Portrait of a Schizophrenic

"Julia"

[The following self-portrait appeared in NIMH's Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 2. It is a first person account of schizophrenia. Do not misunderstand - I am not claiming that Phil was schizophrenic. This article is reproduced here not so much for its "schizophrenic" label, but for the interesting world which the author describes. I believe it was Dali who said, "The difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad," or words to that effect. I could not help but think of Philip K. Dick when I read this article for the first time, and I still see many fascinating parallels between PKD and "Julia," who I am certain is male.]

My name is Julia. I am schizophrenic. My illness began slowly, gradually, when I was between the ages of 15 and 17. During that time reality became distant and I began to wander around in a sort of haze, foreshadowing the delusional world that was to come later. I also began to have visual hallucinations in which people changed into different characters, the change indicating to me their moral value. For example, the mother of a good friend always changed into a witch, and I believe this to be indicative of her evil nature. Another type of visual hallucination I had at this time is exemplified by an occurrence during a family trip through Utah: the cliffs along the side of the road took on a human appearance, and I perceived them as women, bedraggled and weeping.

At the time I didn't know what to make of these changes in my perceptions. On the one hand, I thought they came as a gift from God, but on the other hand, I feared that something was dreadfully wrong. However, I didn't tell anyone what was happening; I was afraid of being called insane. I also feared, perhaps incredibly, that someone would take it lightly and tell me nothing was wrong, that I was just having a rough adolescence, which was what I was telling myself. Anyway, I battled the illness alone until I was 21, at which point, having exhausted all reserves, I decided to leave school and see a psychiatrist.

By the time I reached this decision, I had completed 2 years of college. This was very difficult because ordinary ideas had begun to assume mystical meaning. For instance, when I was reading Euclid's Elements, I was struck by what I considered the profundity of the first definition, "A point is that which has no part." I felt I had discovered the secret of the universe, a definition of God. Over the next few years I built a whole theological system around this definition.

After seeing the psychiatrist for a year, and at her suggestion, I returned to school on a part-time basis. Shortly after doing so, I was hospitalized for the first time. That hospitalization marked the first time I had ever admitted to anyone what was happening inside my head: for years I had witnessed my own decapitation. In addition, I had major fantasies of suicide by decapitation and was reading up on the construction of guillotines. I had written several essays on the problem of the complete destruction of myself; I thought my inner being to be a deeply poisonous substance. The problem, as I saw it, was to kill myself, but then get rid of my essence in such a way that it did not harm creation.

Also at the time I was very afraid. I had the feeling that I was dissolving and that pieces of me were going out into space, and I feared that I would never be able to find them again. I was also very ashamed and thought people were watching me. I was afraid of people to the extent that I wouldn't come out of my room when people were around. I ate my meals when my family was either gone or asleep. I thought that I must be in hell and that part of the meaning of this particular hell was that no one else around understood that it was hell.

My second hospitalization was 1 year later. At that time I was studying math in school and was considering the difference between functions where all points are defined and those where some points are undefined. Somehow I got in my mind a picture of lines intersecting and believed they symbolized the meaning of my life. Consider the XY plane; there exists a line Y = 3, which is called the blood line. This blood line is thick and full of life. There is another line in this plane at Y = X-1. This line has the appearance of a spider's web, fragile and scraggly. This is the line of my life. The point of intersection of these two lines is defined. It is the point of complete destruction.

Somehow I got the idea that if I could offer a little bit of blood, I could appease whoever was demanding destruction. So I cut my arm. But it didn't work. The next step was to cut myself seriously and the next step death. I went to the place where I had been hospitalized previously and told them what was happening, and I was admitted.

After that hospitalization I continued cutting myself, more and more seriously, over a period of maybe 4 years. It is just in the last few years that I haven't found it necessary to cut myself, although I did try about a year ago. It is a response to a formerly near constant sensation of being stabbed and cut with a knife vertically, in long lines.

There followed two other 3-day hospitalizations, the first after being brought in by the police and the second a walk-in. By the second of these two "holds", I was able to recognize when I was getting out of control. I had for quite some time been seeing space soldiers on the streets who were watching me and who intended to kill me. Eventually I realized that I was losing my ability to function at all in reality, so a friend took me first to stay with her family and then, a couple of days later, when that wasn't enough, to the county mental health facility. During this hospitalization I was over-medicated, and, unable to endure that, I checked myself out against medical advice. I was then placed in a sort of crisis house the county had. That was one of the best things that happened to me.

I stayed several times in this crisis house over the next 2 years. It was there, during my last stay, that I was finally put on medication. It was a minimal dose, but it made it possible for me, if I fought very hard, to stay in reality. Because of my ignorance about just what could be expected of an antipsychotic drug, I stayed on that dose until about a year ago. At that point I had moved, and when I hooked up with a new mental health agency, I was put on more appropriate medication. With this new medication, I can stay in reality with minimal effort, and most of my delusions and hallucinations are now in the background. I still have days in which reality is distant, but that is manageable.

