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Schizophrenia knows no boundaries or borders

by Ian Chovil

Guelph Ontario Canada
http://www.mgl.ca/~chovil/index.html#2

Schizophrenia can come on rather suddenly around age 18 in men and 25 in women or it can have an insidious, meaning gradual onset. My schizophrenia seemed to start when I was about 17-18 although I was not a well adjusted teenager before that. I developed my first major romantic relationship at 17 which gradually deteriorated over the next four years. With an insidious onset you gradually lose your relationships with friends, family and lovers, as your symptoms increase and you end up quite alone. My mother says now that she noticed a change around 18, that I lost all my ambition to suceed. When I was sixteen I scored in the top three percentile in a province wide mathematics contest, and my favorite subjects were math and physics. By the time I was eighteen I had lost interest in school and only applied to university because my father was so insistent I go. I was quite strange from 18-25 at high school and university and thought I needed psychological therapy along the lines of Gestalt therapy or Rolfing. I was a very rebellious teenager who experienced a lot of emotional turmoil. One significant indication of schizophrenia was my inability to plan my future. I took courses that sounded interesting, smoked a lot of marijuana and drank too much at parties. I was notably incapable of and uninterested in long term romantic relationships and in fact was very anxious in any kind of social situation. I doubt that any psychiatrist would have been able to diagnose schizophrenia at that point though. I graduated with an Hon B.Sc. from Trent University with a double major in biology and anthropology. I applied to one graduate school at the last minute as I realized that my degree was not a career and was accepted.

At graduate school in Nova Scotia in 1978 I kept going to the university clinic about my physical health, afraid that my health was going to fall apart, that I had picked up a form of syphyllis that couldn't be detected by standard lab tests, etc. I was referred to a psychiatrist and before long I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. What started as having an analyst like Woody Allen became an involuntary hospitalization. I had some delusions that Jim Jones, who was responsible for 500 people committing suicide en masse, was trying to force me to commit suicide but I never told anyone. I was getting pretty confused though. Unfortunately no one mentioned schizophrenia to me or my father, who is a physician, and I thought I had just had some sort of nervous breakdown. I saw someone after I was discharged about once a month for a few months. I remember taking Chlorpromazine before I was hospitalized which I didn't like and some Stellazine after I was discharged. My father encouraged me to take it but I was scared of it and I only took it for a little while. The medication seemed to cause my delusions and I believed that for many years.

My father convinced me to try and finish my year even though I wanted to drop out. It was a very miserable year for me. Some courses went unfinished and I was kicked out of graduate school. I worked for a summer in Toronto, the fall in London, and then I headed out west to Vancouver Island. I knew someone there in a small pulp mill town called Crofton but he moved up island and I rented an apartment in the strip joint tavern, alone again.

As I relapsed I had mostly delusions and paranoia. I thought the CIA was after me for awhile after I wrote a letter to the editor of Science magazine about how the US military was using dioxin as a weapon in Vietnam. My delusions had faded for the previous summer but they had never completely disappeared. That is to say I believed some pretty strange things. In Halifax I thought I had discovered the cause of World War Two. The influenza epidemic of 1918 changed peoples' nervous systems so the cause of the war was a neurovirus. I thought my law professor in Halifax was very well connected with influential people in world politics and was telling people about my theory. Various important people were coming from Europe to meet the man who discovered the cause of World War 2. So for example someone might come up to me in Crofton and talk about mopeds and I would think this man was the president of Motobecane, the world's largest manufacturer of mopeds. People seemed to know me before I introduced myself, and the local townspeople seemed to be laughing at me. I remember once the political cartoon in the local paper seemed to be about me and people who picked me up hitchiking seemed to know who I was.

In the spring of 1980 I left Crofton forced out by the townspeople who demanded I get a job. I took the bus with no destination in mind until I ran out of money. From then on I usually hitchiked, mostly through Alberta and B.C. quitting a job with my first pay check because I found working with people so difficult. They were playing games with me and making fun of me. I would then hitchike somewhere else. I thought I was being followed by a WW2 veteran everywhere I went who wanted me to shape up by working in construction like he did after the war. I kept trying to escape him but he had friends everywhere. I slept in city parks, by the side of the road and in single men's hostels. I was homeless and often penniless.

