Jamieson's Story
By Phoebe
My brother Jamieson has Schizoaffective Disorder. He had a bright future ahead of him, at age
18, a full scholarship to an art school, a beautiful girlfriend, an amazing talent to succeed at anything he
applied himself to, and a brilliant, brilliant mind. After a year at art school he broke down with a psychotic episode for the first time and we had no idea what to think. My brother was not who I remembered when he came back home. He was no longer inhabiting a world that was remotely familiar to me.
For the past six years he’s been from home to hospitals, to half-way housing, in an effort to get his old life back. Although he may be irrational at times he hasn’t lost touch with reality and he knows his dreams were snatched from under his feet. He takes medications that give him horrible side-effects; he has lost his self-esteem, concentration and gained weight.
According to the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill in one year approximately 25 million
Americans are affected by mental illness and more than 7.5 million children and adolescents suffer.
Which very likely means there are kids in our school functioning with mental illness. In fact according to Public Citizen, in any given day 240,000 people with mental illness are homeless, and 283,000 are incarcerated in jails and prisons instead of getting the treatment they need. And in 2001, the Surgeon General revealed a report stating that 12 percent of American children, under the age of 18, have a diagnosable mental illness. However, only 1 in 5 children with mental illnesses are identified and receive treatment or services. Most people think schizophrenia is split-personality, or they demonize schizophrenia as psychopathic behavior; which it isn’t. It is a common brain disorder which affects 1 out of 100 people. It is far more common than AIDS- and yet people shy away from discussing this disorder in health classes across the country. What makes me angry is that our society doesn’t realize that the population suffering from depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia need as much sympathy, research, and respect as the population with other serious chronic physical illnesses like cancer or lupus. Not only the public’s judgment and ridicule upsets me, but even the insurance companies insure much less for these serious physical illnesses of the brain. Have you ever called someone ‘crazy’, ‘schitzo’, ‘insane’, ‘bipolar’? Have you ever considered how that might punch someone emotionally? You may not even notice you’re abusing the mentally ill. “It is time for society to treat the mentally ill as medically ill.” So let me explain, Depression and bipolar are disorders of the mood, and schizophrenia is a disorder of thoughts. Schizoaffective disorder is a combination of the two.
Patricia Ruocchio, a writer, with schizophrenia, describes the illness as a “prison of the mind.”
“There is agony in not being able to communicate… The unusual aloneness I feel is only made worse by the physical closeness of someone with whom I am trying so desperately to connect. This disconnection is not conscious; I cannot control what can or cannot be conveyed. I am blocked by a brain that scrambles thoughts, and a bony structure that will no let me pass beyond its boundaries.” Schizophrenics cannot escape from unreality. My brother can’t decide what are real memories or false and so his life is slipping through his brain unsure. Jamie feels an enormous amount of anxiety and insecurity, even though he cannot express these emotions he still feels the pain inside. I took a drama class last year, and I loved it for the most part; made some really good friends, we all laughed taking turns to practice fake commercials and such. Until I suppose our usual teacher got in a fight with the owner of the place and we got a replacement. He was nice at first, fun, a little obsessed with himself and how ‘great of an actor he was.’ He made us act out different tables at restaurants, and one day he started giving scenes to act out like , “Hey- this table is schitzo, this ones bipolar, and you guys act depressed.” I couldn’t contain myself especially when all of my good friends were frolicking around laughing and pretending to be two different people at the same time, ‘split-personality’, I turned to the owner who was looking on and said, “That’s not schizophrenia they’re acting out, it’s multiple personality disorder.” She looked at me ‘knowingly’ “Oh- but Phoebe, it can be that sometimes.” My feeling were welling up more and more ready to burst as I said, “NO, actually, it can’t it’s a completely different mental illness and you know absolutely nothing about it.” Ending up cracking my last words through tears. None of them understood how they had hurt me. I couldn’t even face them again. I quit that drama class.
There is stigma all around us, people with mental illness are not “bad”, or ill because of some
failure of character. They are simply ill. Ignorance is hard to deal with and I plan on breaking through boundaries of fear and convention to help my brother as I have felt the discrimination that exists. “Empathy: The intimate comprehension of another person’s thoughts and feelings, without imposing our own judgment or expectation.”
I am asking for your empathy, not toward me, but for the mentally ill in general. I think that society should be more educated, sympathetic, and caring.
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