Truer Than Fiction: A Writer's Story of Schizophrenia

by member Leif Gregersen II

Reading to Escape

I always loved to read and write. My sister taught me how to read before I even started school. One of my most vivid memories of childhood was saving every penny I could find in a bear-shaped bank for the book fair. There would be all kinds of books at the book fair, mostly going for a dollar or a quarter, but a lot going for ten cents. The feeling of opening my bank and discovering that I had saved a mind-blowing $15, all for books, was incredible! I carried this love of reading all through my school years. As a young child, I would often walk about a mile to the public library and pick out books in a series, like the one about a boy who was smarter than all his friends and family members, The Great Brain.

My parents started to notice problematic behavior when I was in elementary school. It was mostly depression, but later it also became mania. There was a lot of odd behavior when I was hospitalized at fourteen, including wearing military uniforms, getting into fights, and shooting holes in a neighbor's windows with a BB gun that my parents didn't yet know about.
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Stress-Induced Symptoms

In my final year of high school, I was under a lot of pressure to finish school, to move out of my parent’s house, and to hold down a job. All that stress came to a head and I slowly began to slip into psychosis. I suffered from anosognosia, which involved the lack of awareness of being psychotic. 

I had some bizarre beliefs, like that the human race was two-tiered, and one race was a slave to the other. Somehow I felt I was being allowed to transition from slave to ruler and that there was a complex set of rules I now had to follow which included hating anyone who was a slave. I also believed people around me could send me encouraging words through telepathy, and that I had some great destiny that I was not yet aware of. Any different nuance or unusual phenomenon seemed to have hidden meaning reinforcing my delusions. 

Close friends first noticed the strange behavior. Then my mom noticed something was amiss. A few incidents of bizarre behavior occurred, where the police were involved. Eventually, I had to be involuntarily hospitalized.  

A New Chapter

I realized after several hospitalizations that in many ways life was much better when I was on medication. What led me to accept my illness was simply a great deal of humiliation, loneliness, and a devastating sense of loss from a relationship I wanted to pursue that was never meant to be. I accepted that I needed to comply with treatment or let my life slip away.

I escaped in books. I would take books out of the public library, or when I had a little money, I would go to a used bookstore. I lived in my dreams—being a combat pilot or a criminal in future society. I learned a great deal from reading, and I started keeping notebooks where I would write book reviews. I longed to write for a living, to be a journalist or a book author. It took nearly twenty years, but eventually I completed writing my first book. 

This led to so many incredible opportunities, like meeting other authors, getting paid for selling books, and teaching writing classes. The biggest thing that happened to me out of all this was that I was eventually hired to teach poetic writing on a permanent basis two days per week at the same psychiatric hospital I had been a patient in. My job was amazing. 

One day we all got together and added to a poem we called “Discharge Day,” where each patient would add two lines about what they would do when they went home from the hospital. I sent the enhanced poem to a magazine. They not only published it, but they also sent me a small check. I used it to buy coffee, soda, and donuts for my students one day. 

Plot Twist

Eventually, I ran into serious problems. My doctor, who I still respect and trust, told me I could go on a new medication that would work better, and be administered less frequently. I never doubted that he acted in my best interest, but I agreed reluctantly. However, over the next few weeks, for some reason, the new medication didn’t do anything to help my psychosis. I started hallucinating, having delusional thoughts, and paranoia again. 

One day I went to teach my class, terrified that I smelled so bad that people wanted to harm me. After the class ended, I took the long bus ride home and then went to my dad’s apartment. I somehow thought I would be safe there. Eventually, I started yelling and screaming, thinking someone had come to harm us. My dad had no choice but to call the police, who were actually pretty good about the whole thing. It didn’t hurt that I often would give mental health presentations to police recruits, and one of the officers who responded had sat through one of my talks. They took me in an ambulance to a psychiatric hospital. I had literally worked in a psychiatric ward in the morning and was confined to another one by nightfall.

This was a short, but very difficult hospital stay. My delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia  would not relent. I kept hearing a running commentary of what I did. I imagined a friend on the ward was putting ground-up glass in my food. I couldn’t stop thinking I was unsanitary and smelled horrible. I even thought that someone had hidden a gun in the bathroom that I was supposed to use to force my way out of the hospital. More than once, a nurse would check on me and find me on the floor, hiding behind my bed thinking someone was coming to shoot me. 

Redeeming Resolutions

After I left the hospital, staying in treatment enabled me to work. I wrote a book in which I included scans of poetry I had written while a patient. I requested and received my clinical notes from before and during my hospital stay. These were invaluable in demonstrating for people what psychosis and its treatment are really like. I added commentary to let my readers know what was going through my head at the time. Then I added essays, poems, glossaries of terms. I even got my dad, sister, and a friend to write an introduction to the book. 

I ended up teaching creative writing at the psychiatric hospital for three years. I  eventually took on a new teaching job with a different organization, but have since returned to the psychiatric hospital to teach again, since I really  loved doing this. 
Life has really gotten good. I have  recently taken trips to Canadian destinations and have a good number of friends. I’m even saving for retirement. I love teaching, and it pays much better than the manual labour or cooking jobs I had while I was struggling. 

The key thing necessary for people with mental illnesses is more supportive housing, like the group home I eventually went to. There should also be much more independent housing for people with mental illnesses who can live on their own. Being housed is proven to reduce emergency response and decrease hospital visits, jail time, court costs, and much more. To leave someone to suffer on the streets untreated and unhoused is inhumane. 

A few weeks ago, I experienced something remarkable. I gave a presentation with a coworker to a high school class. At the end of the class, we asked, as we  always do, that the students fill out an evaluation form we give them at the start of the class. One teen wrote about having delusions and hallucinations and desperately wanting to get help. I passed this on to my boss, who gave her  information and resources so she could hopefully get the help she needs. Just the idea that my work can ease someone’s suffering brings purpose and meaning to the life of a middle-aged writer, teacher and public speaker. 

Leif’s book, Alert and Oriented x3, is available as a PDF on his website, edmontonwriter.com. He also works for The Schizophrenia Society of Alberta and volunteers for CureSZ, an organization dedicated to helping people with schizophrenia and their families.