When I was in the hospital for eight months we had some cute nurses.
When I first got into the mental health system there was nothing special abut me. I first got sick when I was 19. That’s when my career as a paranoid schizophrenic began. Before I got sick I was just some teen kid who partied with my friends (and sometimes with my enemies, lol) and we drove around in our old Chevy’s drinking and checking out places and siphoning gas from strangers cars parked on the street at two in the morning because we couldn’t afford to pay for our own gas. When I was 17, gas cost 65 cents a gallon.
I had my little jobs like dish-washing, or stocking shelves in J.C. Penny’s department store. But then things started to unravel. I started isolating and not acting like myself. One day I took too much acid and I had a horrible trip and I was never the same again. The bad trip changed me but not in a good way. It changed me in a bad way. So all you people who want to take LSD while you are schizophrenic, just remember this. Taking acid is a huge mistake. And if you ever think, “Well, I’m diferent, it could never happen to me”. Well, folks, I thought the same thing and look what happened.
But anyways, I eventually got hospitalized and then I was just some kid in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t stand out. I talked to a few people, I played chess with the psyche nurse, I spent time alone on my room. But I didn’t want any attention. I was just an average kid, a little confused, and very screwed up.
But then for the next two and a half years I suffered and spent the time in two or three hospitals and group homes. I was kind of shy and I was a loner. I kept quiet and endured my delusions. Still I was nothing special in the grand scheme of things. I was never part of the popular crowd in hospitals.
I was pretty much invisible just like in high school. I was the “stealth” psychiatric patient.
I got out of the hospitals and moved into a beautiful two story Residential Treatment Home with 6 other residents. There were people my age there but I was too quiet and it pissed people off so the other residents hung out together but not with me.
I don’t think they hated me or disliked me, I just brought my troubles upon myself because of my shyness. The counselors seemed to like me, maybe they were acting, I don’t really know.
But I got put in a vocational program. I kept to myself again mostly, I had a few people who I had conversations with occasionally. I was about 23 b y then. I actually went on a date with a couple of the women.
Anyway, I liked to spend my free time at the vocational program by sleeping on a couch. Until the counselors outlawed it, lol. But I did my little mailing jobs and yard work in the the vocational program. And after several small steps, the staff got me a job in the community. I don’t know why they picked me over anyone else. I just felt like your average person with schizophrenia but I guess they saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.
So me and another guy they picked started working in a hot tub place. (this was California in the eighties when Hot Tubs and Sushi bars ruled supreme and were very popular) But I stayed there for four years despite being a crack addict for the last 1 1/2 years I worked there. So my life began.
I’m 55 now, and I have worked almost steadily since the hot tub joint. I have gone to school, I’ve had a car since about 1996. I’ve had friends and done a lot of fun things. I’m writing this for a reason. In the first few years with my disease, I never gave serious thought to the future. I was so sick that I didn’t even give the idea of working again any serious thought. It took all my energy just to stay sane. I just lived day by day, doing what I was told to do help myself.
Anyone looking at me when I was 19 would never have thought in a million years that I would eventually do what I have done.
I really hope some of you young folk are reading this. I’m writing this to say that you should not get too discouraged and give up. Don’t give up on yourselves. I was just some average kid thrown into life in the mental health system.
Psychiatrists and counselors, and staff are not your enemies, they sincerely want to help you and they want to see you succeed, even if they don’t like you or you don’t like them. They are not giving you medication as a punishment. They give it to you because it works in most people. Medication tastes bad and a has bad side-effects. That is a given.
But right now, in the year 2016, medication is the front line treatment. Maybe in the future they will come out with new medication that works better with less serious side-effects.
Thousands of people are working on this problem right now. Maybe in the future they will find something that works better than medication. Who know? But anyways. I hope you see the point of my story. Not everybody succeeds. But not everybody fails. But I came from the hopelessness of extreme psychosis with nothing going for me and now I have had a life for the past couple of decades. It’s possible for other people besides me. Good luck.