Schizoaffective

  by Jay Paul To all my fellow schizophrenics— Fuck it! Fuck it, all— you are fine as is— some idiots made you this way— they are the nutty ones, not you. My advice is this— if you have been made schizophrenic, think schizophrenic all the way, think the way bequeathed to you by idiots you cannot control, but who tried to control you, and succeeded, but only for a time— until you seized the glory they accidentally handed you— Sanity is the side effect of schizophrenia, carpe diem , sisters and brothers,             carpe diem— the day has always been OURS

When I was around the age of 30, my oldest daughter was diagnosed with autism, and soon after I was diagnosed with bipolar. I felt some bitterness. My coming to terms with not feeling bitter marked the center of my personal emotional evolution at the time. The lessons I learned have helped me get through many struggles without succumbing to too much bitterness. This, good people, is my story! Bitterness is a real danger for both parents of children with special needs and people with mental illness. I was in potential trouble. Both then and now, I believe there were many factors that prevented me from ruining my life with bitterness. Part of it was the need to keep a clear head so I could support my family. I was not only the main breadwinner, but, for most of the time, the only person in the family bringing in much money at all.  There was one overriding factor, however: atheism. I think that, by not believing in a personal God, I was able to more easily navigate the perilous emoti...

  by Jay Paul [A quick note on what to expect on the blog in the coming months. I will continue to post the second and  fourth Thursdays. Today, I will have a second post, "On an Escarpment Above the St. Croix River (The Ear)," a recent poem of mine. In two weeks, I hope to have finished an essay I have begun, "On Avoiding Bitterness," which details how I escaped from feeling bitter when confronted with the diagnoses of my daughter's autism and my bipolar. Long-term, I am researching and working on an answer to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , their two volumes in the capitalism and schizophrenia series. I want to read them as a schizophrenic and see what I think. That essay probably won't appear until September or October. Before then, I will continue to post occasional pieces.] Today, I am going to list a whole bunch of good things going on in my life right now. But, before I get to that, I want to address trauma briefly. O...

 At my most rational, I approach being diagnosed with a mental illness as a chance event that happened to me. Based on what I know of current research, it had a lot to do with genetics and with something in my environment—perhaps a virus, perhaps stress, nobody knows for sure. But what is clear is that it is not my fault. I hardly intended this, and I have been trying to deal with its arising in a responsible way. So far so good. But I, like most people, am not always rational. Since having a bad bout of delusions and hallucinations five to seven years ago from which I've recovered, I have moments of searing shame. They are usually triggered by a memory of some minor rudeness or inconsideration on my part from years ago. I first cringe at my minor failing and then think, "Everybody hates me." I may partly think this from paranoia, I don't know. But then I need to work myself out of the hole. I was talking to my therapist about this last time we met. We concluded that ...

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...

 Strange insights can come up when you meditate, and I meditate a fair amount: 50 minutes twice a day. Over the last four or five months, a series of insights has revealed to me that I, and probably all people, hold deep, subconscious beliefs that our conscious self would never agree with. For instance, I was recently sitting when I heard some people talking in the parking lot outside my apartment windows. These people talk out there a lot. It hit me quite suddenly that "this is my life, to sit in this apartment overhearing the same people talking in the parking lot." It washed over me that this here, now existence is all I have. Even if I moved from this apartment, my life would not be substantively different. I would just overhear different people outside my apartment. The insight continued. I realized in this flash that I harbored a fundamental belief/feeling/hope that was quite delusional. I believed that somehow, somewhere, my problems would be solved and I would live in...

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...

by Jay Paul Perhaps the most common assumption about skin is that it seals off what is “me” from the rest of the world. For instance, I am sitting in this room right now with a bicycle to my right, a computer in front of me, and a bed behind me. My skin provides the barrier between these other objects and what is “me.”             Upon reflection, problems arise with this naive view. The biggest one is that we usually associate our consciousness with our self, but our consciousness rarely concerns itself with what is inside our skin. Except when we are in pain or discomfort, our consciousness focuses on what is about us in the world. Right now, the keys on this keyboard, which are outside me but touching my fingers, are part of my conscious awareness while, say, my heart is not. It’s true that I need the heart to be conscious, but I am rarely conscious of it unless something goes wrong with it.      ...

by Jay Paul On about June 14, 2020 this schizoaffective man changed for the better. It was a long time coming. The story begins over a year earlier.             One night in February of 2019 I was having trouble sleeping. I decided to meditate. I hadn’t done it in a long time. Until 2011, I was active at a Soto Zen center and meditated regularly. But severe difficulties intervened (see the July 16, 2020 post) and I got away from it. That night, the meditation got me back to sleep, and when I awakened, I realized how much I missed doing it. I did it again. I have meditated almost every day since then. I started regularly attending the Zen center. By the fall, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes each time. I also attended a two-day sesshin at the Zen center, which is essentially a meditation retreat.             The type of meditation I do is quite simple. I sit ...

by Jay Paul [This piece does not directly address mental health. All of the posts on here do not. I want to present my thinking on a variety of issues because I wonder if there is something characteristically schizoaffective about how I use my mind. Maybe there isn't. But if you see something, please let me know, because the following question is animating much of this blog: what does schizoaffective contribute to the diversity of human thought? I know schizoaffective is often devastating. But it is also a specific window on experience. This piece originally appeared in a Vail Place newsletter.] written on April 29, 2020 The irony is not lost on me: I am about to burn fossil fuel to drive in my car to a place where I can commune with nature. My assumption is readily apparent to me. “Nature” is not what I see and hear out of my apartment window—the cars, the parking lot, the hum of the highway blocks away, the birds, the trees. Somehow, “nature” is considered that which exists indep...

by Jay Paul   At the end of a book I recently relished was an interview with the author. She mentions her divorce in passing with the explanation that her husband had mental illness—nothing further was said about it. I was devastated. I thought so highly of this author, and I learned that she felt so little of people like me. Giving mental illness as the only reason for a divorce is to assume that people with mental illness all make poor spouses. That’s the only way such a remark can make sense. Plenty of people with mental illness make good spouses, and plenty of neurotypicals make for poor spouses.   It’s called stigma.   A few years ago, I was talking on the phone to one of my best friends from childhood. He mentioned that his sister was seeing a difficult man “who has BIPOLAR.” He said the last word with a heap of disdain, apparently forgetting for the moment that I had been diagnosed with just that and with a condition considered even more serious. I decided not to s...

by Jay Paul Four diagnoses of me or someone in my family have defined a large part of my life. In 1995 my ex-wife and my oldest daughter sat in a doctor's examination room. A nurse placed some wooden blocks in front of my daughter, who sat on the floor. My daughter was uninterested. She looked around the room. She made eye contact with nobody. The nurse gave the doctor a look, picked up the blocks and quickly scurried out of the room. The doctor faced us. He wore a white lab coat over a dark shirt and a tie. He said, "Has anyone used the word 'autism' with you?" I put my arm around my ex-wife. All I could think to do was protect her. She seemed to crumble. Early on, we thought that the autism was probably mild and that my daughter would have to deal with some major social difficulties. But we were wrong. As the years went by, my daughter did not meet the usual milestones. Most significantly, she lost the few words she knew and was unable to speak. She is now 27. S...