In my abnormal psych class the professor asks students to speak to the class about any mental disorders we may have, which we possess in abundance. I talked to the class about depression, another about severe depression, and another two about generalized anxiety disorder.
But today was the most interesting one of all. We are in the middle of the unit on schizophrenia and related disorders, and at the beginning of class the professor said we were going to have a student speak but that he apparently wasn’t here today so it would have to wait. But sure enough, within a couple of minutes a student walked in, made his way to the front, and took a spot sitting on a desk facing the class. I could hardly see his face because of his long hair, but he was clearly under 20 years old and had sat unobtrusively at the back of class until I noticed him now. He wore jeans, skateboarding shoes, and a black t-shirt with a faint logo, and had thin, muscular, veiny arms. And he slouched.
The professor and he had obviously spoken in advance and agreed that the prof would ask the questions instead of the student speaking on his own for half an hour, which, it became clear, would be impossible. Over the next half an hour (and we could have spent much more time), we found out that our classmate was in the center of a conflict between two voices, one a female named Truth, who was often hilarious and pointed out the absurdities of life and made ironic commentary on other people; and a prodding, loud, harsh male voice who urges him to kill his father, burn the school down, and kill himself. We found out about his cumulative one year in a psychiatric hospital and his heavy history of LSD, ecstasy, "bath salt", and ketamine use. We found out he hardly sleeps because that only makes the auditory hallucinations worse, that he smokes two packs a day, and that when someone laughs hard, he sometimes sees their entire face morph into that of a demon. He knows a lot about the two voices that are vying to gratify themselves through his body. He knows they seem more persuasive when he has been drinking and that it is hard to ignore a voice that is inside your head, urging you to do something again and again.
He has been put on risperidone but couldn’t stand the side effects. While he was on the drug the hallucinations subsided, but he said he felt like a zombie. He said that in that state he was only sustaining the physical self but that he was not really living, and didn’t want to be that way for the rest of his life. In addition the drug made his whole body, especially his neck, stiff like a person with Parkinson disease. Who can blame him for feeling that way? He has never hurt anyone physically and is in post-secondary school, after all.
But who knows what his future holds? He said the first problems began in high school with major depression, which may have been the prodrome. They say schizophrenia in males generally begins in the late teens to early twenties, later in females. He obviously has some detachment about his disorder and some sophistication in dealing with it and talking about it. If he can get through the next five to ten years, maybe he will be fine.
I appreciate this kind of thing because it makes me think again about the people all around me. Any time I walk into a room, there are people there with all kinds of interesting stories to tell. Some of them have serious metal disorders and pain that are invisible to me. Two people came up to me and thanked me for talking about depression, but my own story seems small compared to that of this student with schizophrenia. You find out more and more each time you talk to someone. As Karl Menninger said, a fish that catches a hook on a line thrashes about violently trying to save itself. All that the world sees is the thrashing and tends to misunderstand it, because the free fish cannot understand the struggles of the hooked fish. This kind of discussion, where people share a little bit of themselves because they are interested in helping people and the rest of us are interested in helping people, is consciousness-expanding.
I am looking forward to the unit on eating disorders, and I expect at least five women in the class of 30 to come forward and talk about long struggles with eating. It is something I have always tried hard to understand.
pseudoisaac 