Successful and Schizophrenic
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now after being hospitalized for it, and having found medication which makes it so that it's like I'm not sick at all, I can attempt to learn how to code, and hope to try again doing that once I learn how.
The cool thing is you were able to externalize the handicap (schizophrenia), address it (medicine, which is not just a pill or something physical), and move on (it's the past).
Peace!
I read a book about a guy who had luck with it working for him, too. Good stuff.
It makes me nauseous sometimes, but that's a small price to pay for the removal of the delusions that come from the illness.
Old thinking was very much to "protect" people with mental health problems from the stress of the world. But as you know, a bit of stress is fun, exciting, exhilarating.
Modern thinking is that people with MH problems can work, and should work. They might need a bit of help to get jobs, and they might need a bit of help to stay in jobs, and it can be a bit scary for employers and colleagues. But reducing stigma is going reasonably well.
For the Germans here: I advise everybody to notary register a PatVerFue. This is a legal trick using an advance health care directive to forbid any diagnosis of ICD-10 F00-F99 or DSM, that takes effect at the moment a doctor claims that you can no longer make own decisions due to illness or incapacity. The result is that they could only put you in jail, but not into an insane asylum, and can not force you to take any medicaments.
A doctor who sends you to an asylum can be punished for false imprisonment up to 10 years!
A PatVerFue is a must have for everybody who is political subversive, working creative, and even for those who work for the tax office, as there had been cases, where tax officers had been locked in an asylum, to prevent that they follow black money of a Hessian CDU politician, in Germany.
Read at http://www.patverfue.de/ (sorry this page is German)
this is so misleading... it is not about the way you see the world, it is about how your perception of the world is out of your control. my experience of psychosis was that i was both aware of me being delusional, and still having to believe these thoughts. it is immensely stressful, and very easy to put yourself in danger. do you want to find a niche for yourself if you believe you are god, or believe you are persecuted by aliens? the first thing i want (and i am saying this at a moment of sanity) is to be committed by force if i turn delusional again.
> Over the last few years, my colleagues, including Stephen Marder, Alison Hamilton and Amy Cohen, and I have gathered 20 research subjects with high-functioning schizophrenia in Los Angeles. They suffered from symptoms like mild delusions or hallucinatory behavior. Their average age was 40. Half were male, half female, and more than half were minorities. All had high school diplomas, and a majority either had or were working toward college or graduate degrees. They were graduate students, managers, technicians and professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, psychologist and chief executive of a nonprofit group. ...At the same time, most were unmarried and childless, which is consistent with their diagnoses...how had they managed to succeed in their studies and at such high-level jobs?
20 subjects is a lot? Less than half getting a college degree is success? With mild symptoms (as opposed to catatonia)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Epidemiology gives a lifetime risk of 0.7%. LA has ~4m people, giving 28k who have, had, or will have schizophrenia. It'd be impressive if all 28k could not cope at all and none could hold down any kind of job (and wouldn't we expect just from timing of schizophrenia onset to see plenty with degrees and jobs?).
In some cases, it is not possible to function, due to the disease; but there are a lot of people who can function, but they are told they cannot. Of course the 20 people are not a research cohort, but they are anecdotal evidence that people with schizophrenia can succeed regardless of their disease. And if you have schizophrenia, that can give you hope. And hope can bring change.
Now with better prescribed medications and better cognitive therapies it is possible to be "high functioning" person with schizophenia, and more research on that issue will help more suffering people function better. And the first small number of successful cases of persons with schizophrenia achieving professional success, family togetherness in a new family, or even both, will give hope to more suffering patients.
A seminar video produced by the University of Virginia, Divided Minds: Twin Sisters' Journey Through Schizophrenia,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI
tells the story of sisters Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D., one of whom has schizophrenia, and one of whom does not, even they are identical (monozygotic) twins who were brought up in the same home.
They also have a book about their story.
http://www.amazon.com/Divided-Minds-Sisters-Journey-Schizoph...
Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman
who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author of the biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind. Gottesman has spent much of his career researching schizophrenia and debunking former theories about the origin of schizophrenia. Twin studies, especially studies of the unusual cases of monozygotic twins reared apart, and adoption studies have consistently shown that schizophrenia develops from an underlying genetic vulnerability (probably varying greatly from patient to patient, according to the best evidence from genome-wide association studies) that makes a patient all too likely to develop full psychotic symptoms over the course of childhood without careful treatment. Gottesman's research goal is to define "endophenotypes" that can be reliably measured clinically to identify patients who need one kind of preventive or supportive treatment rather than another. But we are nowhere near identifying endophenotypes for any major mental illness.
