What It Means To Those With Schizophrenia or Bipolar To Have a Home In a Community

There is something in the recovery process that a person with a mental illness goes through where they have to take a good hard look at the place they call home. This person will have to think about the importance of their own quality of life. It can be extremely hard for someone with a mental illness, especially when they first leave a hospital stay of any significant length, to find a place that is decent.

During the first few years of living on my own after I was diagnosed with bipolar (and later schizoaffective disorder) I lived in some pretty awful places. The first one was an extremely rundown hotel where I got a tiny box that had a filthy bathroom down the hall, a view of the ventilation area out my window, peeling and old paint, and a mattress that looked like it had been used for a diaper. Still, in a way, it was a better place than some of the places I’ve been for one purpose: I had lots of work, and I was in the process of applying for the military so I was either writing tests or working out. A sense of purpose can go a long way.

I have talked a lot about the importance of having a community, a group of people basically who you can talk to, do things with, interact with, and generally look out for one another with. There are many ways to do this, but I have found that one of the best ways is to simply establish a routine. I enjoy when I get up early to go ride the bus to work at my part-time job because I always see my neighbour. He is a real grump sometimes but always seems happy to see me in the morning. Then I ride the bus to the hospital I work at and on the last leg of my journey I have usually get into really fascinating talks with one of my co-workers. And whenever I am out in my neighbourhood I think I have to generally stop and talk to people I know 3-5 times.

One of the ways I started to meet more people was when I was in a group home in the same neighbourhood I am in now. Most of the people were staff or clients of the group home, but most of the staff were really wonderful people and just about all of the clients became friends because we shared that common bond of having a mental illness and having to manage all the things that go with it. Taking away any stigma surrounding mental illness in that way can facilitate a great deal of healing.

The next thing I started to do was to volunteer with my community newspaper. Volunteering can look great on a resume but not entail the ordinary stresses and pressures of a regular job. Not to mention that when you volunteer, you can pick where you want to work. I think one of the important things to understand though is that one should take a volunteer job as seriously as a regular job. Hard work pays off. I don’t think it was completely the fact that I volunteered with the paper that got me the job, but at one point I was hired as the managing editor of two online magazines. I was paid fairly well and had to travel across the country for a conference which was paid for by my employer.

Then there is the unlimited potential of recreational activities. As far as this goes, a great place to start is a YMCA where you can join all kinds of sports clubs, from running to badminton. I currently work out at a city facility where I get a discount for having a low income. I have met a lot of great people from working out at city facilities on a regular basis. It was hard at first, I didn’t know how the people that had been going there took to outsiders, but I just kept going, then started to learn people’s names and started small bits of conversation in the steam room and such. Before I knew it, I was doing business with people, some bought my books, and I had a lot of invitations to breakfast after my workouts.

The next way of establishing a community in your life is to attend church. I didn’t understand much about the bible or God or anything, then I decided I wanted to learn more and also realized that there were some pretty nice people in the world who were churchgoers, so I started to look into it. There was a church I went to for quite a while where I made some really close friends despite that I had some very negative experiences there. Now, I don’t go as often, but I attend mass when I feel up to it and I not only am getting to know a lot of people in the area, I leave feeling somewhat uplifted and renewed. I went to a mass a few weeks ago and afterwards I felt an urge to contact a friend I had a falling out with 20 years ago and learned that it all had been a mistake. I really saw that as a sign that having some spiritual belief in my life greatly benefits me.

There are a lot of ways a person can plug themselves into a community. I think though that it can be just as important to have a decent home. I have recently been following a series on Netflix based on and hosted by a female author from Japan called Marie Kondo and it has improved many things about my life. Marie teaches people to tidy up their lives, and definitely brings a lot of joy back into their lives. She suggests that a person go through different things in their home, starting with clothes, then books and so on, and taking each and every article and asking a tough question of it, “does this really bring joy to my life?” and then simply donating, selling or disposing of the thing if it doesn’t. I applied her theories partially, then got a little stuck when it came to my ridiculously large comic collection, but carried through as far as I could, and I no longer have to feel bad when people come over and see my place is a mess. I truly feel a lot better with much less stuff and more joy in my life, more things that I actually use rather than just accumulate. One of the things I really like about her method is that after you cull your possessions, you take each one of the things you keep and find a home for them in your home and always put it back there when done using it. This has saved me so much time spent searching for things, for example for years I have had to tear things open with my teeth or do a halfway job with my fingers or a set of keys. Now I have two pairs of scissors and they are always in the same part of the same drawer, no searching, always there.

