Andy

This is my story……

I spent my childhood growing up in England and my first thirteen years of life was one of the happiest times that I can remember. Things were ripped apart however when my mother came down with schizophrenia just as I was starting my teens. Her illness lasted for about two years until she took her own life. I still remember that day, coming home from school and trying to wake up someone who had taken a fatal dose of barbiturates. It’s one of those events that you replay in your memory over and over. We didn’t have a phone at that time so it took a couple of hours before a doctor came over and pronounced her dead. My immediate reaction was one of relief. Relief that there would be no more screaming that had been so common for the previous two years. Screaming that was loud enough to attract neighbourhood kids to the bottom of our garden.

Those tragic two years left my brother, father and me scarred for a long time. For one or two years afterward, I couldn’t listen to the Beatle’s song “Hey Jude” on the radio because of the screaming in the chorus. Panic attacks were common and often happened when I was handed an examination paper at school. Thankfully, when I was sixteen my father decided to move us to Canada, leaving behind my school report card that had many marks that were well below ten percent. (that report card was to catch up with me later).

I thrived thanks to the new start in Victoria, BC and by the age of twenty three I had a wife, four kids and a university degree in Physics. (I grew my hair longer in those days). I still had some lingering effects from my mother’s illness though and I couldn’t look people in the eye, especially on job interviews, because I knew that they would see the damage there. For the next twenty years, life wasn’t easy but it was fun. I worked my way through the copier industry, fixing, training and selling copiers. I ended with my last month of sales netting me over sixteen thousand dollars. Then life stepped in again and I ruptured a disc in my back while breaking up a fight between two of my teenage kids. The narcotic painkillers they gave me made me hear voices, quite the side effect I thought. But after the operation I continued to hear the voices which became all the more invasive in my life. At age 42, the same age that my mother got ill, I was admitted to Richmond General Hospital and given anti-psychotic medication.

This started a new phase in my life, coping with schizophrenia and the side effects of the medications. I was quite zombie like and it was another five years before my sense of humour started to return. Luckily the kids had all moved out on their own but my wife could only take so much of me and my symptoms. She divorced me in the sixth year of my illness. I moved into cheap accommodation with one of my sons and spent my days doing what I’d done since first taking medications, laying in my bed, fully clothed with the covers pulled over my head. I remember on my 50th birthday being taken out for a sushi meal by my family to downtown Vancouver. Later that same night I felt the worst that I had at any time in my mental illness. An Elton John song speaks to the effect of relative’s visits to a mental patient in hospital. In “Madman across the Water”, he writes “Will they come again next week, can my mind really take it”.

With gunshots happening outside my house and teenagers banging on the windows at two in the morning I began to lose hope. First I tried to hang myself and when that didn’t work I tried putting a plastic bag over my head. I made five suicide attempts in total over a period of a year, all done without alerting anyone. Maybe I was just not meant to die. As Crosby, Stills and Nash sing in their song “Long time Gone”, that “the darkest hour is always just before the dawn”. My son had had enough of me and told me to leave the house and find other accommodation. I ended up in Richmond again living briefly with my brother who, working with my ex-wife, contacted Pathways to inquire about housing subsidies. I was soon living in my own rented apartment thanks to a $375 monthly cheque from Pathways Clubhouse. It wasn’t easy; I was still hearing voices, having panic attacks and hallucinations which included watching people on TV talking about me. But the difference was that there was hope once again.

Another five years passed by and during monthly visits by my Pathways housing worker I had always been invited to participate in the daily activities at the Clubhouse. So I finally took Mireya up on the offer and like many members who join Pathways Clubhouse; I started out by helping with simple things like stapling the newsletter together. My concentration was only good for about thirty minutes in those days, and then I needed a prolonged rest. After a couple of weeks at the Clubhouse, I started doing the daily stats, keeping track of the sign-in sheets and tabulating the results onto an Excel worksheet. When I started doing this I sometimes could only complete half a day’s stats before my concentration would give out, but as time went by I found that I could do more and more. These days, I find that I can do a whole week’s worth of stats in one sitting and do them way faster too. The Clubhouse noticed that I was progressing too, and in a gesture of kindness they booked me on a trip to a Clubhouse convention in Toronto. I had a great four days there, and was so inspired by other people’s stories that I gained the courage to write my own little speech and read it out at the open microphone at the end of the conference. Right after I came back from that trip, I found out that a transitional employment job had been arranged for me. This job involved sweeping sawdust at a company called Heatherbrae, two hours a day, twice a week. I had to take a bus to get to my job and the thought of taking one by myself was at that time, terrifying. It took me about two weeks before I felt comfortable on the bus but it was just another step towards my goal of getting well. Again the staff saw that I was capable of doing more and soon I was volunteering in an envelope stuffing job for the Health Dept. As well, they asked me to do Clubhouse tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays for prospective members. When I started doing these tours, there was so much that I didn’t know that I had to ask staff for the answers as we went along. These days I still like having a staff member or member travel along with me on the tours. It lets me learn more about the Clubhouse operation and allows me to modify my tours to include the new information. After my sawdust job came to an end I signed up for another TE job washing dishes at a catering firm in Vancouver. This job was very hectic and was four hours a day, five days a week. I lasted about five weeks before the stress got to me and my old schizophrenia symptoms started showing up again. I had to quit but after a month’s recuperation I was back in another TE job working twelve hours a week. This job went well and I completed a full six months there. Obviously I had bitten off more than I could chew with the dishwashing job. Life is full of surprises and a few months later I was told that I had been recommended for Faculty training in Boston. Faculty people travel to other Clubhouses and give them feedback on what they are doing well and what more they could be doing to follow the Clubhouse standards. It was an intense course which had one workday lasting over sixteen hours, but it was a lot of fun and I found it to be a real challenge, which is what I like. After a week back home I received a phone call informing me that I had passed the course and to expect to be on an accreditation trip in the near future. I reflected back on how I had navigated three international airports all by myself and how at one time I had a fear of going on a bus by myself. Another two weeks passed and I found out that my first accreditation trip was to be a week spent in Hawaii. Since that first successful trip I have not only had another trip to Hawaii but also ones to Calgary and San Diego. (And just so you don’t worry, all these accreditation trips are paid for by Clubhouse International in New York.) I have also attended Clubhouse Conferences in Charlottetown and St Louis and gone on a two week training trip to Toronto.

In my spare time I listen to a lot of music and I have a large iTunes collection. The lyrics to a song are as important to me as the music. In her song about life titled “Sometimes a Bitch”, Stevie Nicks states ”you’ve got to take it as it comes”, “sometimes it don’t come easy”, and “I tried to dance with what life had to hand me” She finishes with “and if I could, I’d do it all over again”.

Would I take the opportunity to relive my life all over again?

After a quick review my first thought was “No way in wherever”. But then I thought about what a learning experience my life has been. It’s not that I treasure spending all that time learning those math terms like Sine, Cosine and Tangent….. I sure used those a lot. It’s more about learning who my true friends turned out to be. If you’re rich and famous, everyone wants to be your friend. Not so with mental illness.

I have a strong belief in the afterlife and I find it comforting to know that when I get there I’ll be with people that I know are my friends, and I can truly thank schizophrenia for putting me in that situation.