I know I mention this a lot but when I was 21 I spent 8 months locked up in a psychiatric hospital. My disease was raging at it’s worst the whole time I was there. I was put on meds for the first time and heavily sedated but still psychotic. I suffered for every minute of every day. I think once I was put on meds I got a little better but I was still in unbelievable misery. But after 8 months of torture my parents visited and told me they could get me out of the hospital and they found a nice home to stay in called a Residential Treatment House.
It was a nice two-story house in an affluent neighborhood in an affluent city about a two minute walk from a relatively quiet, tree-lined downtown. You could call it a group home but it was much more than just 3 square meals a day and a warm bed and a roof over my head. Their philosophy was that mentally ill people would get better if they had structure so this place was heavily structured. We all ate dinner together every night. It was very rare that they let someone miss dinner. We all had morning and evening chores to do at the same time each day.
We had two mandatory groups a week where we checked in, voiced any complaints, and just talked about our day or if we had any issues with any of the other residents. We also had a business meeting each week where they appointed one of us a “house manager” whose job it was to inspect our chores to make sure we did them right. We all took turns cooking and shopping and the house manager had the job of making a weekly grocery shopping list.
Anyways, it was heavily structured and everybody had to have a day time activity, everybody had to be out by 8:30 am and they locked the doors and we couldn’t get back in until 3:00 pm. Some people chose to work or go to school or the rest of us went to a vocational program to prepare to get back in the job force.
This was about thirty years ago and I still think about my stay there occasionally. I stayed there almost exactly a year. I stayed there with out any big crises and as soon as I had moved in, I showed a marked improvement. But I was just thinking tonight about how amazing it was that I lived in that place.
It took all kinds of different people with different diagnoses but I was one of only two or three schizophrenics the whole time I was there. We had bi-polar people, OCD, depression, bulimic and anorexic, etc. But you must remember. I had just gotten diagnosed two earlier at age 19 with paranoid schizophrenia, the most serious disabling mental disorder in the world. My case was seriously severe. And most males with schizophrenia peak with their symptoms the first couple of years. So here I was, psychotic, withdrawn, shy, it was a co-ed house and I still was basically afraid to even talk to women. The house was not actually that big. But yet here I was at age 22, living in close quarters with various women.
There were two girls there, I think one was 17 and one was 18, they happen to be friends before they moved in and they both suffered from bulimia and anorexia. But both of them were the epitome of the stereotypical Californian blonde haired, blue-eyed, small cute upturned noses, cute and tanned surfer girls.
But anyways, there were some older woman, one or two older guys, a couple of guys a few years older than me . The turnover was not high so I lived for 6 or more months withe same people. But amazingly I got along quite well in there. I had no crisis’s, no fights or arguments or bad blood between me and anyone else. I can almost say that I literally did nothing “crazy”. I didn’t act out I l acted perfectly normal. I didn’t act inappropriately or say anything out of the ordinary. My symptoms were still serious but entirely under control.
But like I said, that whole year was amazing to me that I lived with all those people with out any “crazy” incidents. I don’t know how I did it. I didn’t have to try or concentrate on being normal, for all intents and purposes I was as normal naturally or more normal than everybody else. And I was the paranoid schizophrenic!!! The whole experience just surprises me now, looking back. A great experience.