I remember once in Calgary staying at the single men's hostel and not getting to eat very much for several weeks, becoming quite weak. I couldn't work because I had dioxin poisining and this was affecting my cortical hormone balance making work too stressful. Tibetan buddhist lamas were reading my mind everywhere I went in Calgary, respectful and curious, because I had caused the Mt. St. Helen's erruption for them earlier that year through tantric meditation.

I don't think I quite understood or believed what was happening to me, but I was determined not to admit defeat and return to my parents house. It seemed like I had powerful friends who wanted me to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Only two years earlier I had been in graduate school, with a new friend, David Rae, discussing world politics while watching the CBC news at a local bar. David's brother, Bob Rae, later became the Premier of Ontario.

Come late fall I was in Victoria, driven south by the approaching winter. There I was somehow able to pay rent and I stayed there for four years. I started studying Tibetan buddhism and took refuge in the lama who lived there, Tashi Namjyal. I thought he was capable of all kinds of supernatural powers of the mind like telepathy and telekinesis. It is a tremendous invasion of privacy to have someone reading your mind all the time uninvited. I believed he was controling my dreams while I slept as well. He said to me in his broken English, "you special" and I thought that meant I had a lot of natural ability to be a very powerful tantric like him. He was the equivalent of a graduate teacher in the Tibetan monastic system.

I had caused the Mt. St. Helen's eruption with his guidance through tantric meditation. I had bad karma so I wasn't given control or access to my power but by causing Mt. St. Helen's to errupt the Tibetans were taking pressure off the California continental plates. We saved San Francisco.

I had gone to several family physicians about my physical problems of which dioxin poisining seemed to be the cause and I thought it was also causing my adjustment problems but the family doctors never realized what was happening to me and I stopped going to them and instead thought this Tibetan buddhist lama would be able to help me, because I did realize that something was wrong.

I was losing contact with reality gradually and stayed in abject poverty and I was miserable. I remember I bought a WW 2 rifle to please the WW 2 veteran and I would sit in my basement room with the barrel in my mouth and wonder if I should pull the trigger. I started to think Tashi Namjal was evil because he was celibate and I got messages from Beatle songs which I thought were from the Marharishi Mahesh Yogi to run away and that's what I did. I thought there was a war going on between two groups, both with supernatural powers, that would decide the fate of humanity. I called one the Sexuals and one the Antisexuals, because these powers came from sexuality.

I forget some of my life out west. I do remember being very miserable and very alone, identifying with Milarepa who is a Tibetan saint of sorts. The Tantric tradition, which is very interesting, has its roots in India. In the ninth century these supernormal powers were close to becoming a part of society. Tibetan buddhism incorporates a celibate tantricism in its teachings which has survived I think because it is also very religious. I was entranced by the erotic temples in India like Konarak and determined to become a tantric and help the world rediscover the supernormal powers of the mind in sexuality.

In Toronto I managed to get a job changing lightbulbs at a large department store. I ran away twice, to England and Jamaica expecting to be welcomed personally by the Maharishi. When a terrorist bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie Scotland I thought it was an attempt on my life, which prompted me to fly immediately to the Maharishi in England but he wasn't there and I came back the same weekend.  I saw a movie called "Oedipus Rex" directed by Passolini and immediately flew to Jamaica expecting to meet the Maharishi. I was looking for Strawberry Fields mentioned in the Beatles song and there are two in Jamaica. It was a memorable trip. I ran out of money after one week and mostly learned the importance of money.

I was just a pawn in a secret war. I didn't have any friends, any lovers, and very little contact with my parents between 1980 and 1990. My parents had moved to the States while I was in Victoria and I never told anyone what was happening. I lived in a cockroach infested rooming house never even realizing that Diazinon will eliminate cockroaches. I had a strong sense of mission to help humanity instead of myself and in my poverty I believed the cause of suffering in the world was overpopulation. My solution was to hybridize the AIDS virus with the common cold and eliminate 3 - 4 billion people.