The other thing I have done was to put up some prints from my favourite wildlife artist on my wall. They cost a little extra, but I have felt that the money was well spent, I had wanted something by this artist for a long time and the pictures are really stunning. You can likely find some decent paintings to hang in a thrift shop. As my hobby next to writing is photography, I have also put up some photos of things around town and family members and such. It does take effort to keep a place clean, but I have found that once I purge my home of things I don’t need or don’t use, it becomes so much easier to keep things organized, clean, and uncluttered, which is something that definitely improves a person’s mood and also allows them to have guests over more often which can be a great way to make close friends with people.

One of the things that can be most difficult about having a decent place to live is the cost of rent or mortgage, which is always more in nicer parts of town. I feel bad for those who live in the US who have no choice but to live in run-down areas that are actually dangerous or pay ridiculous amounts of rent for very little apartment. I wish there were some national or international governing body that could raise funds and assist people with mental health issues so they can live decently. I had to make the personal choice of living in the poorest neighbourhood in my city and it comes with a lot of problems but luckily violence is pretty rare. I do have to deal with people sleeping in hallways and using needle drugs in the public areas of the building, but my rent is very low and my apartment itself is very nice. My suggestion is to look into subsidized housing, and don’t delay in getting yourself on waiting lists as some of these places can take years to get into.

So Dear Readers, I hope this has given you a little something to consider. all I can really say is that over the many years I lived alone in second-rate apartments and all the years I had a messy room or messy home, I have never been able to do more, earn more, or enjoy life more than I do now with a place I love to spend time in, friends I can talk to every day and rely on, and a feeling like I have a useful purpose in life. Best wishes all!

Relationships and the Person With Schizophrenia, Bipolar or a Major Mood Disorder

I think that when a person has a mental health disability they have every chance a normal person has to get into a relationship, but there are times and situations to reveal things and times and situations to keep things hidden.

As a person who works in mental health, and has written books about it, I have almost no apprehension about disclosing to others that I have a mental illness. I have always felt that if you try and hide it, it will only look worse later on, and letting out the fact that you have a mental illness is something that in a way tests your prospective dating partner or friend, it weeds out those people who are too shallow to see you as a human being under the protective layers of medication and other strategies to treat poor mental health such as putting them on a disability pension and suggesting they not work.

It’s kind of a funny thing, I grew up in a kind of ritzy suburb of Edmonton called St.Albert where everything was clean yards, white picket fences, and people with no problems, at least that was the way it seemed on the surface. When I contact people I used to associate with when I was growing up there, they still seem to be very proud of their suburban advantage. I will admit, it is nice to be in a nice house in a quiet neighbourhood, but that place drove me crazy. One time my mom sent me to mail a cheque to pay a bill and I walked down the street and opened the mailbox just as a schoolboy was going by. I didn’t think much of it until I got home and someone phoned me demanding to know who I just wrote a letter to. I took what money I had, and struck out thumb first for the coast. It was an amazing experience, and the Rocky Mountains between where I live and the coast, (Vancouver, BC) were indescribably beautiful. I got to Vancouver and stayed in a traveller’s hostel in a kind of bad part of town and I was off my medications, but that semblance of a normal life that I had there was so much better than living under the stigma and judgement of all those people in St.Albert

Sadly, I did get sick (mentally) out there eventually, but I did almost spark up a couple of relationships, though nothing lasting or significant. There was a young woman I fancied who I used to hang out with quite a bit some years ago and she told me that she didn’t think someone without a mental health problem could have a relationship with someone who did. I often wonder if I have been banging my head against a wall trying to prove her wrong all these 20+ years after she said it. I do know that I have received some incredibly cruel responses to trying to get a young woman I meet to go for coffee with me or get her phone number. One of them flat out said to me, “I’m not going to call you.” and threw down the pencil she was about to write my number down with. I suppose that was understandable because though she was fully grown she was still in high school (I was around 22 or so at the time) and people that age quite often lack maturity. One of the let-downs that really hurt was when I asked a friend’s sister if she wanted to meet for coffee after her and I had some really great phone conversations and she said, just as though I was asking her to commit a crime, “Are you trying to date me? If you are I’m not interested.) I’m not mad at these people, and I don’t really fault them for what they said, but it is a good example of some of the kinds of things that will get said to a person who is trying to get to know the opposite sex who has a history of mental illness, and you need to end up kind of tough.

