Schizophrenia Diaries

At the age of 14, I started having serious hallucinations and blackouts. I’m half African American and half Native American, and I didn’t try to get help because, in both communities, they called that “going to the white man.” But I became an outcast, because my symptoms got so bad that none of my friends wanted to have anything to do with me.

Instead, I lived with these symptoms for four years. My mental illness got so bad that I couldn’t cope with school and they asked me to leave. I went to Miami to live with my father, but he threw me out; and from the age of 15 until I was 18 I lived on the streets of Miami, with constant hallucinations and delusions.

At 19, I joined the military. But I was still sick and, after basic training, they gave me an honorable discharge and directed me to get mental health treatment, so I did. After taking medication and seeing therapists, I went back to work two years later, as a cook. Four years after that, I got an associate’s degree from the Restaurant School of Philadelphia and became a chef.

I worked as a chef for about 15 years. But there was a lot of stigma around mental illness in the restaurant business. Every restaurant I worked at, I saw other people disclose about themselves and they wound up being badly harassed and losing their jobs. So I hid my illness.

In 1995 I started working part time for the Chester City Consumer Center . After attending the Center for six months, I had asked the director if there were openings and she said she had wanted to hire me for the last six months. I’m still at the Center, now as its director, and it will be 10 years in November. Working with the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, which is out there advocating for consumers, has helped me. Until I started working here, I felt like no one really cared.

Lamar Harris

Some people call me Aftie. This is what my family calls me.

Mostly what comes to mind right now are the misunderstandings and misJudgements I swim through, and have at times nearly drowned in.

Some people come to the conclusion that Im mentally ill based on life choices, an offensive lifestyle that is labelled inappropriate and wrong.

I became overwhelmed. Delusions and hallucinations were obvious at the age of 17…but i tried all i could, to push them away inside me and keep them to myself.

I did not know how to approach others about what was happening inside me…raised mormon and I felt i must be a nasty-wicked little thing, be doing something terribly wrong to be having this sort of waking nightmare. I was angry and fearful, and at times i still get this way, but i have memories and knowledge and experiences I may look to when I feel i can’t go on, or what’s the point.

Dancing…this is what i love most. My eating habits intrigue most…whether people are curious or discusted is another thing.

I bring up dancing and food….and meds…

Stretching and light yoga practice release tension and improve my mood and state of body incredibly…when walking in thrown in for good measure.

People say I have not given the meds enough time to do their magic.

But I swear my body would have shut down had i gone on with that little amount of circulation, and I love my eye sight…thank you very much. The tightness and increase in blood preasure causes my limbs to feel locked up and my flexibility is strained and forced.

I love to dance and it is what sets me free and such a reason to love life and live…when the health of my physical body is hurting and compromised and set off on a drowsy spinning flop of heaviness and exhustion…when im not up to dancing or my body is unable to, caused by meds i’m so curious to know if there are positive things from meds…how come ?

anyhow, i feel scattered now. And im taking seroquel and clopixol….im close to giving them up…they are scary as any episode ive been through.

Please words of encouragement.

Aftie

Schizophrenia knows no boundaries or borders

by Dean Johnston

Schizophrenia can come on rather suddenly around age 18 in men and 25 in women or it can have an insidious, meaning gradual onset. My schizophrenia seemed to start when I was about 17-18 although I was not a well adjusted teenager before that. I developed my first major romantic relationship at 17 which gradually deteriorated over the next four years. With an insidious onset you gradually lose your relationships with friends, family and lovers, as your symptoms increase and you end up quite alone.

