
Successful and Schizophrenic - uladzislau
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/schizophrenic-not-stupid.html
======
cdvonstinkpot
Schizophrenia destroyed my first startup- It began & went undiagnosed while I
was starting it, and it kept getting worse until the delusions affected my
decisions and eventually activities related to them took priority over writing
my business plan and securing funding. The venture ultimately failed because
of its affect on me, and I lost the entire 6-figure inheritence I had invested
in the venture.

Now after being hospitalized for it, and having found medication which makes
it so that it's like I'm not sick at all, I can attempt to learn how to code,
and hope to try again doing that once I learn how.

~~~
dllthomas
Good luck!

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
Thanks

------
reinhardt
Too bad that most attention to schizophrenia has been on "positive" symptoms
(delusions, hallucinations), not so much on the negative ones (lack of
motivation, flat affect, withdrawal). The latter are more debilitating in the
long term, even if those who experience them are less likely to end up in the
news.

------
DanBC
This is a great article. It tells us that people can achieve a lot even when
they're medicated and ill.

Old thinking was very much to "protect" people with mental health problems
from the stress of the world. But as you know, a bit of stress is fun,
exciting, exhilarating.

Modern thinking is that people with MH problems can work, and should work.
They might need a bit of help to get jobs, and they might need a bit of help
to stay in jobs, and it can be a bit scary for employers and colleagues. But
reducing stigma is going reasonably well.

------
kephra
We all construct our world. It does not matter if those constructs are called
sane or insane by others. Our construct is the key to the real world outside
of our minds. So the only thing that matters for those who are called insane,
it to find an other niche in the world where their key fits.

For the Germans here: I advise everybody to notary register a PatVerFue. This
is a legal trick using an advance health care directive to forbid any
diagnosis of ICD-10 F00-F99 or DSM, that takes effect at the moment a doctor
claims that you can no longer make own decisions due to illness or incapacity.
The result is that they could only put you in jail, but not into an insane
asylum, and can not force you to take any medicaments.

A doctor who sends you to an asylum can be punished for false imprisonment up
to 10 years!

A PatVerFue is a must have for everybody who is political subversive, working
creative, and even for those who work for the tax office, as there had been
cases, where tax officers had been locked in an asylum, to prevent that they
follow black money of a Hessian CDU politician, in Germany.

Read at <http://www.patverfue.de/> (sorry this page is German)

~~~
larve
> "We all construct our world. It does not matter if those constructs are
> called sane or insane by others. Our construct is the key to the real world
> outside of our minds. So the only thing that matters for those who are
> called insane, it to find an other niche in the world where their key fits."

this is so misleading... it is not about the way you see the world, it is
about how your perception of the world is out of your control. my experience
of psychosis was that i was both aware of me being delusional, and still
_having_ to believe these thoughts. it is immensely stressful, and very easy
to put yourself in danger. do you want to find a niche for yourself if you
believe you are god, or believe you are persecuted by aliens? the first thing
i want (and i am saying this at a moment of sanity) is to be committed by
force if i turn delusional again.

------
gwern
The tone of the whole article is a little odd... I'm not sure what exactly her
underlying view is.

> Over the last few years, my colleagues, including Stephen Marder, Alison
> Hamilton and Amy Cohen, and I have gathered 20 research subjects with high-
> functioning schizophrenia in Los Angeles. They suffered from symptoms like
> mild delusions or hallucinatory behavior. Their average age was 40. Half
> were male, half female, and more than half were minorities. All had high
> school diplomas, and a majority either had or were working toward college or
> graduate degrees. They were graduate students, managers, technicians and
> professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, psychologist and chief executive
> of a nonprofit group. ...At the same time, most were unmarried and
> childless, which is consistent with their diagnoses...how had they managed
> to succeed in their studies and at such high-level jobs?

20 subjects is a lot? Less than half getting a college degree is success? With
mild symptoms (as opposed to catatonia)?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Epidemiology> gives a lifetime
risk of 0.7%. LA has ~4m people, giving 28k who have, had, or will have
schizophrenia. It'd be impressive if all 28k could not cope at all and none
could hold down any kind of job (and wouldn't we expect just from timing of
schizophrenia onset to see plenty with degrees and jobs?).

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Having a loved one with schizophrenia, the tone is not odd at all (it is an
opinion piece, not a journal). There are many people who believe schizophrenia
is a sentence that means you'll be living under a bridge. I see that attitude
regularly.

