I grew up in a family of 7 people, 2 parents, 2 older brothers, an older and younger sister, and myself in a traditional minded nuclear family. When I was young, I had many thoughts of what I would like to become and be, a hero, an astronaut, a archeologist, a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, a private eye, an investigator, another James Bond, another Jacque Custou, etc. etc. etc. I had a lot of dreams for the future as if everything were possible. I played drums in the middle school and high school band. I found it as easy as breathing. I won several district and state contests for my drumming and made the all state band of Florida in 73 and 74. I eventually went to college and finally decided my major in music. Up to this point I was an honors student in high school. I got A’s in music theory. I thought I could become a great musician someday. Then, when it earlier seemed that I had a completely normal body and mind, I started to have concentration problems. My grades fell in college, and I was starting to hear voices. It started with thinking I could read the minds of others, but it then turned into others reading my mind, knowing my thoughts, my every move, and paranoia and then hearing voices telling me that I am “crazy”, that I am a “nobody” and will “never amount to anything”. I also started having thoughts of future unsuccess, lack of confidence in my intelligence and overall lack of abilities to make it in life. I tried, after getting my associate degree in college to go to the 3rd year of college. I could not concentrate at all, I could not memorize any of the college materials, and I had to pull out of school. This greatly disturbed me. I was not able to concentrate at my current job working at Mc Donald’s. I was terminated. This stigma of being terminated was new to me for I have never been terminated up to this point.
I was hospitalized for mental illness for the first time at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa Florida in 1977. From this point on, I would end up hospitalized several times, for hearing voices, paranoid thoughts of others controlling me. I would experience shock treatment, overmedication, handcuffs from police, take downs, frightening side effects of the earlier psychiatric medicines, working minimum wage jobs and loosing the jobs due to symptoms getting in the way, moving from place to place and homelessness. My thoughts when I was a child, dreams of becoming successful, seemed to be for many years, destroyed.
My recovery started when I first started getting Social Security at an assisted living facility late in my 20’s. It was there that I started to take medicine consistently for the first time in my life, with actual management for the first time of their side effects. Voices went away, thoughts became clearer. I remember getting large amounts of rest from the stresses of the past at the facility. After what seemed to be rest enough for my physical, mental, and emotional well-being, desires surfaces to do something, to improve my seemingly hopeless situation, something from internally in me that seemed to say, “Time to move on” and that “this could not be the end”. Since I did not have to concentrate on worries of food, clothing, or shelter anymore, I was able to manage to concentrate on becoming active. I started simple. I volunteered for the Mental Health Association of Broward County, ran a group for consumers, a Project Return Group, “consumers helping consumers to help their selves”. I went to the Mental Health Association’s functions in the community, educational workshops on mental illness, stress, overall mental health, self-esteem. I liked the encouragement of being active and what it did for me. It made be become mentally/emotionally stronger and more stable. I received case management services, which gave me more assurance of success. My recovery was gradual, but with road blocks. I found myself in need to develop skills of communicating to doctors that mainly wanted me overly medicated all the time. My recovery insisted that I gradually reduce my medicine in order to function. As I learned that more and more people were recovering from mental illness nationally, it increased my level of motivation. I also discovered that much recovery that I did just did not happen, I MADE IT HAPPEN! I continuously worked on my coping skills, abilities to handle stress to the following and not limited to: several changes of psychiatrists, case managers, nurses, therapists, roommates at the ALF I stayed at, changes of medicine, side effects of medicine, changes on levels of relationship interaction between individuals/groups/organizations/heads of departments/CEO’s/advocacy groups, housing, clothes, friends, other mental health professionals. It was not easy to adjust to changes, but through practice, I was able to deal with change easier and easier. I simply decided that if I am going to go through changes, I might as well do it in a positive way, thereby avoiding hospitalizations, raise of medicines, etc.
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