My mother says now that she noticed a change around 18, that I lost all my ambition to suceed. When I was sixteen I scored in the top three percentile in a province wide mathematics contest, and my favorite subjects were math and physics. By the time I was eighteen I had lost interest in school and only applied to university because my father was so insistent I go. I was quite strange from 18-25 at high school and university and thought I needed psychological therapy along the lines of Gestalt therapy or Rolfing. I was a very rebellious teenager who experienced a lot of emotional turmoil. One significant indication of schizophrenia was my inability to plan my future. I took courses that sounded interesting, smoked a lot of marijuana and drank too much at parties. I was notably incapable of and uninterested in long term romantic relationships and in fact was very anxious in any kind of social situation. I doubt that any psychiatrist would have been able to diagnose schizophrenia at that point though. I graduated with an Hon B.Sc. from Trent University with a double major in biology and anthropology. I applied to one graduate school at the last minute as I realized that my degree was not a career and was accepted.

At graduate school in Nova Scotia in 1978 I kept going to the university clinic about my physical health, afraid that my health was going to fall apart, that I had picked up a form of syphyllis that couldn’t be detected by standard lab tests, etc. I was referred to a psychiatrist and before long I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. What started as having an analyst like Woody Allen became an involuntary hospitalization. I had some delusions that Jim Jones, who was responsible for 500 people committing suicide en masse, was trying to force me to commit suicide but I never told anyone. I was getting pretty confused though. Unfortunately no one mentioned schizophrenia to me or my father, who is a physician, and I thought I had just had some sort of nervous breakdown. I saw someone after I was discharged about once a month for a few months. I remember taking Chlorpromazine before I was hospitalized which I didn’t like and some Stellazine after I was discharged. My father encouraged me to take it but I was scared of it and I only took it for a little while. The medication seemed to cause my delusions and I believed that for many years.

My father convinced me to try and finish my year even though I wanted to drop out. It was a very miserable year for me. Some courses went unfinished and I was kicked out of graduate school. I worked for a summer in Toronto, the fall in London, and then I headed out west to Vancouver Island. I knew someone there in a small pulp mill town called Crofton but he moved up island and I rented an apartment in the strip joint tavern, alone again.

As I relapsed I had mostly delusions and paranoia. I thought the CIA was after me for awhile after I wrote a letter to the editor of Science magazine about how the US military was using dioxin as a weapon in Vietnam. My delusions had faded for the previous summer but they had never completely disappeared. That is to say I believed some pretty strange things. In Halifax I thought I had discovered the cause of World War Two. The influenza epidemic of 1918 changed peoples’ nervous systems so the cause of the war was a neurovirus. I thought my law professor in Halifax was very well connected with influential people in world politics and was telling people about my theory.

Various important people were coming from Europe to meet the man who discovered the cause of World War 2. So for example someone might come up to me in Crofton and talk about mopeds and I would think this man was the president of Motobecane, the world’s largest manufacturer of mopeds. People seemed to know me before I introduced myself, and the local townspeople seemed to be laughing at me. I remember once the political cartoon in the local paper seemed to be about me and people who picked me up hitchiking seemed to know who I was.

In the spring of 1980 I left Crofton forced out by the townspeople who demanded I get a job. I took the bus with no destination in mind until I ran out of money. From then on I usually hitchiked, mostly through Alberta and B.C. quitting a job with my first pay check because I found working with people so difficult. They were playing games with me and making fun of me. I would then hitchike somewhere else. I thought I was being followed by a WW2 veteran everywhere I went who wanted me to shape up by working in construction like he did after the war. I kept trying to escape him but he had friends everywhere. I slept in city parks, by the side of the road and in single men’s hostels. I was homeless and often penniless.

I remember once in Calgary staying at the single men’s hostel and not getting to eat very much for several weeks, becoming quite weak. I couldn’t work because I had dioxin poisining and this was affecting my cortical hormone balance making work too stressful. Tibetan buddhist lamas were reading my mind everywhere I went in Calgary, respectful and curious, because I had caused the Mt. St. Helen’s erruption for them earlier that year through tantric meditation.

I don’t think I quite understood or believed what was happening to me, but I was determined not to admit defeat and return to my parents house. It seemed like I had powerful friends who wanted me to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Only two years earlier I had been in graduate school, with a new friend, David Rae, discussing world politics while watching the CBC news at a local bar. David’s brother, Bob Rae, later became the Premier of Ontario.

