Looking Back Over A Completed Life
I’m sixty-five. I’ve been working steadily my whole life. I was hospitalized when I was twenty-three and diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on medication, and I was told that medication was the answer, and that I would just have to take it for my entire life. I accepted that. I accepted that as long as I took the medication, I could not become psychotic, could not, impossible—and that was a tremendous reassurance to me, who was frightened that I would fall apart again. But I stayed out of the hospital, never was hospitalized again. My brother is also schizophrenic, but he has not accepted his medication, thinks “they are trying to poison me”—well, this is counterproductive, and has made his treatment very difficult. Over the years he has gone off medication, been an alcoholic, and has been hospitalized countless times and of course run up a huge medical bill that the state takes “care of”. My life has held together: I am a professor and have worked all my life in colleges, libraries and museums. I am an artist. I am this, I am that. But I have come through this life of schizophrenia, and have even heard some psychiatrists say that I was never schizophrenic at all, and I smile ironically. I have been very reluctant to give my testimony: I can’t tell you how much hatred and anger I have had thrown my way from consumers who maintain that the neuroleptics are harming them. I have become discouraged—doesn’t my story give hope to someone out there? I hope it does help someone to recover their life and go on. Be well.