Sometimes I can’t believe I am now 48 and am not married or have any kids. It always seemed to me that there would be time, I had to wait until I was financially stable, I had to wait for the perfect intelligent, beautiful woman to come along. Some of them have come along and had real problems with how I would act at times, badly enough that they stopped all contact with me. And it really isn’t an issue of me being unattractive, I work out, I’m very fit, and I have solicited honest opinions from a number of women who place me around 9 out of 10 on the old ‘attractiveness’ scale. I think a lot of what it has to do with is simply living alone and not stepping out of my self-imposed boundaries. One such boundary was that when I was young I would go to dances but I would never dance. Not. One. Dance. In years. I had so much anxiety flowing through my veins that I locked myself inside myself. There were a lot of things I could do, and a lot of those things I did well. I was an exemplary Air Cadet, a good athlete, an honour student and on and on. I had little problems working hard at school or the various jobs I had, I could even ask for help, but for some reason though I was totally straight, I felt it was a bad thing to relax and let your hormones take over. When I really think hard about it, I think about how much my parents meant to me, and how sad it seemed that people had to grow up and take on a life of their own and move away and parents would be left to rot in a senior’s home. I have felt so strongly about the injustice of this situation that I have volunteered to work in pastoral care in extended care hospitals, and I even try and visit a friend’s mom in the lodge she lives in because my friend lives way out of town. I also do a lot of things with my Dad and try and call him at least once a day. One of the funny things about me having this idea in my head is that my parents were very honest and forthcoming about the fact that us kids would grow up and go through puberty and one day meet someone outside of the family we wanted to share our life with. My Dad let my brother and I read playboy when I was I think 14. My mom had ‘the talk’ with us. But there was little taught to me in the way of communication, of respecting the opposite sex, which led to something actually kind of horrible.

It was the summer of 1988 and I had been out of Air Cadets for a whole year. I had a job delivering pizza which kept me in pizza and gas and cigarettes but I was extremely depressed and extremely lonely. One day I got a call from a young woman who used to hang out with some other people we both knew, she wanted to meet me at a make-out spot way on the other end of town. I got there and she was all dressed up like a prostitute and asked me to follow her to a different part of the lake. When we got there I sat down with her and she kept trying to coax me into agreeing to sleep with her, she even was rubbing my thigh. I took her hand away and finally, exasperated at what she was doing, and not wanting to hurt her feelings I said, “Yes, but…” and just as I was about to say why I didn’t want to sleep with her she punched me in the face and a bunch of the people I had known came out of the surrounding trees and were laughing out loud at me. It was the worst possible thing to happen, to this day I don’t fully understand why they did it. Part of it I am assuming was that I had a foul mouth at the age as I was working around adults, most of them oil or construction workers who were temporarily laid off and I often swore a blue streak. Other than that I really don’t know what caused those people to hatch such an elaborate plan. It was a really great way to destroy my confidence for at least another couple of years. Then, when I got to Vancouver those people were no longer around, there was no one to judge, no one to impress, and I started to meet all kinds of young women.

The truth is though, in my life I have only really had one meaningful relationship with a woman, and I still talk to her to this day. When I first met her almost 30 years ago we talked and joked and laughed, ended up studying together and going out for coffee a lot. It actually blossomed to a loving relationship for a while but that part of things broke apart after not too long. She is still one of my dearest friends. I don’t know really what all of this adds up to, what I do know is that one should always respect friends and lovers, always treat them as equals. As a young Air Cadet and later as a Student Pilot I had many chances to have one night stands, but I knew that a one night stand would never help me at all. I would find an attachment towards the person and it would be devastating to start and lose a relationship like that, not to mention several times. So I waited and waited and waited, and finally I met someone who I had a real connection to and it was about a million times more amazing than any experience I ever had, and now, 30 years later I still haven’t had to say any permanent goodbyes. As I am getting pretty tired I will leave things there, as always feel free to write to me with any topic related to mental health you would like me to write about in my next blog and I will do my best to accommodate. My email for responses, and for ordering books is viking3082000@yahoo.com   Thanks so much for joining me!       -LNG               Leif Norgaard Gregersen Senior below:

Coping With Leaving The Hospital For Those With Chronic Mental Illness And Their Families

 

First Mental Health Coping Strategies Video Blog

When Does It Go From Collecting to Hoarding?

Let me try and describe for you a quick look at a harsh reality. It isn’t a pretty one, but one I will have to face up to in the following months as I move further away from that scenario. A room, nothing but a non-ventillated room with a tiny bathroom attached. The room is no more than 10 feet by 15 feet, and inside of it lives a very ill young man presently having medication problems and who is surrounded by a lifetime of possessions. A book case covers one wall, packed full of every kind of book. More books are in the cupboard space instead of food, and more are laying randomly on the floor. The floor is littered with clothes new and old, garbage, full packs of cigarettes, dirty socks, and the odd can of beans or other uncooked, ready to eat food. On every flat surface piles of papers or CDs or other items are stacked beyond a safe height, and inside the fridge there are many items, but none of them are useable. This was my reality before I spent six months in a psychiatric hospital where I wasn’t even allowed to go home to pack my stuff up when I was evicted for displaying the signs of a person with a mental illness.