Come late fall I was in Victoria, driven south by the approaching winter. There I was somehow able to pay rent and I stayed there for four years. I started studying Tibetan buddhism and took refuge in the lama who lived there, Tashi Namjyal. I thought he was capable of all kinds of supernatural powers of the mind like telepathy and telekinesis. It is a tremendous invasion of privacy to have someone reading your mind all the time uninvited. I believed he was controling my dreams while I slept as well. He said to me in his broken English, "you special" and I thought that meant I had a lot of natural ability to be a very powerful tantric like him. He was the equivalent of a graduate teacher in the Tibetan monastic system.

I had caused the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption with his guidance through tantric meditation. I had bad karma so I wasn’t given control or access to my power but by causing Mt. St. Helen’s to errupt the Tibetans were taking pressure off the California continental plates. We saved San Francisco.

I had gone to several family physicians about my physical problems of which dioxin poisining seemed to be the cause and I thought it was also causing my adjustment problems but the family doctors never realized what was happening to me and I stopped going to them and instead thought this Tibetan buddhist lama would be able to help me, because I did realize that something was wrong.

I was losing contact with reality gradually and stayed in abject poverty and I was miserable. I remember I bought a WW 2 rifle to please the WW 2 veteran and I would sit in my basement room with the barrel in my mouth and wonder if I should pull the trigger. I started to think Tashi Namjal was evil because he was celibate and I got messages from Beatle songs which I thought were from the Marharishi Mahesh Yogi to run away and that’s what I did. I thought there was a war going on between two groups, both with supernatural powers, that would decide the fate of humanity. I called one the Sexuals and one the Antisexuals, because these powers came from sexuality.

I forget some of my life out west. I do remember being very miserable and very alone, identifying with Milarepa who is a Tibetan saint of sorts. The Tantric tradition, which is very interesting, has its roots in India. In the ninth century these supernormal powers were close to becoming a part of society. Tibetan buddhism incorporates a celibate tantricism in its teachings which has survived I think because it is also very religious. I was entranced by the erotic temples in India like Konarak and determined to become a tantric and help the world rediscover the supernormal powers of the mind in sexuality.

In Toronto I managed to get a job changing lightbulbs at a large department store. I ran away twice, to England and Jamaica expecting to be welcomed personally by the Maharishi. When a terrorist bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie Scotland I thought it was an attempt on my life, which prompted me to fly immediately to the Maharishi in England but he wasn’t there and I came back the same weekend. I saw a movie called "Oedipus Rex" directed by Passolini and immediately flew to Jamaica expecting to meet the Maharishi. I was looking for Strawberry Fields mentioned in the Beatles song and there are two in Jamaica. It was a memorable trip. I ran out of money after one week and mostly learned the importance of money.

I was just a pawn in a secret war. I didn’t have any friends, any lovers, and very little contact with my parents between 1980 and 1990. My parents had moved to the States while I was in Victoria and I never told anyone what was happening. I lived in a cockroach infested rooming house never even realizing that Diazinon will eliminate cockroaches. I had a strong sense of mission to help humanity instead of myself and in my poverty I believed the cause of suffering in the world was overpopulation. My solution was to hybridize the AIDS virus with the common cold and eliminate 3 – 4 billion people.

I got a lot of messages from favorite Rock and Roll songs, from movies, cartoons and library books. The library was my special friend who could show me what I needed to know by having me open and read exactly the information I was looking for. Someone was leading me to the books I needed and that was too much for humans to be capable of. I started to believe I was in contact with aliens from outer space. At first there were two kinds. I learned humanity was going to become extinct from a nuclear holocaust that would break up the continental plates. The oceans would evaporate with all the molten lava and I was going to live in a box out in space with a woman the aliens had been breeding since life started on this planet. She had dark blue skin like the Hindu god Krishna and we were going to have children who would be turquoise in colour. We were going to be the only survivors of Armageddon and we would propagate the species. Only girls would be born as identical twins and they would be able to impregnate each other from a single drop on their funny long noses. I would be the last surviving male although I would only live a thousand years.

