Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia: “Divided Minds” and Recovery

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The day our book, “DIVIDED MINDS: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia” came out, in mid-August 2005, Carolyn/Lynnie, my twin sister, and I had three engagements scheduled, including a radio interview, a TV appearance, and, that evening, our first public  speaking/reading engagement at a local library. Due to advance publicity and widespread interest, it turned out that the venue had had to be changed to accommodate all the people who had called ahead indicating they planned to attend: instead the usual small room at the library, we were to speak in the auditorium at the Town Hall.

 

I made it through the day all right, but by evening, I was beginning to become symptomatic, hearing people unseen whispering over my shoulder and seeing familiar dancing red particles I called the “red strychnines.” Nevertheless, I was determined to make it through the final “gig” of the day in one piece. I was, however, getting more and more nervous, despite taking my evening medications early. Finally, Lynnie suggested I take a tiny chip of Ativan, not enough to make me sleepy but enough to calm my anxiety. I resisted up until the last minute, when, finding the stress unbearable, I agreed to it. She ran to get me some water, and came back with two cold bottles that had been set aside for us all along.

 

Then, we were on. Lynnie had done some speaking before, and seemed to me to be amazingly relaxed in front of the 340 people who overflowed from the first floor onto the balcony above. When she introduced me to read a section of a chapter I had rehearsed over and over until I could do so with the proper ease and feeling, I got up, trembling, and walked to the podium, wondering if my voice would tremble also.

 

In the book’s margins I had everything written out, from my introduction to the passage to instructions to myself on where to slow down, where to raise my voice, where to pause and so forth. I raised my head and looked at the audience, then looked down at the text and taking a breath, began.

 

I was surprised to hear my voice sound as strong as it did and wondered how long I could keep it up, knowing how fatigue and awareness of the audience could make it weaken and go tight on me. Indeed, after a particular spot in the book brought painful laughter from some in the audience, I could barely speak. I had coached myself for this eventuality: Breathe, I told myself silently. Breathe through it, keep reading but breathe slowly and calmly as you read and your voice will relax and stay loose. To my intense surprise and relief, it worked. I made it through the entire segment. “Thank you,” I murmured, indicating that I was through,” though it was obvious from the text that the piece had come to its natural end.

 

The audience burst into applause. People stood up, all of the audience stood and clapped. I didn’t know what to do. They were applauding me? What had I done to deserve this? Even Lynnie was on her feet and smiling. She nodded at me, telling me it was okay. Her eyes seemed to sparkle, as if they were full of tears. My own eyes were wet and I was too embarrassed to wipe them…

 

Lynnie then gave a speech of her own, a wonderful speech, ending with her asking me to stand up. and this too received a standing ovation. We looked at one another.. Who’da thunk? our eyes asked in pleased but puzzled amazement. Then it was over. But not quite. There was still a long line of well wishers with books to be signed and many people who wanted to talk to us. I was so tired that I let Lynnie field most questions, and   hid behind her or busied myself signing and pretending to pay attention to her, so I didn’t have to talk myself. In truth, I was exhausted, and though elated the evening had gone so well, on the verge of tears from sheer relief…

 

When we left, there were only a few people remaining in the hall. The library employee who had given us the opportunity to speak, told us it was one of the best attended events he had ever scheduled. We thanked him or Lynnie and Sal, her new boyfriend, did, I mostly lagged behind, and  followed  as if in a trance. Then we headed out into the warmth of the August night.

 

After the success of that night, the book tour, and later our paid (Lynnie was paid, I was not, as she had to take time off from her practice to do so) engagements became easier and easier, especially after we worked up speeches of our own and developed a rhythm and interaction with one another that seemed to work well. But it was wearying, and I wasn’t always taking my medication as I was supposed to. I still hated Zyprexa, which we had cut to 2.5mg plus Haldol and Geodon, and so I skimped on  it as often as I could, as well as the deadening Haldol. Geodon was the only antipsychotic I was on that seemed to have no objectionable side effects, but it clearly was not effective by itself. So even as we made our way out to Tucson, AZ I was skating on the edge.