I got a lot of messages from favorite Rock and Roll songs, from movies, cartoons and library books. The library was my special friend who could show me what I needed to know by having me open and read exactly the information I was looking for. Someone was leading me to the books I needed and that was too much for humans to be capable of. I started to believe I was in contact with aliens from outer space. At first there were two kinds. I learned humanity was going to become extinct from a nuclear holocaust that would break up the continental plates. The oceans would evaporate with all the molten lava and I was going to live in a box out in space with a woman the aliens had been breeding since life started on this planet. She had dark blue skin like the Hindu god Krishna and we were going to have children who would be turquoise in colour. We were going to be the only survivors of Armageddon and we would propagate the species. Only girls would be born as identical twins and they would be able to impregnate each other from a single drop on their funny long noses. I would be the last surviving male although I would only live a thousand years.

I believed that to be my destiny completely and got a lot of messages everywhere I went. I heard voices several times but mostly I experienced telepathy. I had what are called "ideas of reference" where things are thought to have a particular meaning just for you. For example, a license plate on the street could be an important and appropriate message for me from the aliens. By the end my fate had changed a bit. I was going to become an alien and have eternal life and be capable of time travel and my companion was going to be a part time anthropolgy professor at the University of Toronto. Sexuality was as important as intelligence to the aliens and they had evolved beyond the use of machinery to doing everything with their mind. I thought they were turning on my nervous system with experiences of pain so that every neuron was active, so that I would be able to experience greater pleasure as an alien. I asked them once if a machine might not make the process less painful and I remember them laughing, saying "Machines... Ian, we don't have any machines."

My delusions changed as the aliens instructed me on the real nature of reality. Three things happened as my contact with reality became very tenuous. I got in trouble with the law, I became alcoholic, and I lost my job.

One night after convincing the aliens to transfer my mind to another body I got mad at the aliens, and started breaking windows in the rooming house I was living in. The police came, subdued me and I spent a couple of nights in jail. The judge realized I was a psychiatric case because I carried a pocketknife to defend myself against homosexuals. The world's most powerful man was a homosexual and he was trying to make me a homosexual. By then the Maharishi was my second worst enemy. I believed they both knew about the end of the world and my destiny with the aliens and they wanted to take my place. I didn't mention that in court though.

Nobody asked why I did what I did. I got three years probation with the condition that I see a psychiatrist for those three years. Psychiatrists are only human though, while I was almost alien and they wouldn't have understood what was happening so I never told them anything. I went to my appointments to stay out of jail.

Jail was such a shock to me. I was so mad at the aliens after that experience I tried to force them to give me a new body by killing the body I was in. I bought several bottles of vodka and guzzled them like water until I passed out knowing that people overdose and die from alcohol. I got pneumonia but lived and decided that the aliens wouldn't let me die, only experience pain until it was time for me to go.

Although I didn't drink anything for awhile I eventually started to drink and heavily because I could afford it. You need $11 an hour to become an alcoholic. Originally I drank for the hops which I thought were medication for celibacy. My behaviour became more and more bizarre and I was fired from my job. I went from unemployment insurance to Welfare, brewing my own beer in plastic pails and eating in soup kitchens. I thought I was going to become an alien when I turned 37 because I saw a book written by the ancient seer Nostradamus entitled 3791. I thought that since he could see the future he would realize I was not capable of understanding the book and that all I would need to know could be explained in the title. I turned 37 in 1991 a year after moving to Guelph but I'm still here unfortunately.

I experienced many extreme emotions when I was psychotic with positive symptoms. In fact its a wonder I didn't come into contact with the police before I did. I can say that I never harmed anyone but I realize I came very close, although I experienced more fear than anything else. I am by nature a gentle person who has never fought with anyone. Family members I have met in Guelph have usually had some experience of verbal abuse or physical assault from their ill relative before they were treated. I remember I thought I was dying from celibacy and I hated women for a couple years even though I went through adolescence with only feminist friends and was convinced women were the superior sex. Schizophrenia can force you to feel and do things that are not in character for you. Dr. E Fuller Torrey says violence in schizophrenia is predicted by three factors: a previous history of violence, substance abuse, and not on medication.

I would destroy my own possesions first like my guitar without having much choice. I shied away from people. I remember sitting on the ledge of a window on the sixth floor wanting to jump but knowing that the aliens would have an open truck loaded with mattresses come by just as I jumped and when I actually saw such a truck weeks later it only confirmed my conclusions. 

