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The Lessons of My History

© Ian Chovil

I started having symptoms of schizophrenia in high school, although I didn't know what was the cause of those symptoms. I thought I needed therapy and at that time (1973) the Human Potential Movement was in full swing. Anyone remember the seventies? I read Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls (Gestalt therapy), Ida Rolf (Rolfing), Aexander Lowen (Bioenergetics), and some of the antipsychiatrists like R.D. Laing. Later at university I read Gregory Bateson who suggested schizophrenia could be explained by his "double bind theory". Everything I read made sense to me, and I became very antiestablishment. Psychiatrists didn't know what they were doing. They weren't helping people. They were doing them harm. Anyone who watched "One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" could see that.

We covered schizophrenia in the Sociology of Deviance in third year university. We read one book, written by a Freudian psychiatrist, who blamed the daughters schizophrenia on the mother's anal retentive complex, or something like that. I didn't know what schizophrenia was but it was fashionable then to blame mothers for everything. I certainly blamed mothers for all the frigid women I was meeting in what was supposed to be the sexual revolution. I didn't understand all the Freudian stuff, but the mother was the obvious guilty party according to double bind theory as well.

I never did get treated through Gestalt therapy, although I came close to paying $400 to be Rolfed. That was a lot of money to a poor student in the seventies. I became sicker and sicker, eventually got kicked out of graduate school and was homeless within two years. I did see an analyst like Woody Allen, who was a hero of mine, at the government's expense, but he didn't know much about Freud or Jung and I thought he was an idiot. I was such a genius back then.

If you've read my story "http://www.chovil.com/story.html" you'll know that I was psychotic for ten years, struggling in poverty, homeless for periods, completely alone, except for my imaginary friends. I became alcoholic, ate at soup kitchens, and learned to live with cockroaches. I wish I could forget those years completely. When I came back into reality on medication I took a good long look at myself. I was thirty five years old, never married, not a single friend in the world, with only the shirt on my back. Everything I had believed was a lie. My mind had let me down big time. I had no career skills, no resume I could show a prospective employer. There was no one to blame... I had valued individualism and freedom so much that I could only say that every decision I had made had been my own. I hadn't asked anyone for advice. I was the only person to blame. Talk about adding insult to injury.

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