In some cases, it is not possible to function, due to the disease; but there
are a lot of people who _can_ function, but they are told they cannot. Of
course the 20 people are not a research cohort, but they are anecdotal
evidence that people with schizophrenia can succeed regardless of their
disease. And if you have schizophrenia, that can give you hope. And hope can
bring change.

------
tokenadult
Remarkable. Schizophrenia was once called "dementia praecox," and with good
reason, as most people diagnosed with it never got better over the long term.
I can remember very stark stories about young people felled by schizophrenia,
written by their parents, during the 1960s.

Now with better prescribed medications and better cognitive therapies it is
possible to be "high functioning" person with schizophenia, and more research
on that issue will help more suffering people function better. And the first
small number of successful cases of persons with schizophrenia achieving
professional success, family togetherness in a new family, or even both, will
give hope to more suffering patients.

A seminar video produced by the University of Virginia, Divided Minds: Twin
Sisters' Journey Through Schizophrenia,"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI>

tells the story of sisters Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D., one
of whom has schizophrenia, and one of whom does not, even they are identical
(monozygotic) twins who were brought up in the same home.

They also have a book about their story.

[http://www.amazon.com/Divided-Minds-Sisters-Journey-
Schizoph...](http://www.amazon.com/Divided-Minds-Sisters-Journey-
Schizophrenia/dp/0312320655/ref=tmm_pap_title_0)

Some of my perspective on these issues comes from knowing Irving Gottesman,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Gottesman>

who was credited as the main adviser on schizophrenia relied on by the author
of the biography of John Nash, _A Beautiful Mind._ Gottesman has spent much of
his career researching schizophrenia and debunking former theories about the
origin of schizophrenia. Twin studies, especially studies of the unusual cases
of monozygotic twins reared apart, and adoption studies have consistently
shown that schizophrenia develops from an underlying genetic vulnerability
(probably varying greatly from patient to patient, according to the best
evidence from genome-wide association studies) that makes a patient all too
likely to develop full psychotic symptoms over the course of childhood without
careful treatment. Gottesman's research goal is to define "endophenotypes"
that can be reliably measured clinically to identify patients who need one
kind of preventive or supportive treatment rather than another. But we are
nowhere near identifying endophenotypes for any major mental illness.

------
orionblastar
I suffer from schizoaffective disorder, it is like having bipolar disorder and
schizophrenia at the same time and having normal, depressed, manic,
schizophrenic and a mix of them at times every two weeks or so.

I had earned $150,000/year as a programmer, but because of the stress I was
under at one job I developed the mental illness and was fired for being
mentally ill (I had panic attacks at work, and was ordered to 'snap out of it
or you are fired!' and when I couldn't snap out of it I was fired) I tried
other jobs but I was just bullied and harassed for being mentally ill. When
they know you have a schizophrenic illness they make all kinds of loud noises
to distract you and then pretend they didn't make them to trick you into
thinking you are hearing things. Like playing wav files on their speakers
turned way up, yelling, singing, ringing a bell, one place they bribed an ice
cream truck to drive by every 15 minutes and ring the bell and play music near
my window. Of course you can't work under those conditions and you file
complaints and they are ignored and eventually you get fired because you are
mentally ill.

I ended up in disability being too sick to work a job. There was really three
ways it could have gone. The only way I could find a job was to become a
software contractor on a 1099 form with no benefits and be shuffled around
every six months to finish projects nobody else can finish (spaghetti code
debugging) and either have to go off medication as they are too expensive
without insurance (when you apply for personal health insurance they use pre-
existing conditions to deny you, but if you had a W2 Job with a group plan
they'd accept you, but as a contractor you aren't allowed on a group plan) or
go homeless and wander from one mental hospital or even jail to another. The
alternative is to get accepted on disability and avoid that madness. Not
unless the right company wants to hire you as an employee with a W2 and keep
you on despite the problems with your mental illness they can accommodate you
for it.

The problem is a mental illness is a disability, but when most companies or
organizations plan for disabilities they think people in wheelchairs, deaf or
blind people, and never someone with a mental illness like schizophrenia, they
only see that as a weakness and character flaw. They think he/she is a
potential criminal/terrorist a ticking time bomb that will go off on a violent
spree that will kill people because most of the people who go on murder sprees
are labeled mentally ill by the news media. Even if you are not violent, you
will get classified as potentially becoming violent and thus a liability. If
you had autism or downs syndrome you would find all kinds of support, even get
college scholarships and job placements. But as a schizophrenic you are seen
as a sub-human creature that should be gotten rid of, and confused with a
sociopath or whatever. They even confuse you as having multiple personality
disorders even if that is not a part of schizophrenia.

