Treatment Options for Schizophrenia

I think it's very difficult to understand a mental illness. It is not like they can see a broken leg or something you know.

Well Immediately when they hear me say I am Schizophrenic, there's fear in their face.

I remember just a few weeks ago, we were in the psychiatrist’s office and he asks the psychiatrist, I just have a couple of notes, a couple of questions. I just want to ask you, is schizophrenia something I’m going to have forever? And there was like this silence and you know, I got the lump in my throat. I knew what the answer was going to be.

He tried to go to school, back to college. And it was very difficult, you know. Just the psychosis, him hearing voices. It was very difficult.

I feel like people who have mental illnesses, I mean they usually don’t know they have a mental illness.

Schizophrenia is probably the most misunderstood mental illness of all.

I’ve had strange thoughts most of my life, but it really didn’t cause a super problem until I started going in and out of reality just before I ended up in a mental hospital. It was more like I went into a dream and I couldn’t wake up from it.

It’s not a mental illness that you can just think yourself out of. Or, if you try harder or pick yourself up by your boot straps, you’re not going to be able to be cured of schizophrenia. It is a lifelong medical problem. I kind of equate it with diabetes. If somebody’s born with insulin dependent diabetes, because their pancreas doesn’t make insulin, they have to take lifelong insulin medication in order to be able to survive and thrive.

I take my medicine orally every day. Twice a day. And I have a little pill pack that lets me know, you know, this is my morning pill pack and this is my evening pill pack. So I know that I’ve taken the medicine.

Anti-psychotic medications that are used to help treat people with schizophrenia have been around for decades. The major side effects of the typical or the conventional anti-psychotic medications involve movement problems. We know that people who take them for a long period of time can develop muscle rigidity and it almost feels like people’s arms and legs and limbs don’t move as freely as they should.

The medication that I remember would make me very very sleepy. More sleepy than the medicine I take now and also, I would have side effects like tremors and stiffness.

The newer atypical anti-psychotic medications, which are also called the second generation anti-psychotic medications, have a much lower level of those kinds of side effects. It’s a bit of art in figuring out how to prescribe the anti-psychotic medications. Particularly the atypical anti-psychotics. Traditionally, the sort of mechanism to choose one over any others, is to really listen to the patient’s story. And to try to empathize with them what their situation is like.

Once I started the regimen, I noticed I was getting better. I realized it was a good thing.

Some of the pharmaceutical companies have made dissolving tablets, so that if the person agrees to open their mouth and let the medication go in their mouth at all, it will dissolve immediately, and they don’t actually have to go through the process of swallowing the medication. One step further, is injectable anti-psychotic medications.

Now I believe that the shot really helps him because he doesn’t have to remember to take the medicine every day or be non-compliant with taking it. So the shot is one a month and it really works for him.

Psychotherapy is getting together with trained therapist, who could be a physician, but it could be a social worker or a professional counselor. Or a family and marriage counselor psychologist. It’s a really focused way of talking with somebody about how to deal with the slings and arrows in their life and how to be able to be OK no matter what’s going on in their environment.

It’s not only helpful it’s critical. In our case, the psychiatrist does listen extremely well to my son’s issues.

He kept me on the medication that I was taking and if I had any issues I could talk with him about it.

Adjunctive therapies are great ways to try to engage patients in a treatment program. So, adjunctive therapies include things like, music therapy and art therapy and horticulture therapy and drama and other things. But, the sort of therapeutic piece of adjunctive therapies is that they force people to have socialization.

I feel that if there is a child that has that creative ability, whether it’s art or drama, music, that they, that needs to be enhanced. This child, he still needs love. My son still needs socialization. He still needs friends.

Having things to do every day, I get out every day, I volunteer. So I think that is really good. If I were to just stay at home all of the time I think that it probably wouldn’t be good for my mental health.

If you don’t consider health and physical well being and socialization and spirituality and all the other things that make a human being a human being, you’re really going to miss the boat on treating mental illnesses. If you have the right psychotherapy and the right medication and the right skills training, that you can actually recover from your mental illness and lead a happy and healthy life.

I was pretty depressed when I came down with it at first, but you can see that your life, it will be different than what you were thinking it was going to be. But, it still can be a good life.