Being Crazy when You Live in
Crazy
Town 2
Schizophrenia is an illness that has a large impact on society although only approximately 2.5 million Americans have the disorder (Keefe & Harvey,1994). The illness has affects on the family in which it is experienced, society, the person itself, and significant financial affects. In society, mental illness costs the government and the family in which it occurs concerning care giving, homelessness, healthcare and the prison system.
Sharon, a 45 year-old mother of two, lived with a schizophrenic mother. In an unpublished interview held on December 5, 2005, she declared, “as a child you don’t realize that your mother is sick.” Schizophrenia is an illness that affects about 1-2% of the American population (Keefe & Harvey, 1994). Though intense studies show that men are more likely to have schizophrenia, predominately women are more likely to report the incidence of something being wrong.
Sharon was able to explain the affects of living with a schizophrenic mother.
Sharon is now 45 and is the third child in a family of six. She described life with a schizophrenic as, “unpredictable… [you] never knew what was going to happen, [it was] frightening at times.” If her mother was angry, her mother, Nancy, would pull heads off of dolls.
Sharon’s father had good healthcare, he worked for the government. However, the condition of the mental healthcare system was shocking to Sharon the first time she visited her mother at
Mt.
Auburn in
Boston. Ironically, she did not know that it was a mental hospital and she took her now husband on their second date there. She described it as the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-hospital.”
The cost of living with a schizophrenic for
Sharon was remarkable. Not only did it leave her with deep resentments that she has only recently overcome, it destroyed her family and she only talks to one of five other siblings.
Sharon explained that her mother would “pit kids against each other.” Her mother was a severe manipulator.
Sharon felt led to lie about her home life to her friends who thought she was normal, though she suggests that they “somehow knew I was lying.”
Being Crazy when You Live in
Crazy
Town 3
Sharon’s mother now lives with
Sharon’s father and does not take medication. She “takes medicine for a few months fine, she feels fine… so she stops. Inevitably they think they’re so fine they [think they] don’t have to take medication anymore.”
Sharon is still amazed that her mother has not, at any point, tried to kill her father. Schizophrenia cost
Sharon a lifetime of resentments and a normal childhood, plus the fear that she, herself, would also get the illness. Now,
Sharon worries about her 8 year old daughter who doesn’t seem to show remorse when she does something wrong.
“Definition of schizophrenia has been difficult because of the fact that it has no single symptom or set of symptoms definitively identifies its presence” (Keefe & Harvey, 1994). “Schizophrenia is marked by false beliefs, called delusions, and abnormal experiences in the area of perception, called hallucinations.” Schizophrenia was not clearly defined until the DSM came up with some guidelines. This helped in differential diagnosis, or the defining of an illness separate from that of another.
“Like many other medical illness such as cancer or diabetes, schizophrenia seems to be caused by a combination of problems including genetic vulnerability and environmental factors that occur during a person’s development…Like cancer and diabetes, the genes [for schizophrenia] only increase the chances of becoming ill, and do not cause the illness all by themselves” (NAMI.org “Schizophrenia,” 2005).
People with mental illness in the media are singled out. Newspapers never read “Diabetic Kills Three.” No, instead the paper reads “Schizo Kills Cop.” This puts a negative, assuming, light on mental illness that propagates negative feelings towards those with schizophrenia, depression, or bipolar disorder. “We, as a society, are estranged from the ‘mad’ in our midst. We fear them and their illness” (Whitaker 2002). Most schizophrenics are not violent, unless they were violent before they were diagnosed (Keefe & Harvey 2005).
Being Crazy when You Live in
Crazy
Town 3
“About one-third of the Americans who are currently homeless have severe mental illness; most of these Americans have schizophrenia” (Keefe & Harvey 2005). When government fueled healthcare fails to save the alienated of society from itself, jobs are lost, families are broken, and homeless people flood the streets. “Too many of the people so diagnosed end up in prison, homeless, or shuttling in and out of psychiatric hospitals” (Whitaker 2002). Forty to fifty percent of schizophrenics at least attempt suicide. “Ironically, suicide attempts are not usually triggered by the victim’s imaginary voices or various delusions. Instead they occur most frequently during cycles when the disorder has eased somewhat in the person’s life” (Nadelson, 2000). The logic is to prevent the voices from coming back. “These patients have increased mortality risk due to physical illness, accidents, and other causes of violent death, especially suicide” (Conwell & Cholette, etc. 1998).
The author of Mad in America attributes many deaths to clinical trials. It is necessary for a “washout,” or abrupt withdrawal from medication, to occur in order to facilitate a reoccurrence of symptoms. “At least thirty-six people in the studies of the four drugs [risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine, and sertindole] killed themselves. Hanging, drowning, gunshots to the head, and death by jumping…the overall suicide rate for patients in the trials, on a time-adjusted basis, was two to five times the norm for schizophrenics.” The mentally ill are victims of doctors who manipulate symptoms to further the investigation of research. The mentally ill are treated no better than they were when “mad houses” first started, say for example Bedlam.
The history of mental health is long and disastrous filled with only a handful of doctors who actually took sympathy on their “victims”/inmates/patients. The first facility geared specifically for mental health was Bedlam. Ironically, this term is now used to describe chaos. Chaos it was. Patients were kept in chains, whipped, and occasionally a new form of torture was devised. The idea was to put fear into the mentally ill to keep them from acting out. Whitaker (2002) explains that many years later, Quakers in the
New World discovered that “moral treatment” spurned health. Patients were provided with seminars, shows, and activities such as gardening to sharpen the mind. At the Quaker Retreats, patients dressed in suits and dresses so that an onlooker could scarcely tell the difference between the lunatic and the doctors.
Being Crazy when You Live in
Crazy
Town 4
Unfortunately, mental health care seems to be going in a cycle of benevolence/malevolence to its patients. Every time progress is made in the field of mental health care, the government does something to foul it up. Medicaid in
Florida was going decently well, there were some problems. Yet Jeb Bush has decided to make a lot more problems come up.
Florida’s Preferred Drug List explains which drugs are now available to those with Medicaid. People with Medicaid are usually people who cannot work or do not make enough money on their own. Some of these people are faking it, this we know, but many of them honestly cannot work or take care of themselves and need the money they receive from SSI to survive. The PDL, as it is known to the mental health care circle, details the many drugs that have been dropped from state coverage. Why have they been dropped? Not because they are dangerous narcotics, or addictive, no, they have been dropped because they cost too much. What the governor has done is set up some people to survive and some people to fail. Eugenics, or cleansing of a people group through “proper breeding” is not only known to Hitler. No, back in the day, after Mendel made his discovery, eugeneticists came out of the wood work receiving millions from places like the Rockefeller Foundation to cleanse the
United States of its degenerates. Sounds crazy, right? It obviously isn’t since that is what Bush is doing even today. Rebel against
Florida’s bad healthcare, be an advocate for the mentally ill.
