Written Word Therapy

Illustration by Emily Wright


The following is a presentation written for the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta in May 2017:


Hello, I'm Trevor.  I'm pleased to be here.

I believe that one's earliest memories shape one's entire life.

As Vladimir Nabokov said, "I think it's all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."  It is the curse of the philosophic mind that these memories are memories of people, and people do not live forever.  In my case, my cherished memory is that of my Baba.  I remember her round belly, her sky-blue dresses that reached to the floor, and her suicide.  Even today, the room she died in makes me uneasy.

At the time, when I was four-years-old, I learned that she thought the police were after her.  That was my first encounter with schizophrenia, the disease that steals the soul.  From that moment on, I was fascinated with what I viewed as a different sort of breakdown of reason: religion.  If that's where the core of one's soul is, certainly it would be there where I could find my answers.

I may have been young, but my problem was serious.  I'll steal Albert Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”, I drifted through school, intentionally getting high enough grades that I could pass, but played without any stubbornness of character.  Thus, I was educated without being bothered by petty concerns.  The specter of my Baba's death lingered, and her death was a real insurmountable problem.

Within my twelfth year of school, there was a radical change.  I can blame it somewhat on the literature I was reading at the time:  Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.  It seemed that the answer was there within the confidence of these brave thinkers, and the reason I had not already found the answer was because of government scare tactics promoted so liberally in schools.

The last three months of school were hellish.  I was balancing mild drug use with school work, and the thought of another 4 years of post-secondary was not appealing at all.  I asked my grandfather to lend me the money he had earmarked me for university use to just give me the money and let me sort life out a little.  Of course, he said no.  He was a professional radiologist.

I graduated with an 87% average.

But my rational years were over.  I decided that, in the worst case scenario, participating in the tradition of drug use would cause me to have a mental breakdown, but that was still only in a minority of cases.

Drug users develop a keen sensitivity to their inner state.  It's something that cannot be learned without experience.  In certain spiritual practices, the careful controlled use of drugs pushes someone into the desired receptivity to spiritual ideas.  Outside of therapy, it's a matter of luck and experiment, which is unsafe.

I kept a log, which encompassed everything from nutmeg to cough syrup to marijuana to ecstasy to crystal methamphetamine.  Simultaneously, I kept a journal of my thoughts, a proper philosophical journal that is forever lost to time.  Within my drug journal you can see a mind desperate to hold onto sanity, but only in retrospect.  If I had known that there were treatments for my suffering, I would have skipped the experimentation.  I found solace in crystal meth, finally.  It settled me down and helped me get on track with my other spiritual pursuits.

Four months later, I was coughing up bloody chunks of lung.  That was enough to get me to stop.  I abruptly ended all contact with my drug-using friends.  That phase of my life was over. The only leftover was cigarettes, which I found a lot more difficult to quit than harder drugs.

I opened up to my Mom about my activities, and admitted that I might be depressed.  It didn't come as a surprise.  At the time, I had progressed to reading any philosophy I could get my greedy hands on, and found a spiritual message in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.  I admit I didn't understand it all at once, but my final message is this: seek for Right Mindfulness (be in your right mind) for sanity, unblock your chakras for enlightenment, and see the necessary duality that all in the world has its opposite.  An Enlightened person is the Eastern equivalent of a Rational person.  Having been labelled insane, the quality of my sanity is important to me.

Anyway, I felt that I was being watched.  In this case, it was true.  My friends and family were all trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what to do about it.  It got to the point where I fled my house and ended up at the University of Alberta.  I disrupted classes and got sent to security.  I wasn't wearing shoes since I left by way of my window.  Security managed to get my information and they held me there until I got picked up.  When we arrived back home, a pair of nurses were waiting.  They talked to me for a while and then took me to Alberta Hospital.

By the end of the first full day in the hospital, I was locked in solitary confinement.  I had yelled at the nurses for their mistreatment of patients, and everyone sort of looked away while I had my breakdown.  Solitary is not fun.  I'd say it's like prison, but it's identical to prison.  It's not pretty being in a cage.  I rubbed faeces on the wall just to get moved to the other solitary room.  That was when I was eighteen.

