Ditching addictions to deal with schizophrenia
SASKATOON — Matthew Proctor doesn’t remember the exact charge against him. He only remembers being arrested and ending up in front of a doctor for a psychiatric examination.
“When he first examined me, I was so messed up I couldn’t even really put together a sentence of English,” the 43-year-old recalls.
The doctor said he had schizophrenia, a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes delusions — fixed beliefs in things that aren’t real — and hallucinations of the five senses. At the age of 21, Proctor rejected the diagnosis.
“I didn’t want to be sick, you know? But I was. Really, really, really sick.”
He experienced fear and paranoia and delusions of invincibility. He thought the drugs he took — marijuana, hashish, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD — gave him strength. He hitchhiked to Whistler, B.C. a couple of times, thinking angels would lead him to a friend to tell him about God.
Looking back, his doctor suspected he had been turning to drugs to self-medicate the disease. His mother thinks the illness first appeared when he was 12 or 13.
For four years after the diagnosis, Proctor lived in denial, continuing his risky lifestyle and continuing to hear voices.
“It was a really bad nightmare, a horrible experience. I was bad,” he recalls.
Then he made a fateful visit to Bare Ass Beach outside Saskatoon. Proctor dove headfirst into a deceptively shallow sandbar and broke his neck, rendering him a quadriplegic.
While recovering, he continued to smoke pot, even while in hospital, and would go to the Market Mall to get drunk and stoned. He had more hallucinations and delusions. Finally, three years after the spinal cord injury, he participated in a schizophrenia awareness walk, and when someone asked him why he was there, he replied it was because he had the illness.
He ended up at Sherbrooke Community Centre, where he finally quit cigarettes and drugs.
Proctor credits his work with the Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan — he finds it therapeutic — with helping get his life back together.
He has given about 400 talks to high school students, university students and others, telling his life story and dispelling the stigma around schizophrenia. Unlike their portrayal on TV shows, people with schizophrenia aren’t psychotic killers and rapists, he said.
“A lot of people say it’s inspirational, because I do talk about how I recovered and the battles I had to go through.”
He tells others also struggling with a diagnosis of schizophrenia that there is hope, and life in recovery is good.
“They can do it, they have the strength within them. You just have to dig deep.”