sCHIZoPHReNIa diARiES
TRUE STORIES BY REAL SCHIZOPHRENICS
Schizophrenia Has No Borders or Boundaries
DEAN JOHNSTON'S STORY
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.