I believed that to be my destiny completely and got a lot of messages everywhere I went. I heard voices several times but mostly I experienced telepathy. I had what are called "ideas of reference" where things are thought to have a particular meaning just for you. For example, a license plate on the street could be an important and appropriate message for me from the aliens. By the end my fate had changed a bit. I was going to become an alien and have eternal life and be capable of time travel and my companion was going to be a part time anthropolgy professor at the University of Toronto. Sexuality was as important as intelligence to the aliens and they had evolved beyond the use of machinery to doing everything with their mind. I thought they were turning on my nervous system with experiences of pain so that every neuron was active, so that I would be able to experience greater pleasure as an alien. I asked them once if a machine might not make the process less painful and I remember them laughing, saying "Machines… Dean, we don’t have any machines."

My delusions changed as the aliens instructed me on the real nature of reality. Three things happened as my contact with reality became very tenuous. I got in trouble with the law, I became alcoholic, and I lost my job.

One night after convincing the aliens to transfer my mind to another body I got mad at the aliens, and started breaking windows in the rooming house I was living in. The police came, subdued me and I spent a couple of nights in jail. The judge realized I was a psychiatric case because I carried a pocketknife to defend myself against homosexuals. The world’s most powerful man was a homosexual and he was trying to make me a homosexual. By then the Maharishi was my second worst enemy. I believed they both knew about the end of the world and my destiny with the aliens and they wanted to take my place. I didn’t mention that in court though.

Nobody asked why I did what I did. I got three years probation with the condition that I see a psychiatrist for those three years. Psychiatrists are only human though, while I was almost alien and they wouldn’t have understood what was happening so I never told them anything. I went to my appointments to stay out of jail.

Jail was such a shock to me. I was so mad at the aliens after that experience I tried to force them to give me a new body by killing the body I was in. I bought several bottles of vodka and guzzled them like water until I passed out knowing that people overdose and die from alcohol. I got pneumonia but lived and decided that the aliens wouldn’t let me die, only experience pain until it was time for me to go.

Although I didn’t drink anything for awhile I eventually started to drink and heavily because I could afford it. You need $11 an hour to become an alcoholic. Originally I drank for the hops which I thought were medication for celibacy. My behaviour became more and more bizarre and I was fired from my job. I went from unemployment insurance to Welfare, brewing my own beer in plastic pails and eating in soup kitchens. I thought I was going to become an alien when I turned 37 because I saw a book written by the ancient seer Nostradamus entitled 3791. I thought that since he could see the future he would realize I was not capable of understanding the book and that all I would need to know could be explained in the title. I turned 37 in 1991 a year after moving to Guelph but I’m still here unfortunately.

I experienced many extreme emotions when I was psychotic with positive symptoms. In fact its a wonder I didn’t come into contact with the police before I did. I can say that I never harmed anyone but I realize I came very close, although I experienced more fear than anything else. I am by nature a gentle person who has never fought with anyone. Family members I have met in Guelph have usually had some experience of verbal abuse or physical assault from their ill relative before they were treated. I remember I thought I was dying from celibacy and I hated women for a couple years even though I went through adolescence with only feminist friends and was convinced women were the superior sex. Schizophrenia can force you to feel and do things that are not in character for you. Dr. E Fuller Torrey says violence in schizophrenia is predicted by three factors: a previous history of violence, substance abuse, and not on medication.

I would destroy my own possesions first like my guitar without having much choice. I shied away from people. I remember sitting on the ledge of a window on the sixth floor wanting to jump but knowing that the aliens would have an open truck loaded with mattresses come by just as I jumped and when I actually saw such a truck weeks later it only confirmed my conclusions.

