Schizophrenia Bulletin vol. 42 no. 3 pp. 535–537, 2016
doi:10.1093/schbul/sbt091
Advance Access publication July 5, 2013
FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT
Six Pillars of Health
Susan Weiner
I have been told that I have schizoaffective disorder. When
you’re in a doctoral program with the stress, the constant
work, and the papers, this is a hard blow to take. Who
has ever prepared you for a diagnosis that will end your
life as you know it? Who has ever said to you, “You can
forget everything about anything you once knew, because
your life as you know it is now over?” Diabetes is controlled, cancer can often be cured, but mental illness may
only be managed. And what does this mean for me on a
concrete everyday basis? Mostly, it means that I had a set
of dreams that I watched die one by one. I fought hard
to keep them day after day and week after week while
years have slipped by. People around me, friends and
family, live, love, get married, have children, pursue their
careers, and are able to account for each moment of their
lives with meaning and purpose. I have some time on my
hands. I think about how lost I have felt a lot. For a several
years, I had to pursue my life in knitting sweaters or baby
blankets to pass the time. I did my best to read academic
journals and books: my favorite thing to do in the world.
But unfortunately my chosen field has moved on without
me. I can no longer sustain long-term research either due
to illness or due to the side effects of medication. I’m not
really sure which. I just can’t process facts in a long-term
project. After a while, my brain refuses to cooperate, no
matter how desperately I want to work. I can and will
however (I admit it) read trash about movie stars on the
Internet because it means I can read without too much
concentration and analysis, and any kind of reading is
pleasurable. Gossip helps to put me to sleep every night,
the upshot being I know more about John Travolta these
days than that hero of the Enlightenment, the great John
Locke. This is the bad news. But I’m not here for the bad
news. You know enough about that already. I’m here to
share some good news and that’s something anyone lost
in the dark night of mental illness might want to hear.
What I want to say is that everything they told you
in psychiatric training is true. My doctor tried to teach
me the things they told you, but I had to learn them for
myself, one by one, because I was too pigheaded to give
up what I wanted more than marriage, more than any
other relationship in my life. I wanted to be a professor
or at the very least a writer of nonfiction. I worked hard
to make both dreams come true, but it was to no avail.
I managed to write some historical articles for a while and
published. I managed to study in my field independently
for a while too. But discouragingly I failed in both projects because research is hard and my brain just couldn’t
keep up anymore. Yet I still struggled. I wasn’t willing to
give up, to give in. This caused me any number of problems, but it also led to an awakening and this is what my
story is about. After some consideration, I believe I have
held fast to 6 pillars in life that have improved my diagnosis and have brought sanity, peace, acceptance, and finally
joy back into my life.
The first pillar is medicine compliance. For many years
I stayed on too low a dose of antipsychotics because they
affected the way that I read. My field of history doesn’t
look too hard from the outside, but it’s an amalgamation of facts and interpretation, of theory and concrete
quotidian gathering of information. I was trapped in the
desire to prove myself in this area. No matter how poorly
I felt (and often that was very poorly) I tried to read new
books, old books, old theories, and new research. Because
I refused to give up, I had episode after episode of psychosis. I believed I was talking to Colin Powell (aim high)
or to President Clinton. Once, for a long time, I believed
that God spoke to me directly. God was kind. Should
I have expected anything less from him? Only after years
of repeated psychotic episodes did I give in and take the
medication as prescribed, on a dose high enough for me
to break down the fear that my phone was tapped or that
people were watching me for nefarious reasons. These
were my last delusions to go. And they took with them
my career. I could’ve wept.
My next pillar was to establish a regular exercise regime.
With all the years on antipsychotics, I had become heavy
and sluggish. My body felt like (still feels like) lead. To
move was (and still is) to feel tired, to feel sedated, and
to be held down by the unyielding arms of gravity. Once
I had loved to hike in the hills and mountains near my
university, way above the sea, close to the sky and the scrub
brush pines that dotted fire roads and winding trails above
the green lawns irrigated by sprinklers below. So I took
up walking again. It was a struggle, and adding hills to
my course made me almost gasp for air. At first, I had to
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S. Weiner
rest all the time. But now, after 2 years on my walks, I can
climb the steepest hill in my neighborhood and still have
room to take a cul de sac that dips and rises some more.
