Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul On July 28 I was hiking with a friend in a nature center. While going up a hill I felt a strange wooziness for a few seconds. I attributed it to some weird reaction to the meds I take for schizoaffective, and thought little of it. It happened a few days later when I was hiking by myself in a state park. That evening, I knew something was amiss when I felt woozy and like I was going to fall off my chair while meditating. I have felt woozy off and on ever since. At first it was bad. It hit me the worst when I was out walking. In early August, I cut the length of my walks down considerably. What was happening to me? The only change I could identify was going from a 2 mg Risperidone cut in half to a 1 mg Risperidone. I figured I was having some withdrawal from an inactive ingredient in the 2 mg tablet. I figured I would get over it in a few weeks. A few weeks came and went. I still had it, but it was less acute. I called my psychiatrist, and he thought it might be dehydration. ...

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...