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One of the hardest things about schizophrenia is losing your peer group, and it happens all too often. The longer you are disabled by schizophrenia the harder it is to catch up with your peers and it often becomes an impossible task. There are many reasons why early diagnosis and treatment is important in schizophrenia but the other day I learned one that surprised me. I have a friend of sorts who has a son with schizophrenia who has taxed a mother's love to its breaking point. He loves to smoke marijuana, regularly goes off his medication, has assaulted both his mother and father, insults his mother to her face, and has a history of small crime, mostly through his association with unsavory people.
I admire her perseverance, but at some point you wonder if martyrdom is a virtue. After several rehospitalizations and his father refusing to let him move back in with them, the young man is living in a shared house with some students. He could never really understand that he has schizophrenia but with his mother's help, he keeps his appointments with a psychiatrist, and has been fairly steady in taking his medication. He has taken a part time job washing dishes and seems to enjoy it. Another young man I know with schizophrenia is also washing dishes part time in a restaurant and enjoying it. It made me realize that their peers are also working part time in restaurants washing dishes. It is a job that I, at the age of 46, would consider a prison camp sentence. I have some very painful memories of struggling to pay the rent; unable to get any job, and intensely hating whatever I could get. When I first started on medication I was referred to a day program, what used to be called a day hospital. I thought it was some sort of employment retraining, so I could be forced to take some unskilled, low paying job. I avoided it for months, even though I didn't know anyone in town and was very lonely. Arbors turned out to be anything but employment retraining. It was a recreational program where I made some friends and played so much scrabble and euchre, I could have won a competition. With mental health reform the Arbors program was cancelled because it segregated people with mental illness from the community at large. Mental Health Reform was focused on reintegration of people in the community. It's a noble cause, but it only works if there is an effective treatment strategy for illnesses like schizophrenia. As the degree of disability increases it becomes increasingly difficult for someone to reintegrate. The Arbors program was three or four afternoons a week, and you made new friends and did things with them after the program. It was replaced with case management where someone would visit you once a week for one hour and help you plan your life. My friends and I thought it was a big mistake. What would people do alone in their room for so many days at a time. How would they make new friends? Go To Page: 1 2
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