 

2006, fall. I had made it 18 months since my last hospitalization but fatigue and exhaustion and it may be (I do not now recall for certain) not taking all my medications as prescribed conspired to allow in the same hallucinations that had such devastating consequences back in 2003/4. I was to set my whole body on fire, they told me, not to kill myself but to scar myself so badly that all would shun me, leave me alone, which was what I deserved, and what they ought to do in order to be safe. Because I could not promise not to act on these commands, I was hospitalized not far from where Lynnie lived at the time. I spent a month there, a very difficult and painful disruption in my life about which I have written earlier (see the entry about “trust”).

 

I was hospitalized it seemed every five months after that, until 2008, when I managed another 18 months. But life in between those stays was improving. Although we still did occasional speaking “gigs” we slowed down on those a great deal, so my time was more my own. I had made a papier mache llama once in 2004 when I was hypomanic, and it had taken all year to paint it, after I’d come home from the hospital no longer high. But the fun of it had stuck with me and in 2007 I made a turtle, a huge tortoise and took a couple of months painting it. In between I created some small objects. Then over December 2007 and January 2008 I built and painted my first large human, the Decorated Betsy. I was off and running, with Dr John Jumoke coming in April, May, and June of 2008 and the Shiny Child Ermentrude started in October of 2008 and finished in early January 2009.

 

Also in this period of time — between 2005-2009 — I put together my first manuscript of poems written over a 20 year period about living with schizophrenia, and another manusript of more recent poems, not about schizophrenia, and sent the first one off to the press which is publishing it, in their series on chronic illness. Once it comes out, probably in March, I will be free to finish work on the second. I will send that one out  and hope it too gets published as I prefer those poems to the ones in the first, though I have had rave reviews on that one, at least from the people who have seen it so far. I, of course, as the author, can only view it through the jaundiced lens of self-criticism and self-hatred…

 

Plus ça change, plus la meme chose. (and some things never change…)For all the seeming success I have had in these past three years of recovery, I still struggle with abysmal lack of self-regard, and chronic paranoia. If and when I find myself a new therapist (I must soon leave Dr O, as the travel time 1.5 hours there and 1 hour home  has become too much for me, and too it may be that she will no longer be continuing her practice, though I do not know that for certain…But in this economy, I can no longer afford the ride there as well as her fee. And I think too it is time to move on…both for her sake as for mine.) ..if and when I find a new therapist, it is those two things, self-esteem and the very right to have it, and paranoia — how to either end it, or live with it, are my two major goals I want to deal with, head on.

 

But then, maybe that’s all we have ever done, Dr O and I, dwelt forever on my lack of self-esteem and my paranoia, getting nowhere for all that. Perhaps she had the wrong tactics, the wrong methods, or else perhaps I am hopelessly mired in  my own worthlessness and suspiciousness — for lack of a better word, though paranoia means so much more than that…

 

In any event, I have tried here to describe in one entry a little of what has gone on for me since the book came out, since the beginning of my recovery. But my recovery truly began when I’d started Xyrem some months before. That is the drug that caused Lynnie to exclaim upon seeing me, two months after I’d started it, “Pammy, you’ve changed. You look wonderful, you’re back.” Xyrem, book, papier mache, poetry…all together gave me parts of a life that became somehow worth living, and it is worth living, even if at times of dark forgetting, as in February, I lose track of the one fact I need most to remember.

Recovery, Schizophrenia, Writing

Schizophrenia: Recovery and the Reality Test

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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? 

Lyme Disease, Mental Health, Vision therapy

Vision Therapy and Schizoaffective Disorder

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I combined two subjects in my heading –and they are related — in order to “recapture” as many readers who might come back looking for an entry after three weeks of nothing…

 

I’ve been in the hospital. Yes, a relapse of schizoaffective disorder, due, I think, to stress, poor sleep, worse eating and terrible time management,  in tandem with a flare-up of the underlying infection  of Lyme disease (for which I’d had a positive Western Blot test as late as 2006, five years into treatment).

 

I was in fact overwhelmed, sad, depressed, tired and sick of it all. I wanted to write and do my sculpture and it seemed as if everyone wanted many and more pieces of me and my time. Despite all the successes of the past year, I felt hopeless to change things On Effexor, after a long two and a half weeks, my spirits rose and my hopelessness diminished. I was able to unblinder myself, removing the brimmed hat I wore day and night, and enter the world again (in terms of mood, the affective part of the disorder).

 

In terms of the schizophrenia aspects of the disorder,  this hospitalization was brutal. I heard my name, my full name, being called 100 times an hour, on any given day. When people spoke to one another within my view, I could see (and heard it) that every word  spoken between them was my name, and nothing more. The entire ward had nothing better to do than to persecute me by saying, yelling, whispering my name.