I had earned $150,000/year as a programmer, but because of the stress I was under at one job I developed the mental illness and was fired for being mentally ill (I had panic attacks at work, and was ordered to 'snap out of it or you are fired!' and when I couldn't snap out of it I was fired) I tried other jobs but I was just bullied and harassed for being mentally ill. When they know you have a schizophrenic illness they make all kinds of loud noises to distract you and then pretend they didn't make them to trick you into thinking you are hearing things. Like playing wav files on their speakers turned way up, yelling, singing, ringing a bell, one place they bribed an ice cream truck to drive by every 15 minutes and ring the bell and play music near my window. Of course you can't work under those conditions and you file complaints and they are ignored and eventually you get fired because you are mentally ill.
I ended up in disability being too sick to work a job. There was really three ways it could have gone. The only way I could find a job was to become a software contractor on a 1099 form with no benefits and be shuffled around every six months to finish projects nobody else can finish (spaghetti code debugging) and either have to go off medication as they are too expensive without insurance (when you apply for personal health insurance they use pre-existing conditions to deny you, but if you had a W2 Job with a group plan they'd accept you, but as a contractor you aren't allowed on a group plan) or go homeless and wander from one mental hospital or even jail to another. The alternative is to get accepted on disability and avoid that madness. Not unless the right company wants to hire you as an employee with a W2 and keep you on despite the problems with your mental illness they can accommodate you for it.
The problem is a mental illness is a disability, but when most companies or organizations plan for disabilities they think people in wheelchairs, deaf or blind people, and never someone with a mental illness like schizophrenia, they only see that as a weakness and character flaw. They think he/she is a potential criminal/terrorist a ticking time bomb that will go off on a violent spree that will kill people because most of the people who go on murder sprees are labeled mentally ill by the news media. Even if you are not violent, you will get classified as potentially becoming violent and thus a liability. If you had autism or downs syndrome you would find all kinds of support, even get college scholarships and job placements. But as a schizophrenic you are seen as a sub-human creature that should be gotten rid of, and confused with a sociopath or whatever. They even confuse you as having multiple personality disorders even if that is not a part of schizophrenia.
Anyway I am on geodon and clonazapan if anyone wonders what I take to be treated. I went on disability in 2003, and learned meditation in Buddhism to control it better. I am re-learning how to program all over again as well as writing some ebooks and hoping to self-publish them when I am finished.
When I went online for support of my mental illness, I was faced with trolls and people harassing me and bullying me, once even found my home phone number and kept prank calling my house at 3am every night using a VOIP software to create fake caller ID numbers like 666-666-6666 and 123-456-7890 and my wife couldn't take it anymore and changed our phone number to a private number to prevent that after the police failed to do anything about it, even if the caller did threaten to kill us all as well.
It is really difficult for me, as my community does not give me any type of support for it and just generally avoid me because they don't understand my mental illness or even how to talk to me. So I am excluded from things, I lost most of my friends, and my family most of them cut me off after I became mentally ill.
I have two college degrees, one in computer science and the other in business management. Since nobody would hire me, I plan to do work at home and slowly earn income with writing ebooks and maybe doing some small programming tasks.
keep it up and kudos to you for handling the harassment.
I had physical evidence like someone leaving a photoshopped picture of me in a print out as Herman Munster. Someone would lower my chair before I got into work and I had to raise it back up. My files would be all messed up every day and I had to put them back in order in my filing cabinet. I brought a tape recorder with me to record the noises so I could play it back for my wife who isn't schizophrenic to see if she heard the same noises and voices that I did, and she did.
The problem is that a court would see it that way you suggest as well that I could be 'imagining' the harassment and bullying, which is why I had to collect evidence to prove otherwise.
Also schizoaffective disorder does not always have a schizophrenic cycle it can have a depressed cycle, manic cycle, normal cycle, I would not always imagine things or hear things. This was a constant going on and if it was my mental illness making me imagine these things it would only last for two weeks and then cycle out.
