I came across this blog written by an unnamed writer now in his sixties who, from what I have read so far, reminds me very much of Harry Haller, the protagonist of Steppenwolf. In his introductory post he writes about the process of renewal. Below is just an extract from a blog post. You can find out more at Sky Blue Cure.

From Death to Life: A Story of Personality Reconstruction
Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.

Rainer Maria Rilke

This story has been written primarily for a few close friends although all readers are welcome.

Given the nature of the stigma associated with emotional illness, the pharmaceutical bias of the medical establishment and the vast misunderstanding of emotional functions in popular culture it is unlikely that this message would be accepted or even be of interest to most people.

At least the record is made, for my satisfaction , that someone like myself did exist and did transform in an age where this process is relatively unsought and unknown.

I was sick and then I was cured. I was emotionally ill until I was thirty. I was made ill by the psychological abuses of both my family and the larger social world. At the age of thirty my personality changed, I was totally reconstructed. I changed it with help and guidance. The difference in my two lives, my two personalities, before and after, is virtually the difference of life and death. Prior to my change, I was barely emotionally alive yet I did experience states of extreme fear, depression and anxiety. I was able to think and function to some extent but mostly lived either in a state of deadness or extreme emotional agitation. I could not emotionally react in a natural way and so had to avoid most situations that caused emotion. I could not direct my actions or my life to any cause or interaction with others. I could not progress or grow in almost any way. My current personality is as fully emotionally alive with a full emotional range and I have no social fears or anxieties.

Previously, I was emotionally repressed. I was as if dead, yet I suffered greatly as if in an unending nightmare which I could not understand. My conception of myself now is that I somehow died or was murdered as a small child and lived on drifting as a frightened ghost, a dead person yet alive and dreaming a nightmare, a somnambulist, a recording machine that recorded events but could not participate in them. From emotional repression I deteriorated over the years into a fractured personality. I have no sense of “break” from my two personalities, I have always felt a continual flow of self, yet my current self is my full self and I regard my previous self as my dead self. I remember my past before age 30, It was “I” but then again it was “Not-I”. I live now with a strange dichotomy of memories and feelings about who I am. This also makes me a person who is able to draw on opposite types of behaviour to use at I will.

After I changed, over time I realized that I was not the same person. At first, I had thought I was simply “more” than I was previously but I came to realize that I was not only “more” but I was “different”. If I had met my previous personality, I wouldn’t have liked much about him and I don’t suppose he did like himself much either. That’s as it should be.

Our unnamed writer echos Hermann Hesse, who wrote “Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual. But those who do so inevitably discover that these struggles bring them into conflict with the normal life of average people and the traditional values and bourgeois conventions that they uphold.”

The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is quoted in today’s New York Times:  “I remembered something Marsha Norman said at Juilliard,” he said. “She said, if you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you the most.”

As most of you know, I’m writing a memoir about Chris’s and my journey through schizophrenia. I didn’t set out to be a writer, this is my one literary bolt of inspiration, so sequels are not in the offing and I don’t expect to be awarded a Pulitzer prize for great writing. My added value to this generally “misery memoir*” categorized genre is that I approach schizophrenia from an optimistic viewpoint; I expect full recovery for Chris (and me!) and I expect it to come from non-drug interventions. There is an exciting world of help that more people should know about that runs counter to the accepted wisdom today that schizophrenia is a brain disease that can best be treated by pharmaceuticals. “Schizophrenia” no longer frightens me because I learned how to understand its message, however, my initial fright provided the impetus to try to write a good memoir.

Holistic schizophrenia needs a lot more help than I can provide. The competition is almost all on the side of memoirists (see Henry’s Demons* below) who promote the the idea that one day science will finally track down the cause of this “scourge.” Our side needs to be promoted through our own memoirs showing that there is a better way to understanding. There are too many memoirists like Kay Redfield Jamison who set out to convince people that so-called mental illnesses are depressing, lifelong and purely biochemical in origin. We need more memoirists like Jane Alexander, author of Possessing Me: A Memoir of Healing. Now there’s a positive message!

W.H. Auden had this to say about memoir writing: “Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.”

Many of you are probably already thinking about writing this kind of reflection. If you aren’t, please consider doing so now. The public’s s understanding of how to treat mental illness usually comes from a book or a movie that they read or watched. Together we can challenge the public view of schizophrenia.

_________________________
*Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son’s Story, by Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn (Scribner, Feb. 1, 2011)

Editorial reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sensitive story of a family’s battle with schizophrenia looks at the ignorance and stigma that often accompany any mention of mental illness. When Cockburn, a foreign correspondent for the Independent on assignment in Afghanistan, learns his 20-year-old son, Henry, has been institutionalized after trying to drown himself, he tries to understand why his son has had a mental breakdown. The Cockburns, a tightly knit family, are severely tested by the pressures of a loved one undone by his mind and locked away for seven years in a mental hospital. Told in alternate views, both father and son write candidly of the illness, medications, and numerous hospitalizations, along with harrowing descriptions of visions and voices. This straightforward, unsentimental book, is a bold plea for more research and cutting-edge therapies to combat mental illness. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

What to do when the bright and gregarious child you have loved and nurtured suddenly takes to stripping naked and defecating in a neighbor’s yard? Or worse, what if he courts death via hypothermia by swimming in the frigid waters of a nearby river? What could possibly be worse? If that same young man adamantly denies that he is ill and stubbornly refuses all medication that might help him. As a parent you are helpless when your son repeatedly escapes the confinement necessary to prevent him from harming himself. If Patrick Cockburn’s wrenching account of son Henry’s illness is not affective enough, Henry’s guileless divulgence of his personal reality drives home the unrelenting anguish of the families of schizophrenics. More poignant still are the journal excerpts of Henry’s mother, whose nerves are palpably raw from being in the trenches with her son’s illness and a medical community unable to help him. The family Cockburn’s unique take—by allowing Henry a voice in this book—offers valuable insights into mental illness. –Donna Chavez

Apologies to Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds for continously mooching off her post ideas, as I did yesterday, but her post today has inspired me once more. Inspire may not be the right word. I’ve got to vent. Dr. Mark Foster is a primary care physician in Colorado who is often a guest blogger at Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America blog. Today he writes about a teenage patient who’s been on Adderall for years. His father is with him in the examining room and expresses consternation after he gets a lecture from Mark about the wisdom of having a kid on Adderall for 10 years. “But, it’s a disease, isn’t it?” he says to the doctor.

Believe it or not, my sympathies here are with the father, mainly because this post about childhood use of Adderall shows how much people have been jerked around by the medical profession when it comes to mental health. Now, we’ve got a chirpy young doctor telling the old man that he’s got it completely wrong. Pa’s been jerked around since before this guy went to medical school, now suddenly he’s getting a lecture that supposedly everybody else knows but him.

Parents and their idiotic ideas aside, doctors have been the willing handmaidens of pharma and have been only too willing to push the idea that there is something called ADD or ADHD and there’s a medication for it. Consider the opposite. Suppose this father initially resisted putting his child on meds. He’d be up against teachers, other parents who have put their kid on meds, perhaps his own family doctor suggesting that “research shows that untreated hyperactivity leads directly to jail,” and the media telling him that the latest research shows how these drugs “protect the brain.”

So, I often do get angry because I know we’ve really been had and almost no person in a position of medical authority who families turned to in the past twenty years was curious enough or responsible enough to question the sales job.