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I am aware of the implications of the word “afflicts,” which supports a neurotypical bias, but I also believe in the suffering of people diagnosed with the schizophrenias and our tormenting minds.
Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable experience.
A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded
There is no blood test, no genetic marker to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is schizophrenic, and schizophrenia itself is nothing more or less than a constellation of symptoms that have frequently been observed as occurring in tandem.
Bleuler derived the term from the Greek roots schizo (“split”) and phrene (“mind”) to address the “loosening of associations” that are common in the disorder.
it is easy to forget that psychiatric diagnoses are human constructs, and not handed down from an all-knowing God on stone tablets; to “have schizophrenia” is to fit an assemblage of symptoms, which are listed in a purple book made by humans.
Psychiatry emphasizes a clinician’s judgment as the primary tool for diagnosis.
Humans are the arbiters of which diagnoses are given to other humans—who are, in most cases, suffering, and at the mercy of doctors whose diagnostic decisions hold great power. Giving someone a diagnosis of schizophrenia will impact how they see themselves. It will change how they interact with friends and family. The diagnosis will affect how they are seen by the medical community, the legal system, the Transportation Security Administration, and so on.
a genetic vulnerability to a disorder blooms only if enough stressors cause those vulnerable genes to express themselves.
I worry that seeing schizophrenia as a gateway to artistic brilliance glamorizes the disorder in unhealthy ways, therefore preventing suffering schizophrenics from seeking help. If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.
He’s better now, he tells me, because he was finally told that he himself knows better than anyone else what he needs.
Depression is often compared to diabetes—in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is compared to Alzheimer’s—it’s still not your fault if you get it, but there’s no fixing it, and though you may not intend to be a burden, you’ll still be one until you die.
It is hard to convey the horror of being involuntarily committed.
Our society demands what Chinese poet Chuang Tzu (370–287 BCE) describes in his poem “Active Life”: Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair.
She returned again and again to the subject of my mother, whom she blamed for most of my emotional difficulties. During my first semester at Yale, my mother swelled and grew monstrous in my mind; she loomed as someone whose emotional lability had imprinted me with what I frankly called an inability to deal with day-to-day life.
I was convinced that I would be depressed forever, though the previous week alone had proved this belief to be erroneous. My vision remained myopic and dim as I wrote two lists in a notebook, marking down the pros and cons of permanently removing myself from my life.
I was shaken, and wanted more than anything to be okay. I’m still trying to figure out what “okay” is, particularly whether there exists a normal version of myself beneath the disorder, in the way a person with cancer is a healthy person first and foremost. In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that “invades” them so that they can then “battle” the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold.
“Person-first language” suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia. But what if there isn’t? What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am? It has, in fact, shaped the way I experience life.
And if it’s true that I think, therefore I am, perhaps the fact that my thoughts have been so heavily mottled with confusion means that those confused thoughts make up the gestalt of my self; this is why I use the word “schizophrenic,” although many mental health advocates don’t.
I don’t want to put a child through having me as a mother.
Involuntary commitment may sometimes be warranted, but it has never felt useful to me.
I maintain, years later, that not one of my three involuntary hospitalizations helped me. I believe that being held in a psychiatric ward against my will remains among the most scarring of my traumas.
“Often in the adult world we forget how much it sucks to be a kid.”
It is impressive, and horrifying, how many authors choose to employ the trope of discovering a woman’s body in pieces, scattered, or in garbage bags, unrecognizable.
My relationship with John had ended years ago, and the capital-T Trauma of being raped and abused by him had happened years before that, and yet I was talking about him in almost every therapy session, repeating over and over variations of the same stories, unable to move past the topic to speak of present-day concerns.
Not long before I finally stopped talking to John, a friend told me that a mutual acquaintance had claimed that she didn’t believe I’d been raped. “If she’d really been raped,” the mutual acquaintance had said, “there’s no way she’d still be talking to him.” SUD = eight: the beginning of alienation, approaching loss of control.
For years, I wanted to talk to my partner, C., about what had happened to me. He didn’t want to hear about what had happened to me. I wanted to buttonhole people on the street and tell them my story.
I loved him, but he didn’t love me at all. He took something from me, but I could have walked away. A fictional narrative is considered nuanced when it includes contradictions, but a narrative of trauma is ill-advised to do the same.
I have been told by people that I’ve made a fuss about nothing, thus compounding the trauma of hurt with the trauma of feeling like a crybaby. I don’t chronicle the rape, because to do so feels like testifying before the reader, who is judge and jury, and I have had enough nightmares about inept and poorly received testimony to try. No one has to believe me when I say that it was bad, but I refuse to give the public that kind of ammunition in the first place.
Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing. Both flare up and die down;
both mentally and physically, I could possibly be. Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby, “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough,” which has not been my experience.
