My Son's Story as of Today (schizophrenia)

My son has been home from the psychiatric hospital for two weeks, after a three week stay. The doctor he saw there, Dr. O., put him on a new medication, one that seems to have brought him back to his old self! It is amazing to see. He is smiling, wanting to get out and do things, is aware of his appearance. The voices are quiet. I asked him if he is noticing any of the old symptoms, and he said that sometimes he does, but they are faint and manageable, not overwhelming and constant. No matter how bad the disease gets, the whole well person is still in there.

There is a drawback. Why must there always be a drawback?

The medicine that is helping him so much, has such dangerous side effects that his doctor, Dr. M., who did not treat him when he was in the hospital because she went home to India for three months, has said that she will not treat him any more because she does not want the responsibility and has never used it for outpatients. He must get weekly blood tests. The pharmacy had to get authorization to dispense it and must have the blood test results faxed to them before they can fill the prescription, one week at a time. I know it has gotten to be a joke that death is always listed as a potential side effect on medication, but they really mean it on this one.

We had not tried this hospital before. There were no available beds at the hospital that released him two weeks before. The first of these two stays was for two weeks, and was precipitated by a suicide attempt and by the severity of his symptoms. We were not aware that he had overdosed, because he kept to himself most of the time and we just assumed he was sleeping. When he emerged from his room, the next day, he was very confused about whether he was dead or not. He had not been very verbal about his delusions, but later that night he asked me if he was a ghost or not. Weeks later he explained that he thought he was in Hell and that his punishment for committing suicide was to wake up right back in the situation he couldn't bear to exist in. His father and I got him to agree to go to the hospital; not an easy thing, but much better than involuntary committal, which I will discuss at another time. As always, new medication was added, old medication was eliminated, dosages were changed.

He was still experiencing severe symptoms when he was released. You wonder in these circumstances, if this is the best they can do or if the doctor just doesn't care. Either way it is very common, and sometimes it is because the patient does not want to be there any more and insists on leaving. And they have that right if the committal was voluntary. If it was involuntary, they arrange a hearing before a judge to evaluate the patient's request. This is a safeguard against false committals and a protection of the individuals rights. At the state hospital, there is a court room right inside the hospital complex.

Watching his terror and confusion was awful, and his delusions were overwhelming him. The changes in medication, made during the last hospital stay, did not produce any positive changes that we could observe, so after two weeks, we found a bed for him at the new hospital. It was a God-send that his regular doctor, Dr. M., was in India , otherwise, he would not have seen Dr. O., and have been put on the new medication, Closaril (closapine). Dr. M. had kept him on medicine that did not give him freedom from his powerful, frightening delusions, though it was better than most the other medicines he had tried over the years. We are much happier with his new doctor and the new medicine.

Some of the Psychiatrists we have dealt with seem to have developed a real contempt for mentally ill people. You need to change jobs if you expect schizophrenics to be polite and make you feel good about yourself. Why would a doctor want to keep a patient on medicine that isn't giving the person a chance to have the best life possible, given the living Hell that mental illness is? You'd have to ask Dr. M., and all the other doctors he's seen, before now. We don't know.

Observing Schizophrenia In America

It has been four years, getting to know this disease and what it does to a person. Four years dealing with a health care system that is a continually changing maze that baffles a sane person and is impossible, for someone experiencing an altered sense of reality, to navigate.

This experience has heightened my alarm for the "ones who fall through the cracks". The number of times my son would have been lost without our assistance is frightening. Even with our well intentioned attempts to help him, we are always encountering situations that are confusing, and for a schizophrenic, would defeat any attempts to deal with or resolve them. When I say lost, I mean it figuratively and literally.

I would venture a guess that the majority of schizophrenics are either in jail, self medicating with drugs and alcohol, living on the streets, a combination of the above, or dead. There are also the "lucky" ones that have found a medication that allows them to manage their own lives, or have family that cares for them.

Most Psychiatrists will not participate in the government sponsored health care programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the various State programs. Among the doctors who do, "Tag the Loony and Collect a Check" is a popular game. Most of them have an overload of patients, so their main function is to write prescriptions. The image of a Psychiatrist taking fifty minutes to listen to a patient, is outdated, and in our experience nonexistent. Psychiatric drugs have improved over the years, and doctors also realized that you can't talk a schizophrenic back to sanity. Still the drugs aren't a cure, and only offer varying degrees of sanity; leaving the patient only partially able to cope with their delusions, and mostly unable to survive on their own.