As to why they targeted me, they didn't understand the mental illness (schzioaffective disorder is a poorly understood mental illness that hardly anyone has heard of) and saw it as a sign of weakness, and saw me as a bad person for being mentally ill that they were better off without. I was not into office politics nor was I in any of their social kliks, they decided to get rid of me and got their political allies and social klik in on it.
I had also sort of made myself a target, I stood up for others who got bullied and harassed. There was another programmer and someone discovered he had another man's name on the check he used to pay for the office water supply (they collected checks to pay for water delivery) and then some of the employees bullied and harassed him for being gay. I stood up and told them that another man's name might be on the check because it is a business partner or maybe an apartment room mate and it doesn't automatically make someone gay, and besides there are employment laws in the city we worked that protect people from discrimination for sexual orientation. After that I was made fun of, they said I might be gay as well. They decided to not help that programmer and shut him off, so I decided to help him with projects when he got stuck or needed advice. That made me even more of a target.
I mean the people who wrote those things don't really mean me any harm, and they are not technically harassing me or bulling me. But they misunderstand that if a person is mentally ill they are a liability, they will do less work, be less productive, they will imagine things and all the stress is in their head, and they have a lessor value than someone who is not mentally ill so they should be demoted for it.
Yes there is a semi-consciously bias here, and over time it grows into a mind-set, and when a group is using group-think they will gang up against such a person using the bias that because he/she is mentally ill, it makes things worse for us, so they have to do whatever they can to get rid of that person.
I cannot hide my mental illness, I don't have the 'passing skill' which is acting like a normal person and blending in. I don't have very much in the way of social skills because the mental illness affects the part of the brain that controls social skills and sometimes I don't get social clues. It is not the same as Asperger's Syndrome but it will make some people think that I have that. The mental illness affects the speech center of my brain and from time to time I mispronounce words accidentally and have a speaking tick that others make fun of. For example for breakfast at a meeting that had bagels and butter I asked "Can you please pass me the butter." but I mispronounced butter only to have a few people mock me saying "Butter, butter, butter" and laughing.
Yes they are like sharks who smell blood.
If I ever do go back to work, it will have to be the right company, with the right people, and the right management that does do things that ones in the past have done. One that does not discriminate against the mentally ill.
Imagine if instead of becoming mentally ill, I became blind instead. "Well Orion because you are blind now, you don't have as much value as a programmer than someone who has sight. So we are going to demote you and lower your salary to a position you will be able to handle." instead of "Orion we will help you by installing software that converts text to speech for your PC and other equipment to get you back into programming."
Serious question that I haven't yet faced as an employer. If this comes up with one of my employees? Is it appropriate to sit down with them, recognize that they have an illness, but that the company still has needs that need to be fulfilled at that level, but recognize that the employee can still contribute, although at a lower stress, less demanding level...is it appropriate or even welcome to offer continued employment, but at a lower salary and position?
If your employees are harassing and bullying a person because they are disabled, you are liable for that as well.
The only reason why I couldn't have a lawsuit against my former employers is because lawyers don't want to handle a case if the person they have to represent is mentally ill, so there is discrimination there as well. For example my testimony would be questioned in court because of the fact that I am mentally ill. Sure I had the right to sue, sure the EEOC approved my case, but I could not find a lawyer to represent me in 180 days and the statues of limitation ran out.
Now you can accommodate them if this comes up by asking your staff not to bully and harass them for being mentally ill. If they have problems sleeping you can accommodate them to working a third shift at different hours (some sleep disorders happen because of sunlight or anxiety and if you allow them to sleep in they will be refreshed at nighttime during the third shift). If they need to go to a hospital to be treated there is a short-term disability and a federal family medial leave act that prevents you from firing them or giving them a reduce salary or reduce position for missing work.
When I studied business management we studied employment law. I advise you to do the same if you haven't already.
Make sure you document everything you do with HR to protect yourself, including any accommodating things you do to help. If you are not trying to accommodate the disabled person, it can be seen as discrimination. Make sure you document any lost productivity, as well as anything you are trying to do to help the disabled person recover productivity.
Use this test, if the person were blind or deaf or legless, would you treat them the same? If not, you could be discriminating against them.
If an employee is having problems getting work done due to a disability there usually is an EAP Employee Assistance Program recommended by the state or city you can refer the employee to for counseling, evaluation, and treatment that can help them recover and get their work done. This is usually reserved for mental health issues, stress, depression, alcoholism, personal problems like divorce or spousal abuse aka domestic violence and emotional cruelty etc.