This is as much an achievement for me as studying used to
be. What gives others no pause for thought is a goal I have
struggled to make happen. I have lost weight through diet
and exercise, but I still have more to go. Anytime I overeat,
I get up the next morning and try to go back to a better
diet for the day, week, or month. A professor once told
me that each new day was a fresh start to make things
right. And so this is how I pursue my life. Every morning
I try again, until one day, unexpectedly, I get it just right.
This may take a while, but I try not to be discouraged. I’ve
learned that progress can be slow, that even increments
can lead me to a better, richer life in the end.
Sometime later, I added social contact back into my
life. Rather than merely interacting with my parents (who
have been nothing less than a rock of salvation for me)
I made friends again. I am extremely introverted, but
I found people like me through groups, church, and family friends. I meet with them as I can so that I don’t feel too
alone. Often I just talk on the phone. I have dear friends
again who know about my struggles and more acquaintance friends who have no idea I battle with mental illness
as a way of life. If I’m close enough to somebody, I make
sure they know my history. I don’t want the stigma of
poor mental health to break up a relationship I count on.
After that, I address my mental health as little as possible and try to be a good friend on a normal basis in a
way that most people can take for granted. Fortunately,
not one of my friends has turned out to be an evil dictator bent on subduing the whole world to his dominion.
I have stopped looking for that man. He was overthrown
when I was introduced to Risperdal, my major neuroleptic. I say that thankfully because I believed the evil dictator was able to bend gravity to his favor, on the front lines
where evil fought against good like some kind of Tolkien
fantasy in my head. I believe that support structures are
one of the most important facets of my life. With my
doctor, with my family, and with my friends I am safe. If
I feel vulnerable, I can talk over the paranoia that tends
to creep into my days. With my mother, especially, I can
run by intricate feelings that may have no real basis in
the world. The boon of love and friendship that we often
take for granted has come to be one of the major foundations of my life. Find that support system and nurture it,
both for love and for itself as a requirement of the human
condition.
One of my greatest joys has been to find the religion
of my childhood again. With mental illness comes time
on your hands because, as you know, you literally cannot
function in the world and have busy tasks that occupy you
from moment to moment. One day, it occurred to me that
I had rejected my parents’ Christianity because Karl Marx
had called it “the opiate of the masses,” and I was embarrassed to believe in a dogma that other people sneered at.
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I realized that I had rejected Christianity without fully
comprehending its major premises. Because I had time
and was able to do some reading (as long as I didn’t have
to take notes or analyze the material), I sat down and
read the Bible straight through. I think it took me the better part of a year. What I read and thought about stirred
my heart and convinced me. Over the years, I have managed to study Christianity bit by bit, and I have learned
to take the blessings of every day, commonplace joys no
longer for granted. The sun and rain, the mist and snow
bring me as much joy now as a book on the economic
history of house work in 17th-century Britain once drew
from me. I see that nature, that flora and fauna, are a tremendous blessing. I live near a wildlife preserve, and now
when I walk early in the morning, I see deer chewing to
their heart’s content on my neighbor’s bushes and lawns.
And I feel like I have been reborn into that first garden
that Adam and Eve once knew. What I’ve learned is that
people who have lost everything certainly need to nourish
their spiritual lives, especially when so many other areas
of life may be beyond our grasp like marriage, a career,
or a family of our own. While my God never claims to
eliminate suffering from my life, his tenets have brought
me peace, acceptance of my new and less-traveled path in
this world, and values to cherish that are easily attainable
in my life. Christianity has furnished me a community of
people who don’t care about my diagnosis unless it is to
sympathize with me. Though friends in graduate school
left me when I was no longer shining and successful, my
current religious community has embraced me and fit me
in where I can participate without a thought for the status
I might confer on them. So, take up a religion. Find spirituality. If you have God, embrace your faith. It may bring
about perspective. It may mean the difference between
hope and despair when hope is so hard to come by.
I think another one of the things I’ve come to realize is
that anyone (sick or well) can and should find a job that
they love. Find something that you have a passion for and
do it, and your problems may recede to background noise.
In my case, I couldn’t become an academic, but to my great
surprise, I found I can write fiction. I’ve written one book of
Christian devotional poetry and am at work on my second
book, a collection of children’s verse that contains songs.
