TIM’S STORY

One of the first things I remember following my return home from the psychiatrist’s surgery was the hazy fog that engulfed me due to the medication I was taking.

I would bump into walls, my jaw would become tight, my tongue wouldn’t move properly in my mouth and I would consequently slur my words. Mum was obviously very concerned. Perhaps shocked, or mortified would be a better description.

Fortunately, I was far too gone to register her distress at my condition. I had my hands full just trying to cope. I felt like a walking hospital patient trying to describe to my parents where it hurt, what I could and couldn’t do, through the blanket of chlorpromazine that obstructed my every communication. “Zombie” would be a good description of how I was for that first while.

Medication that is used to arrest a psychotic episode is extremely strong. Apparently, left untreated, these episodes can last as long as a year before they run their course, by which time untold psychic and physical damage will have been wreaked upon the sufferer, let alone what catastrophes he or she may have inflicted in the world, so to speak. That is, if one survives. It doesn’t bear thinking about. So I am quite clear that this extreme period of mental illness needed to be treated in order that it could be arrested and equilibrium, or at least stability, could again be restored, or at least sought.

It is also important to remember that this was 30 years ago. The drugs have improved since then.

Importantly at the time, the psychiatrist who saw me thought I was probably suffering from schizophrenia, a condition which unfortunately does require stronger medication to control. In the acute phase, manic-depression/bipolar and schizophrenia can be difficult to distinguish and are treated similarly, yet most of the time the drugs needed to control manic depression/bipolar are not as strong with fewer side effects.

Another important factor is the era. When I was sent home from the psychiatrist’s surgery the year was 1987. This was well before CAT (Community Assessment and Treatment) Teams. It was still the era of giant psychiatric institutions where one was typically sent for life. I was in fact very lucky to avoid this fate and to end up at home, even if loaded to the gills with psychotropic medication.

Imagine your mind being like a clear crystal ball which is smashed into millions of glass shards, and which you then have to glue back together again.

Those initial days at home were I think quite frightening for my mum and step-dad, to see me so altered by such a “chemical straitjacket”, but for me it was just about trying to cope. I wasn’t frightened. I had been extremely frightened before when I was “unwell”. This was recovery. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was real.

Following my initial diagnosis and treatment, I returned to school. I can’t imagine how I managed to do that and can’t really remember it at all.

Later, I was referred to a private psychiatric hospital. Some of the private Auckland psychiatrists would use this facility with more acute patients as an alternative to the public system, but its function, as I understand it, was as a place of recuperation for individuals diagnosed with mental illness.

I have clear memories from that time, but I certainly don’t remember everything. Initially I was pretty “zonked out”, a technical term, on the schizophrenia meds, but this changed as the chlorpromazine drained out of my system and the lithium took over. I was in there for about three or four weeks.

My room was comfortable if small. It reminded me a little of a motel room without a bathroom. I remember a pale green colour. That could have been the walls. There was a ranch-slider to the garden.

Following my discharge from hospital, I stayed at home for the remainder of the year and didn’t return to school. 1987 was not a great year for me. I had started the year by missing most of the first term with glandular fever. By the time I eventually arrived at school, they were already suggesting that if I missed any more days I wouldn’t qualify as being present for enough of the school year. After my return, the mania gradually took hold, so that my behaviour at school became progressively more outlandish, bizarre and downright crazy. Then I had a car accident, where I nearly died and suffered severe concussion, giving

Summer was a long period of recuperation, which unfortunately passed too quickly, and I was into the new school year, trying to cope with a drastically altered level and way of functioning. It felt like my mind had been shattered and now I had to piece it back together. In fact that is the image I used at the time to try to explain the experience to others.

“Try and imagine your mind being like a clear crystal ball,” I would say, “which is then smashed into millions of glass shards by the psychosis and which you then have to glue back together again. The task is interminable and seemingly impossible, and at the finish you are not left with the clear crystal ball with which you began, but a fractured opaque distorted ball held together with glue (the meds).”

Back then, I didn’t think I would ever heal that ball and make it clear again, but somehow, magically it did happen, though it would take a very long time.

First, though, I had to return to school. This was perhaps the hardest thing I have had to do. I attended a co-educational secondary school, and the previous year I had been floridly psychotic, quite openly mad. I was still a teenager – just 17 – and had to return to school and face the music so to speak. The only comparison to how I felt is “the fear” you have if, having drunk too much at a work party the night before, you awake the next morning not exactly sure of what you’ve said or done, but, fearing the worst, you have to face your colleagues with no recollection of what you’ve done apart from a feeling that it really wasn’t good. If you take that feeling, dial it up to its most extreme, extend it over a period of months, and remember that I was a teenager at school who hadn’t been drinking... you can begin to imagine my apprehension.

I was also still adjusting to my medication. I was much slower, still a bit clouded from the effects of the anti-psychotic drugs of the year before, and getting used to the mood-stabilising drugs I was taking. I was also dealing with weight gain due to the medication.

Iwas fundamentally not the same person I had been six months before. To say that 1988 was a challenge would truly be an understatement. With my friends it was interesting too. Someone had said to me that you will find out who your true friends are; and I did. A lot of people didn’t want to know me, but a few did, and I am eternally grateful for that. I’m still friends with those people today.

Somehow I managed to get through that year. I think it is the worst I’ve ever done at school. I still managed to get an A bursary by the slenderest of margins and I was accepted into Law Intermediate and Commerce the following year at university.

Still I lived to fight another day; and really at the end of it all, isn’t that what counts?

QTim, 47, from Auckland, is married with a young daughter. He has asked for his identity not to be revealed.