 

Then one day something that really scared me, they whispered, “I’m choking myself. I’m choking myself. Pam, start choking yourself. Start choking yourself.” Always, almost always before this time, when faced with such “command hullucinations” I blindly obeyed the directives of the “dictator-voice,” too afraid to do otherwise. This time, rather than obey and do as he or they insisted, I ran out of my room. I looked up and down the hallway for anyone — anyone! — a mental health worker, a nurse, even the ward secretary would do.  No one .

 

What to do? What to do? I raced back to my room, stood  just inside the doorway. No, I could not stay, not with this voice assaulting my brain. I had to find help. Somehow. Then I heard someone coming down the hall, briefly stopping at every room to check on its occupant: the mental health worker “on the floor” which is the say, the one who was assigned to do fifteen minute checks that evening. Stacy, with the long dreads, was  just the person I needed.

 

 

“Stacy,” I whispered urgently when she came nearer. “Stacy, I need to tell you something.”

 

“What is it, Pam?” she smiled.

 

“They’re telling me to start choking myself.”

 

“Who is?”

 

“They are, the people who talk to me, the voices if you need to call them that.”

 

She frowned. “You aren’t going to act on that, are you. Now, come. Let’s find your nurse and see what he can do for you.” Then she took my hand and led me up the hallway to the medication room where Paul was doling out nighttime pills too early for my taste. “Paul, I think tonight, Pam needs her antipsychotics early. What does she have?”

 

He told her what I was taking, and they murmured together a little. I assumed they were discussing what I’d just told Stacy. After I’d taken the pills, Stacy again took me by the hand and walked me down the hallway to my room.

 

“You gonna be all right now?” she asked.

 

I nodded, dubious that the meds would do the trick, but hopeful in any event. I knew now that I could in fact ask for help and be given it, that I did not have to obey the voices not even when they demanded action.

 

But that was only one of many, many incidents. I won’t bother to recount them all, or even just one other, not right now. All I want to say is that the voices never did let up until the final weekend, due to stress caused by a very disruptive patient. It was only the weekend before the day I was discharged, when she’d been booted out, that the ward was tranquil enough for the voices to diminish, and then by Monday begin to cease. Yet even at the very same time, another problem reared its head…

 

This is chronic neuro-Lyme: plots abounding, exaggerated startle, acute dyslexia, increased paranoia and rampaging ideas of reference…I had them and worse in 2000 during the massive psychotic break at Y2K and I had all or most during this hospitalization in a diminished form, when the antibiotics were changed and failed to protect me from a recrudescing infection.

 

Now, why or how does Vision Therapy tie into this? It is related because while in the hospital, that closed-in space with blinds on the windows so the view is largely obscured, I lost my ability to see 3-D, to perceive depth and space. I even lost my ability to read or untangle letters on the page or properly read the words on a computer screen. I noticed this one day when I looked to see if the pen was clearly above the paper, and found that I could not easily say that it was, that I was deducing it from the overlap and the shadows. Occasionally, depth perception would flicker on then off, and it was delightful, but most often I found it was off, and decided to let it be. I knew how to restore it, that it could be restored, and that Dr D would help me if I needed help. So I figured, the worst would be I’d have to re-train my eyes, but the best part of that would be the thrill of re-entering the beauty of the borderline between 2D and 3D.

 

In the follwoing posts I plan to describe the Vision Therapy sessions that help me regain my depth perception, and also in others discuss aspects of schizoaffective disorder, the schizophrenia aspects as well as what I know about depression.

 

Stay tuned…

Brain, Mental Health, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia

Delusions and Paranoia: past experiences

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During the second part of what I call my Y2K Meltdown, when I was hospitalized for 3 months, first in central and then in southern Connecticut, I was extremely — but what I call serially– paranoid. What I mean by this is that plots occurred to me one after another seemingly without end. A new conspiracy would “appear” out of nowhere, as of course paranoid plots tend to, generated as they are by that two step process, described in the “Paranoia and Hallucination” entry. It would “do its thing” as they say, run its course, wreak its own havoc, then having done so, pop or be defused, and disappear. But almost immediately and, without my having any sense that this was happening or had any pattern, in its place another conspiracy would arise to take its place.