I didn’t win the lottery though after I lost my job and the people in my rooming house started mainlining heroin in the living room. I was desperately poor by that point expecting to become homeless and sleep on a hot air vent and I couldn’t believe that was necessary in becoming an alien. I was experiencing quite a few blackouts from the drinking I was doing and getting scared of alcohol. I kept waking up in strange places. One fellow in the rooming house had attacked me with a chain such that I needed stitches above my eye. I was too disorganized and too poor to find another place to live. My mind seemed to be falling apart into the left brain, me, and a right brain I hardly knew who was in tremendous pain and very demanding, and a dinosaur or core brain, very powerful and very angry at me. I agreed to go to the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph to be treated for alcoholism. Going into hospital was the easy way to get out of a situation that was very frightening. That was at the end of my three year probationary period.

As I sobered up my delusions faded a lot and I realized I had no concrete proof of aliens or my imaginary wife. I also realized I couldn’t put my faith in aliens to take care of me. I moved into a basement room in Guelph and started a maintenance dose of antipsychotics. The year was 1990. It took several years to completely believe and understand that I had schizophrenia though. I was sure I had been misdiagnosed, and I would much rather have had bipolar disorder so I could compare myself to various famous people. I wanted to go off medication but the psychiatrists were very firm about that. Medication didn’t seem to have any effect so there was no reason not to take it. It kept my psychiatrist happy.

I was very depressed for several years and very lethargic. I didn’t accomplish very much and was quite anxious. I lived in basement rooms, had no friends and little contact with anyone. At that time I was seeing a psychiatrist at the Community Mental Health Clinic once a month or so. I don’t think my period of depression could have been avoided. Antidepressants didn’t help which suggests I didn’t have an actual depression. I was very anxious having nothing to do and no one to do it with and had very low self esteem. My mood eventually improved a bit and I made a couple of friends and became more active. I started to do a little volunteer work and I eventually met Rosemary and courted her. I started to work for some extra cash, delivering flyers and then the local newspaper. Rosemary and I moved into the apartment building where I delivered newspapers. We shared a two bedroom apartment for 16 months until the Provincial government made that too expensive.

The quality of my life has been improving a little each year for the last eight years so I can’t complain too much but every once in awhile I really feel the losses I am enduring. Life is a series of opportunities as you grow older, and I missed all of those opportunities. I wonder about my future alone. Living on a limited budget could make anyone miserable. Being celibate is a great loss many people don’t mention to anyone. I will never get to experience what a lot of people take for granted. I may never own a car. I may never marry. I may never have a vacation again, let alone full time employment. It is only in the past couple of years that I can say that I have been able to accomplish anything productive. Before that I was pretty unhappy and didn’t feel very good about myself.

My friend Susan says there are two kinds of people. You get on a plane that is supposed to go to Hawaii and instead the plane lands in Siberia. Susan prefers to use Arizona as the alternate destination. You can either learn to enjoy Siberia or forever feel bitter that you didn’t land in Hawaii. Lately Siberia has been fairly pleasant. My life does seem a bit "empty" compared to ordinary peoples lives. I also have a lot of unpleasant memories in which I’ve done things I now regret. Its difficult to know how much I’m responsible for and how much schizophrenia is responsible for. I think its important for me to focus on enjoying life as much as I can and not dwell on the past.

I went to Schizophrenia 96 a couple of years ago, sponsored by Eli Lilly. I was mistakenly booked at the hotel as Dr. Johnston and the next day at the conference in my sports coat and dress shirt I was just another psychiatrist and it felt pretty neat. This was the life I should have had. But the first keynote address by Dr. Weinberger, world reknown researcher in schizophrenia, compared finding the cause of schizophrenia to finding the cause of the TWA flight explosion that was in the news at that time. There was no evidence that it was a bomb. Finding out what happened when all you have are the twisted pieces of metal scattered along the ocean floor was causing difficulties. Over the three day conference I became very depressed realizing how appropriate that image was for me. I could empathise with the psychiatrists who were looking at their patient in front of them and asking themselves "why doesn’t this person have the same lifestyle that I enjoy?".

