Control Review: Having Schizophrenia
I, Dalton Lewis, give schizophrenia an F. It’s a terrible mental illness which ravaged my mind. Hearing voices ruined my life for the last twenty years. This caused a cascade of physical problems, leaving me forty-three, fat, unemployed, and desperate to sell more free copies of my horror novella. (Available now. Free until 9/15 or so. Look up The Hauntings of Old Liberty High by Dalton Lewis on amazon.)
I first encountered schizophrenia in Las Vegas, Nevada. I wrote Illusionary Paintings, an ambitious young teen novel about magic and summer camp and trying to make art. No one liked it. Then I wrote a masterpiece about middle school and how horrible middle school really was. Everyone hated that one too. This was before amazon let you self-publish for cheap: I had to publish with a publisher and make it big or nothing. I hardly tried to get published and got nothing. I became a failed writer. I began to daydream a lot — vivid daydreams — in Tucson, Arizona because my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go.
I ignored the banal reality of doing stupid normal office jobs. I daydreamed of fantastic stories all day as I worked. I gradually lost control of the stories. The protagonists would lose terribly, over and over, and in horrible, mind-melting ways. I would scream at the walls of my apartment. I would pace around all time of the day and night. I would drive around and walk around the casinos, crazy and not playing, just looking around and not noticing the world around me, just obsessed with this story, this story that wasn’t working, wasn’t going my way, certainly not yet.
Several police officers expressed worry over my behavior, but they didn’t lock me up. I decided to get out of my car on the side of the road and head to the mountains without water, a compass, or any other means of traveling safely. I luckily made it…to a supermarket and then to the highway again. We didn’t have phones for GPS then so a cop had to drive me to my car. I don’t know how I survived that year of insanity before we got me meds and a psychiatrist.
I remember trying to go to a writing class. I couldn’t hear the teacher because I was too busy talking to the voices inside of my head. I had to leave class and walk around the school for ten to fifteen minutes during class. Then I would have years in which I would walk around from place to place, listening to the voices, telling the story, knowing that I couldn’t win or end the story, just going from arcade to restaurant to movie, hardly paying attention to any of them.
And the meds! Once the doctors figured out what was wrong, and once they started to treat the situation, I had to take the meds. The meds made me sleep twelve hours a day and made me exhausted for the rest of the time. That — combined with not paying attention to the real world — made me gain five pounds a year for twenty years or so. I remember countless days, putting off taking the pills, not wanting to take them, eventually knowing that I had to take them…and the pills gradually got better. The pills eventually got good enough to make me able to function in a fairly normal manner.
I still hate paranoid schizophrenia. I don’t recommend it for anyone. As no one knows how one gets it or who will get it, there’s nothing you can do for preventative measures. I just want everyone to know that, overall, it gets an F.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
