“Tomorrow I was always a lion.” The story of a man who recovered from schizophrenia

1. “My role was so cramped for me that my whole soul was bruised from this, but I didn’t know what to do with it … If a person has accumulated too many thoughts, feelings, sensations and knowledge that his personality can no longer cope with, he wants to shift all this to something else that is outside of this ” I AM”. I transferred my self-contempt, my strictness and my disproportionately high demands on myself to the fictitious Captain, and the Captain shouted these words, thereby exposing all the severity and injustice of these requirements. The problem was that the packaging concealed the contents. I saw nothing but these demands, and fulfilled them to the best of my ability to the extent of my frustrated possibilities. And the attending staff saw only my illness in this.

2. “I didn’t have the urge to ‘physically hurt myself’, I tended to cut myself because I needed to see the blood. Often, especially during the first period of my illness, I felt somehow terribly empty and distant, and gray and dead. I was afraid that oatmeal jelly was flowing in my veins instead of blood, and that there was no living warmth left in my body at all, that there was not a spark of life in it. So I scratched and cut myself to make sure that I had real blood flowing in my veins and that I was a living person, and not a dead robot with oatmeal instead of blood. After all, blood is life.

3. “I always stayed somewhere inside, and I wanted and desired the same thing that I wanted before and what I still want now: this is the desire to live, develop, grow; desire for an ordinary good life for me and for those whom I love, understanding, confidence in the future and good, friendly relations with other people. However, although the content remained the same, the form in which it was expressed became so distorted and confused that neither I nor others could understand anything in it. But just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it can’t be understood at all. Only you have to work harder in order to get to the meaning … You need to treat not some kind of “schizophrenic”, but a person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And that’s a completely different matter.”

4. “It was about the demands placed on oneself, the desire to cope with tasks, self-respect, dignity. About the struggle between the desire to be smart and the desire to be a living person, between gray emptiness and hot, pulsating life…

After all, vital questions are who I am, what I want, who and what is important to me, what basic rules of life I used to follow and which ones I want to keep, what I like and what I don’t like, and what I I dream in my future life. And no diagnosis can give a satisfactory answer to these questions … “

“My daughter has schizophrenia”

5. “Every time I lost hope or tried to take my own life when I got to the hospital without having time to fulfill my plan, or just experienced another crisis, falling into the already familiar state of psychosis, my sister only sighed patiently and said: “Nothing, nothing, it will all pass, everything will be fine . I know that you wandered into some wilds, and now you also dug into a hole, but it doesn’t matter! You made a detour, but soon you will get out on a straight road ”… She peered so vigilantly that she saw something that was not there yet. And thanks to the fact that she was able to see it, there was more chance that everything would come true. And everything came true.

6. “Because violence changes something in you. A well-thought-out use of force, done with all prudence and provided that all possibilities of cooperation have been previously tried, that everything has been done to inform the person and preserve his self-respect, allows him to do the least damage to his self-respect and preserve him a little more hope and dignity. And I know this because I have visited this place myself. I was much easier to deal with when I had some hope and self-respect left than when they were destroyed. As Janis Joplin sings, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” When everything is taken away from you and you have nothing more to lose, no honor, no self-respect, no health, no job, no friends, no future, or anything at all, you become completely free. And a very dangerous person. Because there is almost nothing to hold you back. The use of force is necessary. I wouldn’t be alive today if the use of force was prohibited in psychiatric institutions.”

7. “When I noticed as a teenager that a dragon wanted to eat me, I wrote in my diary that I want, no matter what the cost, to paint with all the colors that are in my set … Unfortunately, over time, I learned that even in healthcare there are people who believed that the main thing is peace, not determination and will. They believed that it was impossible to paint with all colors. They responded to strong feelings with fear or drugs to muffle too harsh colors with their help and turn blood red into pastel pink.

Sometimes it was necessary to do this for a while for my own good, in order to relieve pain that would otherwise become unbearable. But in the long run, this does not solve the problem. Big feelings can be too strong, rude, frightening, and even angry, but fundamentally they are not harmful. Once out of control, they can lead to dangerous behavior, but they are not a threat in and of themselves. Gradually I understood this, and I understood it thanks to those people who were not afraid of strong feelings either in themselves or in others. They were people who were able to contain strong feelings and keep them in order to let them go when they were under their control, letting them out little by little. They showed by their actions and their attitude that feelings are good, and they taught me to draw with all colors … It was not just important, but it was crucial for me.

8. “… The table was laid in the living room. Fresh flowers, embroidered tablecloth and cups with roses. Family service. The most beautiful and the best of all my mother’s coffee utensils … Mom had to see me beat the cups more than once. She knew how lightning fast I was able to do it … And yet she put her pink cups on the table with complete confidence in me … And, of course, I did not break them. Naturally, I did not let my mother down and did not deceive her trust. The cups and the set table loudly spoke of her trust in me: “You are my daughter, Arnhild. You still appreciate beautiful things, take care of what your family values, its traditions and such important things as beauty. You can never reach such madness as to destroy beautiful and valuable things, and illness will never take possession of you so much that you stop appreciating the beauty you have been accustomed to since childhood. Here at home you are not a schizophrenic patient, here you are Arnhild.”

And I will never forget it. After long months and years, lived under the sign of the madness expected from me, recorded in diagnoses and descriptions, I received a few hours of light in May, when I, along with tea drunk from thin porcelain cups, received a breath of trust and hope. It was amazing and just what I needed the most at the time!”

9. “Anyone who has tried to quit smoking or biting their nails, or change some other ingrained habit, knows how much work it takes to change his habitual reactions. If at the same time you do not keep in mind your possible image in the form of a healthy, working, independent person, in a word, the person you want to be, it will, of course, be very difficult for you to achieve any changes. That is why those treatment strategies and information that take away a person’s ability to see himself tomorrow healthy and think that, even if I now live in a sheep barn, but in the future I will someday run through the free savannas again, are so harmful, because in the lion’s possibilities lie dormant for me.

10. “I find it important to give people hope and faith in the fact that there will be some opportunities for them, despite the seriousness of the diagnosis and the severity of the disease. I know that for myself, when I was sick, hope would mean a lot, so I really want to give hope to others … Some dreams come true. Some are not. When I was in high school, I was going to be a psychologist, win a Nobel Prize, and dance in ballet. I never became a ballerina, and I will never receive a Nobel Prize for anything. But I became a psychologist. And I have a full and interesting life, so I’m doing well. In order to feel good, it is not necessary that all dreams come true. And you always need to have hope.”