I have been living with schizophrenia for the past 18 years. I first became ill when I was attending university in Vancouver when I was 22 years old. At that time I was enrolled in my second year at law school at the University of British Columbia, having already completed a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Victoria the previous year. I was enjoying myself and taking part in many activities. Socially, I had quite a few friends and acquaintances; athletically, I was jogging five miles four times a week, I played tennis and soccer, bicycled, skied, went scuba diving, mountain climbing and hiking. During my first year at law school my grades were in the top quarter of my class and I had no problems handling the stresses of university life.

Within a few days in October 1976 all of this came to a crashing halt as I suddenly experienced my first psychosis. I can still remember those experiences vividly even now 18 years later. At first I thought I was coming down with the flu since the abnormal mental state I was experiencing was similar to the viral delirium of influenza but as I stayed in bed for a day my symptoms got even worse. I began to have delusions about the state of the world around me. Suddenly the noises made by cars and planes going by outside my house took on secret and deliberate meanings. I became convinced that I was involved in the start of a nuclear war and the only way for me to survive was to find the answer to a difficult riddle. During this first episode of psychosis I fluctuated between wild delusions of grandeur to deep depressions about my future. I thought I would become the next prime minister of Canada and rule by divine right over a new world order for our citizens. I was also visited by demonic voices. These grotesque distortions tormented me day and night until I could no longer distinguish between reality and nightmares.

In hindsight, one of my most dangerous delusions was probably the belief that I could fly, for if I had found a tall building, I might have easily climbed to the top and tried to jump off to test it out.

During the second day of my psychosis I began to wander in the streets of Vancouver following my disrupted thoughts and hoping to find the answer to all of life’s problems. After a few hours I ended up in someone’s backyard. I had another delusion that I had been magically transported 20 years into the future and owned a mansion I had at random found. Sitting there was almost blissful, the delusion at that point was even enjoyable; however, within a few minutes a police car arrived and two officers arrived on the scene and asked me what I was doing there. I thought that they were part of the conspiracy to have me made the next prime minister so I was quite friendly towards them as if I had been expecting them to arrive. After a few minutes they made some inquiries over the radio telephone and called for an ambulance. The attendants arrived and took me to the emergency room at the nearest hospital.

When I got to the hospital, I got even more paranoid. I thought the nurses and doctors were plotting to kill me. I had a wild delusion similar to a horror movie plot that hospitals were not places where people go to get better but rather where people go to get killed and then were chopped up into processed food and fed to everyone. I was placed in the psychiatric observation unit for 24 hours. My symptoms got worse. I began to hallucinate more intensely and the constant delusions continued. Eventually, the medical staff got in touch with a friend of mine who was a second year medical student at the time. He came to see me the next day and brought a psychiatrist with him who I agreed to see. Even with all my delusions and paranoia I guess I still had enough trust in my friend and agreed to do as he suggested. From there I was transferred to another psychiatric ward and started on a large dosage of haloperidol to control my symptoms. At first I had some severe side-effects from the medication. My muscles became rigid, my vision blurred and I slept about 20 hours a day; however, within two weeks my symptoms had remitted and I was able to be discharged from hospital. When I say my symptoms had remitted, I should point out that I am referring to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, that is the delusions, the hallucinations and the thought disorder. The so-called negative symptoms such as lack of motivation and depression actually got worse and were made more severe by the medication.

Upon discharge I returned to my studies at law school; however, trying to cope with university after such an episode of schizophrenia was extremely difficult. I was unable to concentrate and therefore my reading ability was almost zero. I had trouble remembering things and was still sleeping about 18 hours each day. With all this it was no wonder that I was failing my courses. Luckily, I got my exams postponed that year and was able to write them a few months later.

