A Troubled Mind
What it's really like to live with schizophrenia
When Debra Lunceford-Mikolajczyk saw A Beautiful Mind, she delighted in how the hallucinations of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash seemed so real. "Everyone feels the psychosis with him. It was so cool."
And she knows psychosis. On April Fools' Day 1977, the 22-year-old blond with the perfect pageboy was driving to Kresge's to buy bobby pins when her car radio started sending her secret messages. "Tell us, what would you do if you trapped someone?" "I thought someone was playing a joke on me," she recalls. Terrified, she played along. Soon she was up at 5 a.m., deciphering messages in songs like "Fly Like an Eagle." When she tried to cut off the voices by changing stations, the voices would change, too. Looking back, she says: "I knew something was wrong with how I processed information. I knew I was not a well girl."
Indeed. She ended up hospitalized for five weeks. When she got out, she was "an unwed mother with a 2-year-old, basically insane." Lunceford-Mikolajczyk is one of the more than 2 million Americans with schizophrenia. It is the most dreadful of all mental illnesses, striking its victims in their teens and 20s and devastating their minds. The disease has put Mark Hidalgo's life on hold. "My plan is to get a car, get a part-time job, get a girlfriend, go out to dinner, go to the movies, and get married," he says. Instead, the 42-year-old son of a Costa Rican diplomat lives with his mother and spends his days at Liberties Inc., a support center for people with mental illnesses in a strip mall in suburban Detroit. Monthly shots of Haldol, an antipsychotic drug, subdue the paranoia and sleeplessness that tormented him. But anxiety attacks make it impossible for him to drive or work. "It's terrible," Hidalgo says. "You feel like everyone's staring at you, and you can't keep your mind on one thing."
Mild manners. Hidalgo and Lunceford-Mikolajczyk hardly fit the common image of a schizophrenic as a grimy street person screaming about space aliens. Impeccably groomed and articulate, they'd pass muster in any office. The fact that their illness--and their suffering--are invisible to the casual acquaintance further reinforces the public perception of schizophrenics as deranged bums. But confusion has long surrounded this disease.
Schizophrenia has existed for thousands of years but until quite recently was considered the product of evil spirits, to be exorcised with torture. It wasn't until the late 19th century that physicians realized that its perplexing symptoms were all part of the same disease. Those include "positive" symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations; "negative" symptoms, which include lethargy and lack of emotion; and cognitive impairments that lead to the loss of learning, memory, and decision making. About 20 percent of people with schizophrenia recover without lasting ill effects. But one in 10 commits suicide. The rest range from people who are severely disabled to those who function fairly well between episodes.
Debbie Lunceford-Mikolajczyk is one of the latter. After her first episode, she knew only that she couldn't bear the thought of losing her son. "It was a challenge between my love for him and my delusions. I couldn't do both. I had to hang on to my son." Antipsychotic medication banished the delusions; good psychotherapists helped, too, as did her belief in God and a sense that there was always a part of her brain that she could trust. When things were good, she juggled part-time waitressing jobs. When things were bad, she knew to run to her mother and sisters, who let her pace for hours, muttering. She now works full time as the executive director of Liberties and has been hospitalized only once since she took the job 12 years ago. "People said, it's going to upset you, it's going to make the symptoms worse," she says. "The exact opposite has happened." She married seven years ago and counts her blessings. "Now I'm a grandma. A lot of the people here will never have that experience."
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