Also employment law has a clause in it that if the employer suffers an undue hardship in accommodating the employee, it can be used as a defense in a discrimination trial. If the employee wins the discrimination trail they are usually awarded one year of their salary (The lawyers usually collect 2/3rds of this amount for legal fees, leaving 1/3rd for the employee) and in some if not most cases the lawsuit is usually settled out of court to avoid negative publicity.
Honestly because I've been on disability for so long, I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. It is not the money nor the position, it is being treated fairly that I look for, and that means the right company and the right manager. I would not even mind doing PC repairs and troubleshooting instead of programming or something else like that.
Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing.
Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees.
From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.
I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill?
The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines.
But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming.
But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money.
I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.
What could help is determining the mental cycle and then cross training the employee for different work in the office and during a bad cycle change them to low stress work, and during a normal cycle back to regular work and having other employees work on projects with them that can take over due to a bad cycle and then give control back once that cycle ends. Also educating the coworkers and employees not to treat the employee bad during the bad cycles and avoid stressing them out.
Some things they could do instead of programming:
Documentation of software and requirements.
Quantity Assurance testing of software.
Database design and maintenance.
Doing research into new technology and beta testing products and filing reports on them.
Monitoring print queues and servers for potential problems and reading log files for errors and crashes and reporting on them.
Yes I plan on writing my own book, keeping the names fictional, writing a disclaimer, and documenting all the things that where done to me so people can read and learn about it. I plan to write it under a pen name so it won't be traced back to me either.
I'll be reading it when I have the free-time to do so.
For those who have suffered depression, here is a list of well-known people who have suffered major depressive disorder. If you google, there is a list for every mental disorder! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_major_depre...
In my case, this is what drove me from acceptance of my quirks and issues. So my first rule is to turn that damn TV off, ignore media and advertising as much as humanly possible while still living in this world and meeting real people.
It's a monkey see, monkey do type of world. Everyone thinks they know how they're supposed to behave based on what they see around them, and that becomes a circle of masked behavior in society. So the few of us who can't wear those masks feel even more outcast for being ourselves.
— http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-...
There are too many everyday people armed with psychiatric terms.
Stop it. Many nootropic and psychotropic drugs induce many of those hallucinations. Accept it. And learn how to understand what your body is telling you, rather than treating it like it's some operating table experiment that you'd being graded to poke and prod. Your body is a diagnostician, albeit a cryptic one that has needs, demands and quirks of its own. Most of you simply do not know how to live in your skin because, for one, you were likely raised religious and you've learned how to spite your own "holy temple," not only with deeds but in your minds, your mental habits and cognitive hygiene.
Read a book, like Food of the Gods or something about the organic complexity and biodiversity of this world. Understand.
Stop fearing Nature, and understand how to become harmonious with it.
The rest of your post is similarly ignorant of the very real harm that can come from ignoring severe and enduring MH problems.
Perhaps Bipolar disorder is over diagnosed. Maybe a small number of people cope well without their meds. Meds do have unpleasant side effects. But most people with psychotic illnesses really need the meds to stay functional.
> And learn how to understand what your body is telling you, rather than treating it like it's some operating table experiment that you'd being graded to poke and prod.
I've talked to people who hear voices. They don't always want the voices to disappear, but they do want some techniques to use so they can know when the voice is just a voice and not real, and so they can cope with some of the negative affects of voices.
Is that what you're saying? If you are, fair enough.
But if you're saying that psychosis is just a different state of being, just a different part of the spectrum of normal and fine, well, you're wrong.
How did you get that? Honestly? How? I'm telling you to read up on how ancient mysticisms categorize these problems and relate them to advanced, therapeutic drug use.
Somehow you got "ignore the problems" when I explicitly tell you to go read alternative research on the topic.
Honestly, wtf? My post says "Go read book X" on the matter, and you want to start jumping to claims of "ignorance."
Dude.
The point he was making was that reading and relying on such material (ie. "ancient mysticisms") is liable to cause more harm. Explicitly telling someone to read alternative research doesn't mean a thing if that "research" is flawed.
One's time would likely be better spent reading modern research.
I think the most frustrating thing about your post is all the non-advice you give such as throwing around phrases like "become more harmonious with nature" and "understand".