 

An example: at one point during that same hospital stay, having smelled what I was certain was marijuana coming from the art supplies room, I became convinced that the staff had been infiltrated by drug dealers selling weed and stronger drugs to patients. I’d mentioned the smell — no doubt some innocuous meaningless odor, if it existed at all — to a male nurse, and the look he gave me convinced me that he was involved. As a result, I realized that my knowledge of the presence of drugs on the unit made me dangerous to him and the other dealers. I felt frightened that he might retaliate, threaten me, or worse, hurt me when no one was around or could help me or know he was responsible.

Terrified enough to start talking, I told the doctor, and I called my sister and begged her to come in and sign me out. Please take me anywhere else, I begged. I would agree to any other hospital only get me out of there where I was in mortal danger. It was, I knew, after visiting hours, indeed it was after bedtime, but she had to come in and get me, now, or I might not survive the night.

 

Incredibly, she actually came in, if only to make sure that the staff was aware of my extreme distress. I knew only that she came to check out the drug situation and was devastated when she left without taking me home with her, though by then she had managed to “talk me down” some, convince me that I was in less danger than I believed, and that at least some of the staff were on my side and would be watching out for me all night.

 

Somehow, her words got through to me, and by the next day, the matter of the drug  conspiracy was resolved, though I cannot recall exactly how.

 

All I know is that as the urgency of that situation ebbed, I became aware that a new patient had arrived on the unit. Cally wore a raglan-sleeved sweater made of what I immediately apprehended was a washable wool yarn called “Candide.” Now, I knew only one other person aside from myself who knitted sweaters like that made of Candide yarn and she was the woman who had taught me to do so. “Lisa” not only knitted many such a sweater but did so for her long lost daughter, “Cally,” who had been given away for adoption many years before. The fact that “Cally” lived in North Dakota, last I knew, was of no importance to me. What seemed of paramount, vital and decisive importance was 1) the Candide wool and raglan sleeves, and 2) the fact that Cally appeared to have Lisa’s ballet-slender body type. These two coincidences in fact absolutely clinched the matter. Cally was “Cally,” wasn’t she?

 

These equivalences might not have been so critical to me, except that, it suddenly seemed that Lisa had died. She had committed suicide, so the message was communicated to me, and I had now to inform Cally of the fact that I’d known her mother way back when. I felt it was incumbent upon me to tell her what she had been like, that was the mission I’d been given. But  first I needed to ascertain beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Cally was indeed Lisa-my-former-friend’s daughter “Cally”…

 

If this was not a true paranoia that instantly arose following the death of the drug dealing plot, it was a delusion coupled with the felt urgency to act on what I was certain I knew (not so different from the marijuana delusion after all). And it was only one of a long string of plots and serial delusions that followed one upon another almost without a break that winter and spring. Just as I described in my entry of the other day, not once in the midst of any of these conspiracies or delusions was I cognizant of what was going on or able to step back and analyze the situation with any objectivity. At that time, I did not even have the tools I have now to dissect an incident after the fact: I was at the utter mercy of my brain illness, without any insight whatsoever. Now, at least, I can step back after the experience and say, Wow, I must have been really paranoid to think such a thing, or That was a hallucination after all…My goal, and a real triumph would be to recognize these things in medias res, that is, right while they are happening, but so far that does not seem to be possible.

 

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Paranoia and Hallucination

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Argh… An incident of paranoia and, hallucination unrecognized by any of us, including me, caused certain people close to me unnecessary distress this week.  I won’t go into the details of that particular incident, except to say that I had absolutely no appreciation for the fact that I was both paranoid and under the influence of false perceptions and so took what I hallucinated as solid reality, with predictable consequences. Since I felt attacked and “heard” corroborating evidence, when I accused the responsible parties, as I felt certain they were, you can imagine how people reacted…Anyhow, I don’t really know how to make things right now, since the accusations themselves seems to reveal a fundamental lack of trust, however paranoid and generated out of the whole cloth that is my imagination going full tilt…I don’t imagine it would  help anyone much to say that this has happened many many times before, and that I have accused so many people of so many outlandish things that it embarrasses me even in the remembering…Nor that some, no, most of the accusations have had utterly NO basis in fact other than the predisposition of my brain at that precise instant in time. They didn’t even reflect any longstanding attitude, so much as a temporary, very fleeting feeling that burst out as full-blown paranoia-of-the-moment.