I didn't win the lottery though after I lost my job and the people in my rooming house started mainlining heroin in the living room. I was desperately poor by that point expecting to become homeless and sleep on a hot air vent and I couldn't believe that was necessary in becoming an alien. I was experiencing quite a few blackouts from the drinking I was doing and getting scared of alcohol. I kept waking up in strange places. One fellow in the rooming house had attacked me with a chain such that I needed stitches above my eye. I was too disorganized and too poor to find another place to live. My mind seemed to be falling apart into the left brain, me, and a right brain I hardly knew who was in tremendous pain and very demanding, and a dinosaur or core brain, very powerful and very angry at me. I agreed to go to the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph to be treated for alcoholism. Going into hospital was the easy way to get out of a situation that was very frightening. That was at the end of my three year probationary period.

As I sobered up my delusions faded a lot and I realized I had no concrete proof of aliens or my imaginary wife. I also realized I couldn't put my faith in aliens to take care of me. I moved into a basement room in Guelph and started a maintenance dose of antipsychotics. The year was 1990. It took several years to completely believe and understand that I had schizophrenia though. I was sure I had been misdiagnosed, and I would much rather have had bipolar disorder so I could compare myself to various famous people. I wanted to go off medication but the psychiatrists were very firm about that. Medication didn't seem to have any effect so there was no reason not to take it. It kept my psychiatrist happy.

I was very depressed for several years and very lethargic. I didn't accomplish very much and was quite anxious. I lived in basement rooms, had no friends and little contact with anyone. At that time I was seeing a psychiatrist at the Community Mental Health Clinic once a month or so. I don't think my period of depression could have been avoided. Antidepressants didn't help which suggests I didn't have an actual depression. I was very anxious having nothing to do and no one to do it with and had very low self esteem. My mood eventually improved a bit and I made a couple of friends and became more active. I started to do a little volunteer work and I eventually met Rosemary and courted her. I started to work for some extra cash, delivering flyers and then the local newspaper. Rosemary and I moved into the apartment building where I delivered newspapers. We shared a two bedroom apartment for 16 months until the Provincial government made that too expensive.

The quality of my life has been improving a little each year for the last eight years so I can't complain too much but every once in awhile I really feel the losses I am enduring. Life is a series of opportunities as you grow older, and I missed all of those opportunities. I wonder about my future alone. Living on a limited budget could make anyone miserable. Being celibate is a great loss many people don't mention to anyone. I will never get to experience what a lot of people take for granted. I may never own a car. I may never marry. I may never have a vacation again, let alone full time employment. It is only in the past couple of years that I can say that I have been able to accomplish anything productive. Before that I was pretty unhappy and didn't feel very good about myself.

My friend Susan says there are two kinds of people. You get on a plane that is supposed to go to Hawaii and instead the plane lands in Siberia. Susan prefers to use Arizona as the alternate destination. You can either learn to enjoy Siberia or forever feel bitter that you didn't land in Hawaii. Lately Siberia has been fairly pleasant. My life does seem a bit "empty" compared to ordinary peoples lives. I also have a lot of unpleasant memories in which I've done things I now regret. Its difficult to know how much I'm responsible for and how much schizophrenia is responsible for. I think its important for me to focus on enjoying life as much as I can and not dwell on the past.

I went to Schizophrenia 96 a couple of years ago, sponsored by Eli Lilly. I was mistakenly booked at the hotel as Dr. Chovil and the next day at the conference in my sports coat and dress shirt I was just another psychiatrist and it felt pretty neat. This was the life I should have had. But the first keynote address by Dr. Weinberger, world reknown researcher in schizophrenia, compared finding the cause of schizophrenia to finding the cause of the TWA flight explosion that was in the news at that time. There was no evidence that it was a bomb. Finding out what happened when all you have are the twisted pieces of metal scattered along the ocean floor was causing difficulties. Over the three day conference I became very depressed realizing how appropriate that image was for me. I could empathise with the psychiatrists who were looking at their patient in front of them and asking themselves "why doesn't this person have the same lifestyle that I enjoy?".

There is hope on the horizon in the new atypicals and early diagnosis, coupled with relapse prevention, and schizophrenia seems to be attracting much more public interest and compassion. There is so much research underway on schizophrenia it's difficult to keep up with it.

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