In the meantime, I was still in college and was busy with the requirements of a math major. The faculty rated my mathematical ability as superior, but I was unable to make the grades expected with such a ranking. An example of the difficulties follows.

In linear algebra we had been talking about shrinking vectors of infinite dimension down to a point, and because of this I was too frightened to go to school. After about a week, I explained this to my advisor, and she gave me a topological proof as to why it is impossible to shrink a person to a point. I was reassured by this proof and was able to return to classes.

During this time I had great language difficulties, which made both school and verbally conducted therapy quite difficult. Periodically I saw a priest at my church who was a marriage, family, and child counselor. He helped me to do work in a sand tray, which I found very helpful and indeed a great relief. (A sand tray is a shallow box filled with sand in which the client builds a portrait of his psychological reality with various figures.)

A constant during most of these years under psychiatric care and in the 3 years leading up to them was the existence of an inner reality that was more real to me than the world's outer reality. In this place I lived in underground caves, which were torture chambers of the gods who ruled there. The outer reality of these caves took the form of condemning auditory hallucinations. I heard voices telling me that all the torture was my fault, and that I was alien and didn't deserve to live in reality. There were periods when I felt so unable to face what I perceived as certain mutilation in the real world that I insisted on remaining in the caves. The air in reality cut like razors, and the torture of the gods seemed preferable to that.

The transition point came several years ago when I was working in a sand tray. In this particular tray I pictured the condition of my psychological reality and realized for the first time that I had emerged fully from the caves. In the sand tray, the figure I chose as myself was a creature, not entirely human, of gray-green color. He was stooped over and bore the marks of great torture; he was gaunt, his ribs showed plainly, and his brow was furrowed. In the sand tray, he stood just beyond the entrance to the caves. The area of the caves was still guarded by a cruel god, but the god no longer had power beyond the limits of the caves. Ahead of him lay a long and torturous journey. It began with a series of caverns through which the creature had to pass. The terrain was quite rugged and quite dangerous, and winged demons flew about his head to make him crazy. At the end of the caverns was a long desert of indefinite. Guarding the other end of the desert, which was the entrance to the land of colors, was a sphinx-like god who posed questions of great depth that a traveler had to answer before he would be allowed to pass.

And then came the land of colors. During my time in the caves, color represented the land of the real world. For a long time I did not see colors in reality. When I began to, they mocked me, because, although I could see them, I could not participate in their world. Anyway, the land of colors had a fence around it, and the people in this land led "normal" lives and wore clothes of color, and there were trees and flowers and life. But my creature was an alien, and the years of torture showed, and he would never be able to be part of this place. The fence kept such aliens out.

I have now reached the end of the journey pictured in the sand tray. I have reached the land of colors, but I have found that the colors are not enough. In order to live here I must bring with me the silence I found in the desert. The time in the desert was a time of great healing. I met God in the desert. And when I reached the colors, I found that they lacked what I would call a spiritual depth. So now I live in the land of colors, but I carry within me the silence of the desert and the purging heat.

Another constant during these years was the belief that I was of evil substance, born of an evil realm and inserted into this world as an oversight. The justifications for this belief had to do with my being the second-born of a set of twins, being gay, and being mentally ill. Anyway, I finally explained all this to my priest, with whom I shared an honest friendship, and he said that perhaps I wasn't evil, but that I was in touch with the dark side of myself. And he gave me a copy of Morton Kelsey's book, The Other Side of Silence, which explained Jung's view of the intersection of the unconscious and spiritual realms.

I recently revisited the caves, and they had changed. Inside there was immense space, a veiled light, and silence. It was misty, and I sensed a presence there. So I wandered through the mist in a sort of walk of discovery, and as I wandered, the sense of the presence increased. Eventually I came upon this presence and this place inside me, formerly inhabited by evil and torturous gods, is now inhabited by a being of great creativity and goodness and peace. I need times within in order to function in the world of colors, the world of outer reality. It is the time spent within that feeds me, and without that time I become fragmented. So I try to allow for the time I need within and to go there at appropriate times so that I can function appropriately in outer reality.

Something needs to be said about what hospitalizations meant to me. It was always a relief to finally end up in the hospital. By the time I got there, I had generally exhausted all reserves of normalcy, and it was a great relief to be in a place where it did not matter if you went off somewhere in the middle of a conservation. It was a relief to be where things that were real to me could be real. It was a relief to be able to be honest.

A note about becoming "sane": medicine did not cause sanity; it only made it possible. Sanity came through a minute-by-minute choice of outer reality, which was often without meaning, over inside reality, which was full of meaning. Sanity meant choosing reality that was not real and having faith that someday the choice would be worth the fear involved and that it would someday hold meaning.

I am now 34 years old. My life is relatively stable. In the early morning I deliver papers to local businesses, and later in the day I attend a day program for the mentally ill. In the fall I will start back to college, a course at a time. I am hoping that it will work.