I’m also in the middle of writing a murder mystery novel.
Never in a million days did it occur to me that I could really
do these things. I’ve always written poetry but thought
I’d given it up for teaching. And I always, always believed
I would make the worst novelist on the face of the planet.
Thankfully, it seems I was somewhat mistaken about these
suppositions. Now I have as much fun working on a novel
as I ever did reading about Queen Elizabeth I and her
court of talented men who made up the flowering of the
Elizabethan Age. Now I get to dream up novel characters
such as a land-bound surfer, a detective who is insane, or
a mental ward doctor who curses in long, florid Russian.
Write what you know they say. So I have. I write about my
Six Pillars of Health
religion; I write about history; and I write about the inside
of a mental ward. Will my work be any good? That’s up to
others to decide, just as someone would’ve once sat on
my doctoral committee and passed or failed me on the
merits of my oral exam. I do the best I can, and in that I find
meaning. I use my mind in my work, and that makes all the
difference to me. Find that thing you have to have, and try
to build your work on it if you can.
Lastly, if a person can find the time, I recommend they
volunteer with a cause they care about. As a life goal, this
could apply to everyone. I volunteer at my church once
a week. I clean the kitchen. It needs to be done, and it
has rid us of a problem with mice. I enjoy cleaning, and it
tickles me to think that I worked hard at graduate school
just so I could become a maid. But honestly it’s important to me. I feel I have a place in a church that I love,
and I believe that I’m helping to maintain the work of
the church so the community can flourish. I don’t necessarily hold with the idea that someone with mental illness
should volunteer anywhere they can. I worked for an eminent research library when I first became ill, and I hated
it. All day long scholars would come and go perusing the
stacks of books, and I longed to do the same thing myself.
Instead, I led visits of the library for tourists. I was bored
out of my head. Certainly, it had higher status than the
cleaning of my church kitchen. But I have been doing the
latter for 2 years now, and I never grow tired of it. Every
week I look forward to my time alone with God and the
grease on kitchen counters, and I’m happy with myself for
filling in where I’m needed rather than where I thought
I should be. Find out where your deepest passion lives and
volunteer there. I believe any member of the human species might improve their lives with this outlook.
My story is one that began in terror, but that has been
ultimately bathed in hope and redemption like light. It’s a
story that took at least 18 years to make; and, perhaps, that
makes it all the more valuable in the end. “Never, never,
never give up,” said Winston Churchill. Like America
and Britain I have fought my own long, hard debilitating
battles. I was stubborn, and I wouldn’t give up my dreams
of an academic career. It helped me maintain hope, but
it also impeded my recovery. Sometime later, I was finally
able to carve out new dreams that suited me just as well
as the old ones did. To stay true to your dreams in the
face of adversity is good. It helps you keep equilibrium
in suffering. Yet for me, it was also detrimental and a factor in delaying my eventual recovery. But now every time
I break and each time I fall, I know how to get back up
again, as many times, as many years as it takes. I lost to
murder a man who helped me reclaim my life, a man who
cared for me, and I loved him. He was my psychiatrist.
I have not lost him altogether. He is deep in my heart,
his picture remains on my mantel, and I’m a far better
person for having known him. Because I’m blessed, I was
able to find another psychiatrist who cares for me as he
(Wayne S. Fenton) once did. In my heart, I truly believe
that God will equip us to be always stronger than any
evil we encounter, be it in the bonds of illness or at the
hands of men. Schizophrenia and related disorders can
take everything from you. They can strip you so bare that
you no longer even recognize yourself. I know all about
this. I’ve been there and back again. What I want to say is
this, it’s our job to take it back, to take back life. And I’m
a prime example that with some effort, sincerity, and persistence we can still succeed. And who knows most about
this? Why, my doctors, of course, who are the coheroes
of this story. I thank God for them and for the tiny little
pills that I take twice daily to maintain my sanity and free
my creativity to write fiction rather than to spin paranoid
fantasies that involve sophisticated military hardware
pointed in my direction. I can only say that I’m glad the
stealth bomber and the evil dictator are not out to get me
after all. But health is and now that I’ve found it; I will try
my best never to let it go.
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