Carole Buckingham, 44, local government officer
Schizophrenia is a socially unacceptable illness and at first I tried to blank the diagnosis out of my mind. We didn’t even speak about it at home. I was ashamed of being mad.
This was the 1980s and there was a wall of silence from the medical establishment. I got no help from doctors. They observed me like a caged animal, watching how my brain worked by making me play Scrabble. I never want to play another game of Scrabble in my life.
It took me 10 years to get to grips with the condition which I only did by reading up about it myself in medical books. Slowly I began to realise I wasn’t mad, I was ill.
I was 27 when I had my first attack working as a secretary in Paris. I woke up one morning to experience my brain as a walnut being split open with a knife and voices in my head. If I disobeyed them, it felt like I was being punished by electric shocks to my brain. For the next three days I wandered round Paris in a deeply psychotic state until I was found by a colleague.
With schizophrenia you’re living a nightmare, but you can’t wake up because that nightmare is your reality. There is no release with the morning. You hear voices which taunt you. You fear for yourself and perhaps all humanity. You are bombarded with thoughts and people seem to misunderstand you.
I came back to England to be cared for by my parents but the drugs the French hospital had put me on made me like a zombie and I stopped taking them. 18 months later I had a relapse. After that my life consisted of long periods of stability punctuated by several acute episodes with florid psychosis. I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals.
My employers have been good to me and when I had my last relapse in 2000 (after my mother was killed in a car accident and my brother died of a heart attack) I asked to work part time because of now having to manage my illness alone.
I’m a bit of a loner. Schizophrenia has made me like that because so much of my energy is taken up with self-preservation. Because I don’t look ill, often people don’t take it seriously. They think people who suffer from mental illness are weak. I try to tell them that having a mental illness doesn’t mean you’re brain dead.
The stigma of mental illness left me with feelings of guilt and shame that took me years to overcome. It is only once you are free from the pressure of what others think that you can be more relaxed with yourself.
FACT: The public are far more at risk from young men under the influence of alcohol than they are from people with a mental health problem. (Mind, 1997)
|
