mental illness and stigmas: saving the people with schizophrenia

This week I decided to do research on the mental disorder of schizophrenia.  This disease has always interested me, since I first heard about it.  In my nursing mental and behavioral health class, we touched on the subject, but I wanted to do my own research on the topic.  Moreover, I truly wanted to explore how people live with this disease every day and how it affects their human dignity every day. 

Approximately 1% of the world’s population will develop schizophrenia at some point during their lifetime. This severe, disabling neurological disease is chronic and there is no cure. Although it affects both men and women equally, men are usually diagnosed earlier, in their late teens or early twenties. Schizophrenia symptoms are complex and the disorder can be difficult to diagnose, particularly in its early stages. People who have schizophrenia often have terrifying psychotic symptoms such as hearing voices in their heads, or believing that others are controlling their thoughts, reading their minds, or plotting against them. These symptoms often leave them afraid and withdrawn, so people living with schizophrenia can be incomprehensible or scary to other people because their speech patterns and behavior are disorganized and bizarre.

The initial signs indicating schizophrenia often appear as behavioral changes that may be confusing or shocking. A sudden onset of symptoms is referred to as being an “acute phase” of the disorder. Psychosis is a common symptom of schizophrenia where the patient is mentally impaired by hallucinations, delusions, and the inability to discern what is real and what is not real. Less obvious symptoms may precede, occur along with, or follow severe psychotic symptoms. Some people have a single episode of psychosis, but others have them many times throughout their lives, yet they lead fairly normal lives between episodes. However, a person who has chronic schizophrenia usually does not recover completely normal functioning, and they often require long-term medical treatment, usually requiring medication, in order to control their symptoms.

There are treatments for schizophrenia that can relieve many of the symptoms, but very few patients recover completely and most continue to suffer symptoms of some sort throughout their lives. Suicide is a danger for people diagnosed with schizophrenia; approximately 10% of all patients commit suicide, especially younger males. Medications can other treatments can control symptoms when used regularly and as prescribed, but there are persistent consequences of schizophrenia that can be very troubling - lost opportunities, medication side effects, social stigmas, and residual symptoms that never go away completely.

Overall, people with schizophrenia do not live successful lives, healthy well-beings, or strong relationships.  Nothing is easy for them and they are constantly stigmatized in society.  They are looked down upon and are feared because they are not considered “normal”.  Based on these findings, the dignity of these human beings is greatly affected.  They become so hopeless and so depressed due to their own diagnosis and what people say that they kill themselves.  We need to step up and stop this stigmatization.  We can save lives, and save people’s dignity who have schizophrenia or any other mental illness. 

3/22 ~ Medicine and Dignity

This week we read provocative medical topics.  Topics, which I have discussed in my Biomedical Ethics, but not delving into the depths of human dignity and medicine as much as this class is making me do.  For me I chose the article by Gawande, A called “Letting Go;” it was about keeping people alive on life-sustaining medicine, and the people who chose to die without those measures.

The article centered around one particular person, a young woman with end-stage lung cancer.  She just had her first child, and was told she was going to die.  They did everything to keep her alive, but no treatment worked. She only got sicker and sicker, until she got pneumonia and slowly slipped into and out of death, before she finally took her last breath.  Her parents and sister wanted to keep her alive, but her husband let her go.  There was nothing more that could be done.  They all knew that, but they did not want to believe it.  I believe this article is directly related to human dignity.  The family and doctors respected the woman’s wish to try everything, but at the end they let her go.  In addition, they did not stop her from being a mother or a wife; they never stopped her from being human.  They let her live her life, a painful life, but her spirit was able to retain its dignity to the last breathe and beyond.

For me this article brought up some tough memories.  My uncle/godfather had terminal brain cancer.  It was a tumor that he was born with, but no one knew he had.  Near the last couple weeks of his life, he was not the same person.  After all his extensive brain surgery he lost everything that made him human, he was in a vegetative state.  He could neither look you in the eyes, smile, or laugh.  I was too young to know what was going on, but I knew it was something bad.  My aunt made the final decision to “pull the plug” on his life-sustaining measures.  To me I thought she killed my uncle, I thought, “Why couldn’t we wait, He could pull out of this eventually.”  Knowing what I know now, I understand that my aunt made a really rough decision, and it was the right one.  Medicine would have not brought my uncle back to himself.  His brain was so damaged by chemo, radiation and surgical resection, that all his human traits were gone.  He was nothing, but a shell.  A shell is not a life and I believe holds no dignity.  ‘Letting go’ was the best decision, and also it makes me wonder how my aunt feels everyday knowing what she had to do to give my uncle his life back before he drift away.

This whole topic of letting go and life-sustaining measures connects to the theorist Peter Singer’s thoughts and ideas.  According to Singer, he holds that the right to life is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to feel pain and pleasure.  Therefore, if a person cannot feel pain or pleasure then the person cannot possibly be alive or human.  For instance, Singer would agree with the idea of “Letting go” to what happened to the young woman in the article and my uncle.  However, since my uncle was born with this disease.  Singer would have easily decided to put my uncle out his misery early in life.  Additionally, the young woman knew of her tough road of her incurable disease, but still fought hard.  Singer would have told her to give up. 

We must make our own decisions; we cannot base them on previous experiences or theorists’ ideas.  We must place trust in our own hearts and minds to know what is right for us.  We cannot choose for others what we find best for us.  It does not work that way.  I chose my own path of life sustaining measures or “letting go,” and I will respect anyone’s wishes for what they want.  This is human dignity to me.

A Quiet Time

The experiential learning that we did in class gave me an hour of my life back.  I was able to take back control of the things that were taken away from me.  I could listen to my heartbeat and watch the rise and fall of my chest during each inhalation and exhalation I took.  It was only me.  There was no one to make me feel bad about myself; there was no one to make me feel less.  With this hour of solitude I knew I needed more than that one time in class, I needed to make this hour for myself everyday if I were to truly take back control. 

The dove grasping an olive branch in its mouth is a sign of peace.  I am looking for this sign that things will turn out alright, but I need to start making my own peace and serentiy.  This is something you cannot go out and find, you need to make it happen.

Moreover, I have been going through some really rough times with my roommates to the point where I end up crying myself to sleep and stay at Carlow until night.  I do not feel appreciated, I feel rejected physically and wounded emotionally.  It is a toxic place to live, but it is the only place I have right now during school.  To find an hour of solitude is almost impossible in this place.  Thus, I looked for other means to find my peace, but it was hard.  However, I do find peace the peace I so desperately need while I exercise in the gym or sit on the bus.  It is not the hour that I strive for or the perfect environment of serenity, but for now it works for me. I need a mental and physical escape, and this experiential learning gave me to first step to taking back what rightfully belongs to me.