And that's because of bias. Moreover, I've cited authors who are leaders of these fields, who present at TED and speak in recent discussion forums. McKenna is modern. Stamets is modern.
You just don't read these people, and that's why I cited the madinamerica.com article.
You're just telling me about linguistic and intellectual biases that I'm already fully aware of, and that I tried to anticipate with my post.
And operative word: "if" -- "if" that research is flawed. What are you even arguing? I could argue that against modern medicine, but that is circumstantial and requires precision. What you are saying is not precise, and hardly even relevant; or rather it is too vague to be relevant. Any research can be flawed. But there is even a further question of interpretation of that research; hence why I say "understand." You're using broad strokes as if I am doing so, when I am not.
I honestly just think it's linguistic/information exchange bias going on here. I'm citing those I'm reading. You're telling me that anything could be inaccurate or falsehood; that doesn't get us anywhere.
Scientific method, one would hope.
But, yes, science means we use "weird" mystic concepts like "mindfulness" (from Buddhist meditation) because we know it works for some people and some mental health problems.
And I'm saying "Many," dude. "Many."
Where are you getting "ignorance" etc? I'm not espousing universals here. I'm not at all saying it's black or white. I too am speaking in generalization which can be subject to counterexample.
Read. May I add some color to my writing? Gosh.
If you're going to start throwing out "your wrong," I must ask you to read. Read.
And we're talking about schizophrenia. Why am I being charged with opinions that I haven't even expressed on psychosis? I'm not here to discuss the whole range of psychosis.
The article is about a psychotic illness. It's reasonable to assume your comment is about psychosis.
I've readed McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Antero Alli, etc. Even studied Zen and vaious kind of meditation. And know what you mean.
But keep in mind that all that knowledge is somewhat buried, there are no modern "shamans" readily available, and if they exist, how would we differentiate them from charlatans?.
A person with this kind of "disorders" has a wrong map for reality, and i don't know if it's possible to self cure.
On the other hand all this kind of theories are not so mainstream and you will get massively downvoted for expressing your point of view on the matter.
On my very humble opinion, this so called disorders are problems with symbols assosiations, combined with very sensitive human beings. And where modern science tries to get the individual to adapt to the environment, older techniques tried to build a new map for reality, using the unique talents that every person has, and reordering the symbols on the mind.
Some similarities to this kind of work can be found in NLP (Bandler) and the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Maybe shamanism is not the preferred theme in this forum, bu come on guys, shamans where the first hackers!
- Sorry if there are errors, i'm in a hurry and english is not my first language.
i was very relieved to find a competent psychiatrist, who prescribed me medication and immediately referred me to a "psychoeducation" group, which is basically a class (not therapy) about handling the illness. we were taught how both medication and behavioral techniques go hand in hand. that sounds very similar to the "body and soul" approach you can read about in RAW etc..., without the crazy. I can assure you that if you wrestle with delusions, the last you want is more crazy concepts designed to fuck with your mind. After that psychoeducation, I went to a psychologists and regularly do some CBT, which is mostly being told as an adult that you should tidy your room and go play outside a bit, and how to keep a balanced life.
now all these concepts and medications may lose their "magic" touch, but it is pretty much the same thing isn't it? it just sounds less funky to call someone a competent psychiatrist than calling him a shaman in touch with the chemicals of nature, or a competent psychologist a priest who can read your soul and keep you grounded in the natural world.
one thing i learnt too is that meditation is something that actually triggers mania and ultimately psychosis in me. this may sound stupid, but if you have mental issues and especially issues with psychosis or dissociation, don't start to experiment with substances and mental techniques on yourself without making sure you having someone watching out for you. and it's definitely easier to pay someone to do that than put that kind of burden on your family and friends.
I'm against most of the new age mystic mumbo jumbo, but, my sensation about the subject is that the main difference is that modern mental science tries the symptoms, where primitive healers worked with the root causes (raw symbols) with the help of rituals, to give you an example of a mentioned author, Jodorowsky sais that "the brain accepts methapors as reality", accepting this premise you can elaborate, for example, a teatrical scene (or a ritual) where you face your problem, fight it, and solve it.
What we are missing is people that know how to orchestrate this sessions, because, as you said is very dangerous to someone with mental issues to experiment with this kind of things.