 

Be that as it may, instead of dissecting this particular incident, I want to discuss paranoia of the rather prosaic sort that afflicts me these days, rather than the grandiose and global kind — involving the usual suspects like the CIA plus certain shadowy figures known as The Five People — which used to. These days, paranoia — which I’ve been taught to recognize and deal with by my psychiatrist, though success at either task remains elusive as best — reveals itself most often at the grocery store or the post office or the lobby of my “elderly-disabled” apartment complex. Or it might pop up in my suddenly suspecting  theft by someone near and dear, or accusations of malfeasance or betrayal by someone who would have no possible reason or motive for such an act, if an act of that sort were even in the realm of being contemplated. But usually the accusation is so outrageous as to be laughable if it weren’t so insulting or potentially dangerous to reputation or livelihood.

 

What happens in general is something like this: (and Dr O has broken it down for me, knowing the neurology of paranoia) my brain generates a feeling, that is the amygdala spontaneously, chemically, spurts out neurotransmitters of some sort that spell “fear” or “threat” coupled with a sense of absolute certainty. I don’t know if there has to be a trigger for this amygdala burst or not, but it seems to me that stress does induce it more often than calm does, and that certain stresses bring it on more often than others. But that is not to say that I can ever predict when or if my amygdala will produce an outburst at any given time; it is definitely unpredictable to the max! So imagine that I am, say, visiting someone in the hospital with another friend, and in that stressful situation — crowded hospital, stress of strange place and sick friend and not knowing what to do — my amygdala pours out the fear neurotransmitter. I’m suddenly on alert and feeling threatened. Someone is attacking me, my brain decides, and he or she is right there in the room with me! In fact, I just heard them both conspire against me, the sick friend and the well friend visiting him…They are both in on it and against me! I hate them both, they got me here on false pretenses and now are plotting against me, they want to hurt me, to do something to me, they…And so it goes.

 

Anyhow, after the primary flood of “threat” feeling (“the feeling is primary” and that feeling is almost always fear in some form or another) the brain’s longer pathway — as I understand it — kicks in and generates an explanation, a storyline to go along with the “threat feeling.” The important thing to know is that the storyline need not make any sense whatsoever. The brain doesn’t give a damn whether there is any evidence outside of it to explain the threat feeling, because the threat feeling is already inside and felt…So anything can explain it, literally anything can seem or feel reasonable, and does. So wherever the mind goes, or tends to go at that moment, will be the form of the storyline that explains the threat-feeling. If one’s brain travels along the line of (I should only be so reasonable) “why do I feel so threatened?  Did they just say something bad about me? Maybe I’d better ASK them! then one is in good shape, because at least then one can check out what is going on, and short circuit any tendency to mistake false perception for reality. But for me, while I do not, often, these days go so far as to opine that cosmic forces are behind my threat-feeling, I do find other less than reasonable sources than reality to explain it: voila paranoia. 

 

One example, when I am in the grocery store, particularly when alone, I almost always hear and as a result know that I am being followed, and instructed as to what I can and cannot buy. I generally race through the store in an effort to get out, and get away from my pursuers,  or if I do not, suffer from dreadful fear of imminent assault or at least dire consequences. At a minimum, in the best of times, I know that someone is following me and keeping track of what I put in my cart, and will be transmitting the “evidence” to a central authority, which will lead to later consequences that I will regret (which my mind spins into longer more detailed scenarios that change each time I am in the store but which vanish as soon as I am safely back in the car or walking down the hill a distance away…)

 

So that is both an explanation of how paranoia arises — from Dr O’s mantra, “the feeling is primary” , meaning the fear that is initially and instantly generated from that burst of neurotransmitters or neuroelectricity to the brain’s subsequent confabulation of a narrative, an explanation for that all-compassing feeling of threat and the certainty that the threat is real. And I hope I have given some examples of paranoia, specific examples, where the situation stimulates the content without the two being necessarily significant or significantly related. For example, in the instance of the two friends at the hospital, it is the fear and the feeling of threat and certainty that provides the stimulus for the paranoia, rather than any underlying distrust of the friends. The friends are simply the carriers of the fear and the certainty of the reality of the threat, which would have been borne by almost anyone stepping into the picture at that time…