Anyway I am on geodon and clonazapan if anyone wonders what I take to be
treated. I went on disability in 2003, and learned meditation in Buddhism to
control it better. I am re-learning how to program all over again as well as
writing some ebooks and hoping to self-publish them when I am finished.

When I went online for support of my mental illness, I was faced with trolls
and people harassing me and bullying me, once even found my home phone number
and kept prank calling my house at 3am every night using a VOIP software to
create fake caller ID numbers like 666-666-6666 and 123-456-7890 and my wife
couldn't take it anymore and changed our phone number to a private number to
prevent that after the police failed to do anything about it, even if the
caller did threaten to kill us all as well.

It is really difficult for me, as my community does not give me any type of
support for it and just generally avoid me because they don't understand my
mental illness or even how to talk to me. So I am excluded from things, I lost
most of my friends, and my family most of them cut me off after I became
mentally ill.

I have two college degrees, one in computer science and the other in business
management. Since nobody would hire me, I plan to do work at home and slowly
earn income with writing ebooks and maybe doing some small programming tasks.

~~~
bane
> I had earned $150,000/year as a programmer, but because of the stress I was
> under at one job I developed the mental illness and was fired for being
> mentally ill

Serious question that I haven't yet faced as an employer. If this comes up
with one of my employees? Is it appropriate to sit down with them, recognize
that they have an illness, but that the company still has needs that need to
be fulfilled at that level, but recognize that the employee can still
contribute, although at a lower stress, less demanding level...is it
appropriate or even welcome to offer continued employment, but at a lower
salary and position?

~~~
orionblastar
More information I forgot for my first post.

If an employee is having problems getting work done due to a disability there
usually is an EAP Employee Assistance Program recommended by the state or city
you can refer the employee to for counseling, evaluation, and treatment that
can help them recover and get their work done. This is usually reserved for
mental health issues, stress, depression, alcoholism, personal problems like
divorce or spousal abuse aka domestic violence and emotional cruelty etc.

Also employment law has a clause in it that if the employer suffers an undue
hardship in accommodating the employee, it can be used as a defense in a
discrimination trial. If the employee wins the discrimination trail they are
usually awarded one year of their salary (The lawyers usually collect 2/3rds
of this amount for legal fees, leaving 1/3rd for the employee) and in some if
not most cases the lawsuit is usually settled out of court to avoid negative
publicity.

Honestly because I've been on disability for so long, I'd take a reduced
salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. It
is not the money nor the position, it is being treated fairly that I look for,
and that means the right company and the right manager. I would not even mind
doing PC repairs and troubleshooting instead of programming or something else
like that.

~~~
bane
> I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human
> being for once.

Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may
not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a
$150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to
the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to
the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good
alternative to outright firing.

Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an _employees_
perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for _whatever_
reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees.

From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their
full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other
team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10
hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply
unfair to us as well.

~~~
orionblastar
I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming
languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out
why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote
documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments
in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-
Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say
I was the best, but I did valuable work.

I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was
a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is
schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for
economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower
position because he is mentally ill?

The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy
trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to
me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to
meet deadlines.

But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would
keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done.
Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic
attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had
broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being
put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and
writer's block which I am only now overcoming.

But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work
and earning even more money.

I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an
idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.

------
xijuan
My friend and I were discussing about this this morning! She is diagnosed with
bipolar disorder; and this morning she asked me whether I think she could
still be successful career wise with her conditions. I said "Of course, you
will! Other people may stigmatize people like you! But you should NEVER
stigmatize yourself!" Of course, I talked to her more than just few sentences.
This article just proved everything I told her!

For those who have suffered depression, here is a list of well-known people
who have suffered major depressive disorder. If you google, there is a list
for every mental disorder!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_major_depre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_major_depressive_disorder)

------
INTPenis
I think everyone is hurting a bit inside, some more than others. The problem
is that we're shown these masks that make us believe everyone else have it
better than we do.

In my case, this is what drove me from acceptance of my quirks and issues. So
my first rule is to turn that damn TV off, ignore media and advertising as
much as humanly possible while still living in this world and meeting real
people.