An interesting note about the stigma of mental illness and the legal profession at the time. My psychiatrist had to write a letter for me to the Dean of the law school in order for me to postpone my exams. He decided not to write the word “schizophrenia” as my illness but rather said I suffered from “emotional illness”. My doctor said that if the Law Society should one day find out I had schizophrenia, I would be disqualified from practicing law. However, the strategy almost backfired when the Dean at first would not postpone my exams because an emotional illness was not serious enough, he thought. Eventually, I did get my exams deferred and was able to write them later as I said.

Over the course of the next several months to several years my medication levels were reduced allowing me greater freedom from the horrible side-effects. As I practiced studying my academic skills returned to a point where I was able to pass my exams, although now I was at the bottom of my class instead of at the top. The following year I was placed on an antidepressant medication to assist me in functioning a little bit better. It didn’t seem to help that much and I just learned to live with the depression and the lack of motivation associated with the illness. Another of the side-effects of the medication for me was gaining weight. Within six months from first starting the treatment I had gained about 40 or 50 pounds. This only added to my depression and my poor self-esteem.

Over the next few years I got progressively better and was able to finish law school, find an articling position and become a practicing lawyer. However, I found that I had trouble competing with my peers, my stamina and motivation levels were quite low. I still had trouble interacting with others in relationships and tended to be more withdrawn than I had been before my illness. After about three years of being treated with medications my doctor decided to take me off all of them to see if I could function without them. I did very well for a number of years after that. I opened a law practice, I got married and moved into a new house. I certainly did not miss the side-effects of the haloperidol. I now had a greater range of emotions. My weight dropped to normal and I needed only 8 or 9 hours per night of sleep instead of the usual 12 or more that I was getting while on medications. I lived a relatively normal and fulfilling life for the next five years while off all medications. I did not have any symptoms of my illness during this period.

Unfortunately, in 1986 I had a sudden relapse in my illness. I became acutely psychotic while mountain climbing alone in a wilderness park here in British Columbia. Fortunately, I was able to return home without assistance from anyone. It was during this psychosis, however, that I believed aliens from outer space were communicating with me and that a fire was started in my house that set the house on fire and caused me to end up in court as a result. Within a few days of the fire I had signed myself into the local psychiatric hospital and was again placed on large doses of antipsychotic medication. I spent two months in hospital this time and upon discharge it was very difficult for me to function again. I had to give up practicing law because of the side-effects of the medication and the lack of motivation and inability to concentrate on my work. I slowly relearned most of the life skills necessary to find employment and function independently outside of hospitals. I worked at a drop-in centre working with people with schizophrenia and reconnected with many friends in the community.

In 1989 I began a relationship with a woman that continues today. She has been a tremendous support and encouragement to me over these past five years. I feel that successful relationships are a key factor in overcoming serious illnesses such as schizophrenia. The other person acts as a sounding board and gives feedback on a day to day basis and helps one grow and gain insight.

Since October of 1992 I have been working with three other people, two consumers of mental health services and one family member, in a partnership education program through the Schizophrenia Society and with the Ministry of Health. We work at educating various groups about serious mental illness using our partnership talks. In them we describe our personal experiences with mental illness and how it has affected our lives. This has proven to be a very powerful and successful way of teaching many people about mental illness. It has also become a way of breaking down the barriers between families, consumers of mental health services and professionals and allowing them an opportunity to work together to further the cause of mental health.

In conclusion, my experiences with schizophrenia were initially very devastating, derailing my career and almost destroying my future. Since those difficult times, I now use my experiences in a positive way to educate others and advocate for better services for all consumers of mental health services.

Editor’s Update (Feb. 14, 1996)

Since November 1995, Marco Baldini has been working full time as a legal research assistant for our provincial government. Last summer, Marco and Leslie bought a new condo in Victoria, and have settled down to marital bliss in our province’s capital city. In addition, Marco is on the Board of Directors of Riverview Hospital (our largest provincial psychiatric facility). This week, at the Riverview Hospital Board of Directors meeting, Marco made local psychiatric history. He proposed a motion that: “there be an immediate freeze on all further downsizing of Riverview Hospital.” His motion was passed unanimously.