Sometimes I like to think that back then I wasn’t a hoarder but just a book lover or a music lover. But the plain truth was that I was being choked to death by all of my possessions. I didn’t want to let go of them for any reason. I think it is often the common reason people hoard things is that they feel they have more value than others do, that they can somehow sell them. The idea in my head was that somehow I would read all the books, even though I was consistently buying more books than I could read at that time. Lacking proper space to cook, I was also forced to buy food out or sponge off of my elderly parents which definitely wasn’t sustainable. I think at this time I was a hoarder. I tried an experiment though, a lot of my stuff was put into storage for after my release from hospital, and after spending two years paying for storage I hadn’t once needed to go to get more stuff from there, and I realized that I actually didn’t need any of that stuff. I stopped paying the storage people, they sent me a few nasty letters then auctioned off my things and that was that. The main problem was that I had already begun to accumulate more things.

I have a friend who is definitely a hoarder who lives in a small house stuffed to the rafters with books he will never read, records he will never play and videos he will never watch. At one point he confided with me that when he bought something, it almost gave him a sexual thrill. At first I thought this was a pretty sick thing, but later in years I have heard that many people actually experience this same thing. I think the important thing to understand though is that it is essential to gain awareness of a problem like hoarding, and that there is a great deal of help out there for people to want to change.

It is quite a few years since that incident when I was not only severely mentally ill, but also drowning in more possessions than I needed. What has changed is that I have stabilized on medications, which work well for me, and I have much more space than that tiny little apartment. What I desperately would like to know is if I am still a hoarder.

In the time since that six month hospitalization, I developed an interest in reading comic books. I had once collected them as a child, when I was 10 and I had an impressive collection. Now I don’t read them as much but they have become easy to purchase, I now have thousands more than I ever did, despite that I don’t have a lot of time for reading.

So in all this time since my last hospital admission (19 years) I have fought to find a balance to my life, and I have discovered a movement called minimalism. I find it extremely fascinating, the claims they make are huge though. Get rid of 90% of what you have and you will feel 200% better. Declutter your home and declutter your mind. A lot of it makes sense to me, but I have hit a roadblock. I have this huge collection of comics recently bought and I just don’t know if I can sell the comics at a huge sacrifice, never having taken the time to read them. This surely must be hoarding at its worst, and to break out of the cycle I am going to have to make some really hard decisions. The only way I really know how to deal with it is to read books like “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” a beautiful book about purging possessions and reorganizing ones’ home. I know it will be difficult, but I think one of the most important things is likely that I shouldn’t worry about getting my money out of the comics. What I really have to focus on is finding a way to force myself not to buy any more, and I am lucky to have a resource in Edmonton that many of us can access with ease, there are graphic novels galore in the Edmonton Public Library. There are actually also a great deal of comics online, but I can’t comment due to lack of knowledge on copyright status and such. One of the wonderful things about the computer age is that it almost seems all one needs is a decent computer and only the very essential necessities of life and you can make it.

There are some truly encouraging reasons to embrace minimalism. The idea that one can either lower the amount they work without worry or work like they did before but be able to save much more, save for things in life that truly matter, like a life-changing vacation or being able to take your spouse out for a special meal at a fancy restaurant you enjoy more often. For me, as I sit at my desk writing this now, all I can think about is what it will be like when the clutter and papers of my work space are cleared and I can think of nothing but writing. I have also been thinking that if I use some of the space in my apartment differently there is no reason why I can’t hold onto my comics, but the essential thing I think is for me not to buy any more, so I have been trying to read up and listen to podcasts on living with less.

Last week I went into kind of a cleaning frenzy. I took all my clothes, piled them up on my futon, then got rid of each and every stitch of fabric that I wasn’t using or didn’t give me immediate joy. I was going to move on to do more this weekend but Edmonton has been hit with a brutal snowstorm and temperature drop which has made it impractical for me to complete my scheduled purge. Books are next. This is going to be the hardest part of it all I think, I have loved books since I was very young, but I think I should go easy on myself and include books but not comic books. I have this idea that I can simply pare down my comic collection to a manageable amount, but the truth is no matter which way I do it, this can become a very emotional time for a person who has had a lot of stuff for a long time. One thing I do know is that changing the way you view possessions, and not letting what you have define what kind of person you are, is so worth it.