From street to student

Spare change question prompts
reflection on psychiatric medicine

by Mary Phyllis O'Toole

"Can you spare some change?"

I look at the man who is speaking to me. He is some where between forty or fifty years old, is hair wild and unkempt. Unshaven, his clothes ragged and smelling of urine, I wonder if he is an ex-psychiatric patient who is not taking the medicine prescribed by his doctor. I know from personal experience what not taking psychiatric medicine can do to a person.

When I was twenty-one, I was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic when I voluntarily committed myself to a psychiatric hospital. There I was prescribed an anti-depressant and a tranquilizer. I was told by my psychiatrist that I needed this medicine and to keep taking it.

There has been a lot of bad press about psychiatric medicine - from the Rolling Stone's song "Mothers's Little Helper" referring to tranquilizers, to various magazine and newspaper articles about family doctors over prescribing psychiatric medicine.

My family and friends criticized me for taking psychiatric medicine. However, for several years I did, and successfully completed a Bachelor's degree in Economics from UBC.

Then, one day, shortly after releasing myself from the psychiatric ward at Vancouver Hospital and after having an argument with my late sister about my medicine, I stopped taking it. The results were disastrous. I became too bewildered and confused to realize I was entitled to unemployment insurance. I hallucinated, thinking I was seeing spaceships. I became convinced the people in my hometown, Prince Rupert, were from another planet where I had billions of dollars in a bank. I thought nothing of begging money for food and cigarettes, while my sister paid my rent.

My clothes were ragged; I reeked of urine, which I did not think other people could smell. I had a hormonal imbalance from a malfunction in my adrenaline glands, which caused me to grow a small goatee.

Thinking that people on another planet had put a series of special mirrors around my face, I didn't think other people could see my beard.

After a few months, my sister realized that I wasn't collecting unemployment insurance or welfare and filed a UI claim for me. I stopped begging on the streets. However, I continued to not take my medicine and remained insane. Tow years later, I was involuntarily committed to Royal Columbia Hospital in New Westminster where I became sane when put back on my psychiatric medicine.

Today I am part-time student of accounting and live a somewhat normal life. Every time I see an unkempt beggar. I wonder if they are mentally ill and off their psychiatric drugs. And I wonder if the bad press about psychiatric medicine has led them to go off their medicine and whether or not this has contributed to such a downfall.