My 24-year-old son was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in his case) in 2011. He has decided he wants to start sharing his story publicly, so he will be speaking for NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) this Monday. He asked me to share his story with as many people as possible, so that’s why I’m posting it here. I am so very proud of him. He is a warrior.
NAMI Speech Presentation
December 5, 2016
Hello everyone, my name is_____, and I am here to give a short presentation on my experiences with mental illness and their ramifications in my life. I have lived in Texas and Maine, and I have seen mental illness face-to-face from month to month and on everyday encounters.
I have motivation to speak from several sources, the best of whom is my psychiatrist, among others including friends and family. Good common sense from my doctor inspires me to maintain healthy well-being with respect to managing my symptoms and also take my medication as prescribed. Friends and family have often supported me in my trials and have always been there when I have needed a helping hand. My life has been rigorous at times, and my support network has been invaluable in encouraging me in my worst moments.
In the early fall of 2010, my collegiate career began on a promising note. I started well enough at the University of Texas at Austin, but soon began to decline mentally. My roommate stayed up late at night playing online games, I had a hard time sleeping, and in classroom settings, I had an odd tendency to think that people were tapping their feet because of the intensity of my gaze. I didn’t think that it was odd in those moments, however, but as the months dragged on, my mind was wearing down and causing me to doubt my reality. Eventually, at the end of the first semester, I expressed my voice to a woman, my grandmother who lived nearby, and said, “I think something is wrong with me,” and trembling, I said, “I think I need help.”
My granddad, my grandmother and I were able to find a psychiatrist nearby, a respectable woman, who quickly analyzed my situation to be an example of a delusion of reference, the idea that in my own mind mere coincidences lined up with strong perceptions of personal meaning. Basically, I had experienced my first known mental illness outbreak, and I needed medication to quiet the thoughts that were practically exploding in my mind—the foot tapping wasn’t caused by me, I tried to think, but part of me still believed that all of the weirdness of the situation was my fault. Now I know that I was experiencing mental illness.
I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder type II bipolar type, a name that seemed foreign and strange to me. As far as I understood, it was a variety of schizophrenia that accounted for mood changes—anyway, I didn’t know how to take care of myself, so it sort of made sense. I wanted to change for the better, but my symptoms of bizarre thoughts, sleeping too much because of my medication, and headaches because of my classes bothered me to the core.
I managed to make a 3+ GPA in that first year of college, but the mental hospital visit at the end of the second semester definitely highlighted the realness of my mental condition. My medication that I took was causing me to miss classes regularly, so I would end up isolating in my room frequently, and my mind weakened as a result. I ended up expressing my emotions surrounding these events by drawing explosions on a notepad, and when the obviousness of the racing thoughts quickly revealed itself, my exact statement was, “The sh-- has hit the fan. So this is why I have a safety plan.” A few weeks later, thinking back on the episode, I thought, “Good riddance. Thank the establishment for the hospital visit.”
At the end of the summer following my freshman year of college, I went back to Maine to live at my parents’ house as my permanent residence. I found a new doctor, and I was all set to keep living a good life. I was too psychologically unstable to stay at Texas, so I had the option to either go to the hospital for sanity or go back home, so I went home. I took the fall 2011 semester off to collect my thoughts and take a break, but I was back at school, the University of Southern Maine at Portland, in the spring of 2012.
At the end of 2012, I began to hear from things I didn’t understand. I even remember the date—this kind of experience has been going on and off since that time, and did not become significantly better until the end of 2015. I do remember the day. I was lying on my bed thinking about something, maybe dinner, when all of a sudden, I heard this loud voice say in my mind, “No,” and I didn’t think it came from me. I was frightened after this event and I didn’t know what to say. I was a little bit unconfident speaking my own voice then, so the idea of saying something about what I felt happened was unnerving to me. I decided to play it cool and brush it aside like it didn’t happen, but that’s the thing about my experience: It was not good. The problem, the voices, was integrated slowly into my thoughts, and eventually after a few weeks I just accepted them in a deluded kind of way. This went on. I went to the mental hospital again that spring and again soon after because my thinking was not in alignment with reality. I thought that the voices were real and that they were coming from heaven to save me, and the deceit from the words I heard lasted for years.