It's a monkey see, monkey do type of world. Everyone thinks they know how
they're supposed to behave based on what they see around them, and that
becomes a circle of masked behavior in society. So the few of us who can't
wear those masks feel even more outcast for being ourselves.

------
nerdfiles
"Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD
or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many
hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to
authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The
selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out
many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a
decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of
compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world
where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs
and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and
behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one."

— [http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-
authoritarians-...](http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-
authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/)

There are too many everyday people armed with psychiatric terms.

Stop it. Many nootropic and psychotropic drugs induce many of those
hallucinations. Accept it. And learn how to understand what your body is
telling you, rather than treating it like it's some operating table experiment
that you'd being graded to poke and prod. Your body is a diagnostician, albeit
a cryptic one that has needs, demands and quirks of its own. Most of you
simply do not know how to live in your skin because, for one, you were likely
raised religious and you've learned how to spite your own "holy temple," not
only with deeds but in your minds, your mental habits and cognitive hygiene.

Read a book, like Food of the Gods or something about the organic complexity
and biodiversity of this world. Understand.

Stop fearing Nature, and understand how to become harmonious with it.

~~~
gbaygon
I somehow share your point of view.

I've readed McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Antero Alli, etc. Even studied Zen
and vaious kind of meditation. And know what you mean.

But keep in mind that all that knowledge is somewhat buried, there are no
modern "shamans" readily available, and if they exist, how would we
differentiate them from charlatans?.

A person with this kind of "disorders" has a wrong map for reality, and i
don't know if it's possible to self cure.

On the other hand all this kind of theories are not so mainstream and you will
get massively downvoted for expressing your point of view on the matter.

On my very humble opinion, this so called disorders are problems with symbols
assosiations, combined with very sensitive human beings. And where modern
science tries to get the individual to adapt to the environment, older
techniques tried to build a new map for reality, using the unique talents that
every person has, and reordering the symbols on the mind.

Some similarities to this kind of work can be found in NLP (Bandler) and the
work of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Maybe shamanism is not the preferred theme in this forum, bu come on guys,
shamans where the first hackers!

\- Sorry if there are errors, i'm in a hurry and english is not my first
language.

~~~
larve
i don't see the big difference with what psychiatrist and psychologists
actually do. i have been diagnosed with bipolar I after an intense manic and
psychotic break, and the subject of my delusions was actually much of the
mckenna RAW zen mysticism combo. it was quite instructive in a sense, and
terrifying in another.

i was very relieved to find a competent psychiatrist, who prescribed me
medication and immediately referred me to a "psychoeducation" group, which is
basically a class (not therapy) about handling the illness. we were taught how
both medication and behavioral techniques go hand in hand. that sounds very
similar to the "body and soul" approach you can read about in RAW etc...,
without the crazy. I can assure you that if you wrestle with delusions, the
last you want is more crazy concepts designed to fuck with your mind. After
that psychoeducation, I went to a psychologists and regularly do some CBT,
which is mostly being told as an adult that you should tidy your room and go
play outside a bit, and how to keep a balanced life.

now all these concepts and medications may lose their "magic" touch, but it is
pretty much the same thing isn't it? it just sounds less funky to call someone
a competent psychiatrist than calling him a shaman in touch with the chemicals
of nature, or a competent psychologist a priest who can read your soul and
keep you grounded in the natural world.

one thing i learnt too is that meditation is something that actually triggers
mania and ultimately psychosis in me. this may sound stupid, but if you have
mental issues and especially issues with psychosis or dissociation, don't
start to experiment with substances and mental techniques on yourself without
making sure you having someone watching out for you. and it's definitely
easier to pay someone to do that than put that kind of burden on your family
and friends.

~~~
gbaygon
I don't have experience in the psychiatric field, and you have an interesting
and positive experience in that matter, and i congratulate you for that.

I'm against most of the new age mystic mumbo jumbo, but, my sensation about
the subject is that the main difference is that modern mental science tries
the symptoms, where primitive healers worked with the root causes (raw
symbols) with the help of rituals, to give you an example of a mentioned
author, Jodorowsky sais that "the brain accepts methapors as reality",
accepting this premise you can elaborate, for example, a teatrical scene (or a
ritual) where you face your problem, fight it, and solve it.

What we are missing is people that know how to orchestrate this sessions,
because, as you said is very dangerous to someone with mental issues to
experiment with this kind of things.

