Some days when I get out of bed and begin getting ready for my day, I look in the mirror and am amazed. How can I really the same person I used to be when I was homeless and deeply affected by untreated schizophrenia?
Growing up, I was the honor student, the violinist, the daughter, the sister, and the friend. I loved my family. Life was full of friends at church, in school, and at the Cleveland Institute of Music where I studied violin.
I never imagined that the next phase of my life, right as I was turning 21 and becoming an adult, would involve losing everything I loved and becoming homeless.
As I student attending USC, one of my favorite classes was differential equations. As schizophrenia symptoms began to insidiously emerge, my mind became distracted. This is probably why I scored a B and not an A. But I still greatly enjoyed the class and considered switching my major from biochemistry to engineering.
I keenly remember years later while very ill, going back to the classroom where I had studied differential equations. That afternoon, I sat in the empty classroom, alone, eating whatever garbage I could find. I was always surprised by just how much food the students had left. I could not grasp the magnitude of how far I had fallen in so short a time.
I remember practicing violin for four hours a day in high school. When I graduated from high school and began classes at USC, I quickly won the position of concertmaster of their community orchestra. I remember coming onto the stage as everyone clapped for me and tuning the orchestra. My friends who were other freshmen from my dorm watched in the audience, surprised by my musical ability.
Years later, I would go back to that same building where I had once performed, but this time it was not to play the violin. Near the auditorium, there were two full private bathrooms that could be locked, some of the only ones like that on the campus. I would put my feet, one at a time, into the sink and wash myself as quickly as I could in privacy. I even remember washing my long hair in the sink. Because I washed it with hand soap, when it dried, it was oily. I was so out of touch that I did not even mind wandering around the campus afterwards with soaking wet hair.
When I began USC, I was very active in a community church. When I was later homeless, I would often go to the place where the church had once been located (as it later moved) and stare into space as I waited for people to leave, hoping I could find some good trashed food to eat.
I cannot fully comprehend my history living as two different versions of myself which are such polar opposites.
When I think of the two different versions of myself I have experienced because of illness, I stand amazed at the power of antipsychotic medication. How can it be that single oral pills can radically transform a person from a lonely homeless stranger into a thriving, productive member of society? The difference between untreated and treated schizophrenia can be vastly different when the right medication is found for each individual. Compliance in treatment is also vital.
I am grateful everyday for my sustained recovery. I cannot even imagine living this life prior to the discovery of antipsychotic medication in the 1950s. I would have been institutionalized for life, living everyday with voices in my mind and hallucinations.
One of the biggest barriers to treatment for schizophrenia is lack of insight, as people cannot tell how much they have changed and how ill they are. I understand this so well. When I went to the room where the math class had been and the bathroom right by the auditorium, I thought I had not changed. I thought I could take advanced biochemistry again and score another A. But that would have been impossible at that time.
Regaining healthy Insight often is accompanied by grief and feelings of profound loss, as you have to make peace with having been so exceedingly ill and out of touch with reality. But if my schizophrenia had remained untreated, I most likely would have faced a future of severe illness, the inability to preform purposeful work, and a life lived in the shadows of society.
Today, on medication, there is hope for the sickest street people in our society. I know this because I was one of them.