I was initially diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.  Although I hadn't touched meth in over eight months, it is one of those drugs that set off alarm bells.  I thought that I was dead and was in Purgatory.  I took three months until I understood anything of anything again. My family was very supportive, and I know they know more about my illness than I do since I still have trouble with basic activities of life.  I've been admitted four times, and my current diagnosis is schizophrenia.  What this means to a regular person is anyone's guess.  I barely understand it, and sometimes I feel like I've gotten over it and then straight back to the hospital.

I've been out of hospital for three years now.

After so long, I'm so used to schizophrenia that I don't bring it up in casual conversation.  There's plenty of other things people can hate me for.  I did have a period of self-stigmatization.  It almost lead to my suicide.  It came about after I tried to go back to school and found that things that were normally easy for me were now ridiculously impossible.  Getting to school.  Staying awake in classes.  Making lunches.

Currently, I'm thirty-two years old.  I don't work, go to school, or volunteer.  For a while, I tried to check out the Mormon church, but it was not my brand of religion.  I don't need any more guilt in my life.  I do, however, practice karate and attend the SSA.  I keep good relations with my family, and I've got a few high school friends that managed to survive through my incidents.  That's the limit of my socialization.

What do I think can be changed?

I dislike when people use words like "bipolar" or "depressed", "autistic" or "schizophrenic" outside of the context of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual.  As Soren Kierkegaard said: "once you label me you negate me."The challenge of finding a way to speak openly about mental illness without stigmatizing those labeled as such is real.  Depression is not simply sadness; schizophrenia is not simply fear.  In the future, I would like to find a shared vocabulary that allows doctors and lawyers to speak intelligibly to one another without frightening those they are talking about.  It feels too much like a witch hunt and not enough like medicine.  I'm not the first to make this comparison.  As Albert Camus had said, suicide is the prime philosophic problem of philosophy.  In this sense, my problems had a spiritual solution.  I've considered using the spiritual languages of Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to describe the same events in clearer terms.

I'll share with you how that might work.

There are seven chakras which can be blocked, and a blockage in a chakra leads to an illness.  For example, the lowest chakra, the basal one, is blocked by fear and leads to poor survivability, just as someone afflicted with schizophrenia is walled in by his or her paranoia.  It makes sense primarily because Hinduism is a meditative language, which has given names to all the different states of consciousness.  Western medicine misses a useful tool when it ignore the discoveries of the East.  Taking all seven chakras as real allows us to quantify degrees of mental unwellness, in the same way that an IQ test allows us to quantify the rarity of relative intelligences.  Living with schizophrenia is better than not living at all, and there is always the possibility that one opens the crown chakra and becomes enlightened.  But this is beyond the scope of this presentation, so I'll finish my thoughts another time.

For the moment, this image should suffice:

How do I respond to Camus' problem?

Although my medications are certainly better than meth, they still do not answer all the problems of the illness.    I suffer from excessive fatigue, sleeping 12-14 hours a day.   My hygiene could be better.  My hands quiver frequently.  No matter how often I try to focus on these, it never seems important.  I've had 4 different diagnoses with 4 different pill combinations.  There will never be a perfect one.  As it stands, I prefer the negative side-effects of my medications than the side-effects of street drugs.

But I certainly no longer have the urge to kill myself, through drugs or otherwise.  Suicide, the problem that my Baba introduced to me at an early age, is no answer.  If I could talk to her now, I could give her the ultimate advice: be patient.  Even at my worst, it was going to get better.  What I had was patience, as it took ten years for the psychiatrists to find an acceptable medication cocktail for me.  The solution meant I had to trust others to do what was best for me when I was incapable of making these decisions.  It's hard to swallow a doctor's drugs if you have a history of drug use.

My family stuck by me, and showed me by example that life was inherently worth living.  Above all, my mother always tried to reach me on the far side of consciousness.  She is able to admit me into the hospital if I stop making sense.  And others believe that what I say makes sense, which is all I really desire.  Telling the truth and being believed is important for anyone who has gone through any form of suffering.

In closing, I hope you enjoyed this journey into my mind, and appreciated the humble perspective of someone living with schizophrenia.