My Involuntary Metamorphosis

My metamorphosis came about through novel experience — a lot of it — and being cut off from my prior experience. This was 36 years ago, and I’ve lived longer since then than before the change. But I am still periodically digging out remnants of damaged thinking I acquired during that change.

Getting a diagnosis including psychosis made such a change in my life and myself that I’m still trying to understand it. I even (mostly unconsciously) recreated some of my past experience at a more recent corporate job. It recalled to me my initial experience of being thrown out of what my family would consider normal economic life. That exile has made a lasting impression on me.

When I was 30, at work in a department store, I made a joke about a bomb, which is a felony. The low-level people worked together and this joke had been made before. But the way I did it, walking into the office of an executive, putting her mail in a cabinet and saying it was a bomb… the place erupted. I was probably in a fog due to always being exhausted, always being stressed, and, at the time, hearing voices and having delusions. That had been going on for about six months, amid a lot of criticism about how I did my job.

It was my first real job after school, so I felt plenty of pressure from the family to do well. They thought I was a dreamer because my main interest in life was reading and writing poetry. They let their concern about whether I could handle “the real world” be known to me. And even I thought I was lucky to get the job and it was a good fit.

The department store had a jail where I occupied a cell. I wasn’t aware that a retail store could have a jail. I don’t know whether this is still a practice in retail. I was transported to a police station and then on to another jail. My father bailed me out. He kept telling me I needed a doctor. I was baffled and frustrated. I thought I had a drastic need for a lawyer. My father took me home to an apartment I shared with three other women. I talked to my mother. I talked to an old psychiatrist I had seen for talk therapy for depression. He was quite firm that I had to face the consequences of my actions. My father called. He said that if I were in the hospital when my court case came up, the judge would probably throw the case out of court. Sold! He drove me to the hospital.

My father and some kind of administrator told me it was better if I signed myself in. The administrator looked sad. They showed me where my room was. About half an hour later someone told me I could not stay in my room because they were short-staffed and I needed to sit in the milieu area. I didn’t want to, but it would not have crossed my mind to argue. It was clear to me that the whole succession of events had happened because I was in public disgrace.

Some amusing things happened during my 30 days there (the maximum stay). One is worth recounting. The first evening I spent in the milieu area, they brought supper to us. There was a woman in a nightgown with a big frown on. After she got her tray and looked it over, she raised her arm expressively and shouted, “Where is my wine? I want my wine!” I could not stop laughing. Then I caught the eye of a mental health worker whose look seemed to say, “Don’t encourage her.”

At some point a few days later I saw a neurologist, a psychiatrist, a psych nurse…several times when I was at the nurses’ station for some reason, a psych nurse or other would approach me and say, “Is this your first time in a psychiatric hospital?” Like most people spent most of their time bouncing in and out of psych hospitals. Or like this time would be the “first of many.” I thought about the succession of events that got me there and wanted to say, this is my first time for any of this shit!

In the next couple years I was asked several times, “Did the time in the hospital seem interminable? Could you hardly wait to get out?” Out to what? There was nothing to rush back to. Or I was afraid of what I would come back to: Nothing. And that upstanding self was gone so I wasn’t going “back” anywhere. I would rather have gone to the moon. Especially after one of my housemates visited me (I wrote a check for the rent immediately). Someone had asked her to bring my “cocktail” of pills to me. She handed the check back and said I would not be living there anymore.

I was in day treatment for around six weeks? We learned how to shop and cook pasta, etc. I could not participate in psychodrama group because I was being shifted around in my family and did not have a stable home. It was thought by the staff that an emotional group might upset me. I was the only one who could not join this group. The group was two feet away from where I was sitting and behind me I could hear a woman saying in agony, “I have wasted my talents — and God will not forgive me!” As a poet, I could relate to that completely — taking your art so seriously that to bungle it would call down a judgment from God. I have never forgotten that pronouncement that I was supposedly too unstable to hear. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t have missed it.

The next day a group was convened of me and a couple other clients, to ask if “we” had been upset by the louder voices in the psychodrama group. The time period and people who might have complained were cast as vaguely as possible. I thought, “Oh, shut up.” The other young women acted as though they didn’t know what the psych nurse was talking about and I did the same.