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Schizophrenia and Trust

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Today I want to discuss the issue of trust, a specific kind of trust in my case, which is intimately tied to my sense of personal evil and a resultant paranoia that persists to this day. (Note: while I discuss this in the context of schizophrenia, the etiology of my schizophrenic symptoms remains Lyme disease.) Because I am evil, I must assume that people are out to get me, to kill me, to get rid of me by any and all means. This is a logical conclusion even as it leads me to a state of more or less constant fear and suspicion. I worry about where the next attack is going to emanate from. This puts me in a difficult position with most people, who do not like to contemplate the fact that I do not trust them. I must reassure each and every one that they are the exception to the rule, when by and large no one truly is, because I assume that everyone in their heart of hearts despises me! Deep down, deep down, no one really feels for me anything but the purest antipathy and revulsion, and perhaps unconscious to them even, wishes me ill (at a minimum) or like my twin, wants me dead.

That said, I am able to put this awareness aside and deal with people on the as if level, as if they were not my enemies, as if they did not wish me mortal ill, as if I were not somehow a source of scorn and disgust to them. I am aware of it nonetheless, and aware of the double entendres being exchanged, or being sent one way to me. But I do not allow any expression of comprehension to show on my face. That would be breaking the compact of civility. No, I pretend that I didnt “get it” and act insensible to everything but what is said on the surface. but I do get it, and I know what is really being said in the subtext…

Sessions with Dr O are an island of relief for me in all this. I don’t know why talk therapy is so frowned upon for people with schizophrenia. It has been nothing but a blessing for me, despite the many bad experiences I have had with certain incompetent shrinks over the years. Dr O has taught me so much about my symptoms, how to recognize them, what they are and how to handle them, both emotionally and intellectually, how to wrestle them and overcome them, that I cannot but be grateful…And I would never want to have gone the “meds only” route all this time. No, I think that is a terrible mishandling of schizophrenia, and deprives most people with the illness of what might have helped them recover to the best level possible.

But one thing about trust and Dr O is that I need to trust her to take care of herself vis a vis me. I need to know that she will not let me burden her or wear her down. For example, and this is really painful to report, two years ago when I was in the hospital with what turned out to be relapsing CNS Lyme disease, I must have seemed impossible to deal with. I was out of control, on one-to-one almost the entire 4 weeks I was there. I attempted suicide, refused half my medications an hour after agreeing to take all of them…BUT still I knew that when she said she would see me even during her August vacation that it was a poor decision, and I did not want her to do it. I just didn’t know how to tell her, nor if anyone would see me in her place. Well, she made some rotten decisions and got furious with me over things that she ordinarily would have handled better and differently…and finally, to my great relief, took her vacation and got another doc to see me in her stead. But I felt terrible, because she left abruptly and in anger, and it needn’t have happened in the first place if she had taken care of herself and gone on vacation the way any other doctor would have. So I spent the next week and a half in her absence thinking I would not continue to see her. I was too dangerous to her. Because I had not taken proper care to NOT be “too much” even for her…so it was time to leave.

Finally, I was discharged by my demand, no longer committed on the 14 day paper I’d been signed in on in the middle of my stay, not wanting to be still there when she got back. I’d see her in 6 days and for 6 days I deliberated whether or not I would return or find someone new. It wasn’t rancor on my part at all, it was purely fear that I could so misjudge a situation and my effect on things that I’d accidentally allowed myself to over-burden someone before walking away, before saying, Never mind, I’m okay, relieving them of any responsibility or worries. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t meant anything by refusing the meds except that I’d wanted to take only one pill of each category, not two or three of each category, and I figured that if I did so while she was away on a long weekend, and was fine when she returned, then I’d have proved it was okay to do so. My memory is SO bad that I simply did not remember that just an hour before that I had agreed to take ALL the meds, including 3 Haldol. This sort of crazy lapse happens to me all the time. The memory simply wasn’t there to hold onto.

In any event, much as I wish it didn’t, that incident haunts me even now. I want to talk about it with Dr O but am afraid to bring it up lest she get angry all over again or refuse to hear my side. And besides, it is not the incident itself that bothers me so much as the fact that I did not protect her from me! I did not protect her from me! And so she was harmed by me, worn out, wearied to the point of exhaustion. True also is that fact that I worry as well that I cannot trust her to protect herself from me! And if she can’t or won’t, and I must, then there’s no point in my seeing her. The only way I can protect anyone is by getting out of the way. Only if I know that someone will protect themselves, take care of themselves vis a vis me and not do things in any special way for me, can I trust them to help me. Otherwise, it always backfires to my detriment.