Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

 Psychiatrists are like car mechanics who don't know how to drive—they've never actually used what they give to us people with mental health issues to purportedly "fix" us. They are like car mechanics who never felt their foot depress a gas pedal or allowed a steering wheel to ease back into the straight ahead position after a turn. Such car mechanics may very well know what books say about cars, but they have no idea what it is like to operate one. They don't fix cars from experience, but from what they have been told. Psychiatrists, I have found, are woefully naîve about medications, particularly when it comes to side effects and withdrawal. Sometimes, I think they are willfully naîve. I say this because they dismissed me and refused to listen to me when I tried to tell them about side effects and withdrawal. I guess they believed the books and classes they took more than they believed the evidence of my own body. Their body certainly couldn't tell them anyt...

The term "dementia praecox" was first used in 1887 by Emile Kraepelin. It isolated a type of "madness" that exhibited hallucinations and delusions and later became known as schizophrenia. Since the English poet and visual artist William Blake lived from 1757-1827, he could not have been so diagnosed. However, according to his biographers Peter Ackroyd and Leo Damrosch, Blake exhibited symptoms consistent with what we now call schizophrenia. He had what he called visions, heard voices, and had command hallucinations. Some others thought him "mad." In his lifetime, Blake received almost no recognition. His reputation began to be built decades after his death, and he is now considered one of the greatest of the English poets. His reputation largely rests on his "illuminated books"—engraved books that combine Blake's stunning and dramatic visual art with his poetry. You can see pictures of his longest illuminated book,  Jerusalem , at this link ....

It occurred to me that I may have appeared to contradict myself in the course of the last several postings on this blog. On August 13, in a post entitled "Skin," I explained how the skin does not have to be viewed as the boundary between the self and the rest of the world. In fact, skin is one of the ways we reach out into the world, connecting with it, being in relationship with it. I went on to say that consciousness is not inside us, especially not in the neural workings of the brain, but all over the place, both inside and outside. The things of the world we are conscious of, such as birds and piles of sand, are also conscious, though not to the extent a human being is. After arguing for this perspective, I proceeded to write several posts that detailed my recent experiences with antipsychotics. I related how getting off risperidone caused withdrawal symptoms that included anxiety. Anxiety is a mood that, like all moods, affects consciousness by causing us to focus on som...

by Jay Paul I have posted here for the last several weeks about my recent struggles with medication. I am happy to say that, for now, things are resolved. I am on a low dose of olanzapine that does not play havoc with my blood and does not make me feel woozy. Unfortunately, I am having some minor problems with weight gain and sleepiness. I hope they get better as time goes on. But for now, my serious problems are behind me. Now on to this week's essay. _________________________________________________ In his essay “Moral Luck” Thomas Nagel notes that we blame a drunk driver for recklessly driving up onto a curb and hurting a pedestrian much more so than we blame her if she just went up on the curb and nobody was there. This is a case of moral luck. If nobody was there, the drunk driver’s moral, and legal, standing results from her being lucky that the sidewalk was empty.   Nagel’s point seems irrefutable. Much of our moral standing in our own and in other people’s eyes results...

by Jay Paul Last week on this blog, I gave a rundown of what has been ailing me for the past five weeks—namely, wooziness. We still don't know what was causing it. A celiacs test came up negative. But in the course of investigating it, we found that my prolactin levels were twice as high as they should be. Prolactin is the hormone that in women causes them to lactate when pregnant. Risperidone, which I was on a low dose of, can cause prolactin build up because of its effect on the pituitary gland. So I am now off risperidone and on a low dose of olanzapine. Olanzapine causes you to gain weight more so than other antipsychotics. I have had problems with that for the last 25 years. I have recently been losing weight. So far, I am two days into the olanzapine, and I have lost some weight. My strategy is to eat set amounts only at mealtimes and not eat according to hunger. This is not easy. We'll see if I succeed. Two things concern me: olanzapine can raise prolactin as well, altho...

by Jay Paul In many ways, I consider myself lucky when it comes to side effects. The antipsychotics I am on cause some people to have diabetes or tardive dyskinesia. I have neither. But this does not mean I haven’t had my share of bizarre side effects. After a great June and July this year, when I felt better than I have in decades in terms of mood, something creeped back in in August. It may be side effects. I may be cycling. It’s not clear.             Bizarre side effects are nothing new for me. They started around 2000 when I was diagnosed with central apnea—a rare condition where the brain, not airway obstruction, shuts down breathing while asleep. I was put on a fancy and expensive CPAP machine called a bilevel. In 2013 I was taken off Depakote because of side effects. It was causing a build-up of ammonia in my blood. At my next sleep study, in 2016, it was found that I had mild obstructive apnea and no central apnea. The...