I was staying with my father and stepmother at this time. Bedding down in the dining room of my father’s house one night, I had a conversation with him in which he mentioned irately that I could not stay there forever. That made my heart stop. I had no money. Where was I going to go? He had probably had a fight with my mother over how much she would get from him for taking me in. I stayed with her for about six months.

After day treatment, I went once a week to a “continuing care” group at Harvard Community Health Plan in Boston. I lived and worked as a coffee jerk in Salem and took the commuter rail to Boston. What was “continued” was the lesson that you had a fault that was shameful, volatile and dangerous, and it was your curse to keep it under control. This was conveyed by telling you how serious your mental illness was, how sick you were. I believed my mind was not to be trusted. We were discouraged from talking about our mental illness anywhere but in the group.

Some readers might be thinking that the continuity of care I got is usually only available in a few states of the US. I’ll give you that. It could also be said on behalf of the clinicians that the “dire” depiction of mental illness is meant to impress the newbie with the importance of taking every dose of medication. The “dire” depiction is one-size-fits-all. I remember one person in the continuing care group treating their condition as a big joke, while I thought I was transformed into someone a few links before us on the evolutionary chain. It was obviously my fault and I would be on trial forever. No one gave a damn about how I was acclimating to this curse. I was thought of as a different person, as someone who was born this way. In 36 years of treatment I have heard once (from the psychiatrist in that very group) that my mental illness was not my fault.

In the first three years of treatment, I was in a state of horror I probably could not have described even to myself. I had feelings that I had not known existed. I thought, I’m not feeling my feelings — they are feeling me.

I had stuff slung at me every week and had no idea what it meant or what to do. At the coffee place, I could not count back change to save my life. My drawer often came back $10 or $12 short. My boss showed me his handwritten log of my drawer one day and said “I think you’re stealing from us!” etc. I told the continuing care group of my miserable day. The psychiatrist said coldly, “And were you stealing from them?” I emphatically said no, and wondered why anyone would risk a criminal conviction for $10. I took myself down the hall to the train, thinking, “It’s OK. It’s just one of the worst days of my life.” My head was descending to a terrible place; part of me, fascinated, split off to watch.

Once in the continuing care group, a woman member that everyone liked came in and said she had just turned 35 and now had been mentally ill for more than half of her life. She had a good IT job and was married to a history professor. Her diagnosis was schizophrenia and sometimes it scared her. She had had a tough life while getting used to her condition. Her comment suggested she had passed a milestone that showed her her condition was real and it was not going away.

When you have had an involuntary metamorphosis, the meaning changes over time. I can attest to that. A therapist who made me feel like a human being again told me people often take a year to accept that they have a mental illness (her terminology, not mine). I accepted it right away, she observed, as if I thought there had always been something wrong with me. This got me to reflect on the difference between me and the later-acceptors: they were denying something that, as far as they knew, had not happened. Ten years after my diagnosis, I was well aware that my involuntary metamorphosis had happened — but the effort I made to bury it was another kind of denial.

I used the same criteria for “normal” that my clinicians did — no unusual thoughts or practices, regular eating and sleeping habits, basic and utilitarian speech. I must have felt good about this, since when I began to hear voices again a year or two later I would be miserable. Oh shit… not this again. The metamorphosis had claimed me again. Had I really half-consciously thought it would go away?

This piece of my story, the beginning, lasted about three years. As I mention above, my forward journey included burying my problem so it was a secret to others, and, at times, a secret to myself. However, it was also the beginning of my two successful strategies: 1) Think for yourself, and 2) Help yourself. I thought I could not help myself out of a wet paper bag. My confidence, never high, sank as low as it gets. Anger helped me use my brain, plus the obvious fact that if I didn’t help myself, no one would.

I visited a job counselor who knowingly handed me the e-newsletter I edited myself, and told me, “There are lots of good jobs there — I use this all the time.” I knew most of the jobs paid $12.25/hr. — less than I was making at the time. It irritated me that I was doing part of her job for her. I left, mouthing, “Shit! Even I can do better than that!” Starting to run my own life upped the quality of my life more than anything else.