Prisoners of their own worlds

Families need to be aware of schizophrenia as symptoms usually develop in teens

An article published in the May 27th edition of The Chronicle Herald:

By Allison Jones, The Canadian Press

Nigel Bart first had an inkling that something was different about him when on a trip to B.C. after high school graduation he tried to summon the wind.

His family had entered a sailboat race, but there was no wind that day.

"An urge in me thought that maybe if I prayed hard enough I could somehow make the wind blow and make our sailboat win the race," he says.

"So I closed my eyes and I started gesturing with my hands, kind of like making the wind blow, like conducting an orchestra. That was the first clue."

Bart, now 33 and working in Winnipeg, didn’t know anything about schizophrenia at the time. But looking back on events like this one about 15 years ago, there were subtle clues pointing to the onset of mental illness.

"Before a person has what we call a psychosis . . . people are going to have preliminary signs," says Chris Summerville, the interim CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada.

Some of the signs include: change in behaviour, change in sleep patterns, irritability, avoiding social activities, becoming reclusive, difficulty with studies and a change in appearance or hygiene.

"When a person does get a diagnosis of psychosis and schizophrenia, then people often say, ‘Well this is what I did see and I just thought it was adolescence and they were just going through a stressful time.’ "

But the teen years are exactly when the symptoms of schizophrenia can start to show up.

"It has often been called youth’s greatest disabler because with schizophrenia, along with all other major mental illnesses, its primary onset is during adolescence," Summerville says.

He says parents and people who work with adolescents should look for a cluster of symptoms over a period of time — not just somebody having a bad weekend.

Tammy Lambert, 25, started experiencing symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder, which has components of both schizophrenia and mood disorders, when she was 14.

During manic highs she gets a sense of "heaven on Earth" and of prophecies. During periods of depression, a delusion of being under surveillance combines with the depression to make her feel like she’s a bad person and people are conspiring to kill her.

"One time I had a friend over and we were watching television and I got a message from the television," Lambert says, remembering one of her first episodes when she was about 15 years old.

"I said to him, ‘Can you please get out. I don’t want you here right now.’ I thought that he was part of a conspiracy and the message on the television was telling me he was part of the conspiracy. I kicked him out and then I barricaded my doors."

Lambert calls the onset of her symptoms "a gradual process" that culminated in several sleepless nights in a row, a foggy feeling, distorted images in her mind and messages from the television and newspaper.

That’s when she sought help and eventually got her diagnosis, which she says was partly a relief.

"It made me feel good because I actually finally understood what was happening to my mind," she says.

"But then it made me feel bad because nobody wants to accept the fact that they have a mental illness. It’s very stigmatizing. Especially for somebody in high school."

For Bart, it was the time just after high school, when he started studying science at the University of Winnipeg, that his symptoms really started to appear.

"I knew I was different from people," he says.

He began to repress natural urges: hunger, thirst, urination and even sexual urges. He started looking for signs from God or signals in people’s coughs or subtle gestures.

"It was like I was on automatic override," he says.

"I wasn’t making any deliberate conscious movement. I was acting basically all out of what I believed was some kind of spiritual intuition."

Bart would get on the bus in the morning and find himself still riding the bus late into the night after following signals all day.

Bart also felt relieved at hearing a diagnosis, finally "an answer to all of this madness," he says. After that came what he calls his "convalescence period," when he got much-needed support from treatment and his family.

He got a degree in fine arts and now works at Art Beat Studio, which incorporates art with a mental health recovery program.

Lambert is now working toward a bachelor of arts degree at the University of Manitoba and hopes to become an occupational therapist. She also does presentations now on her experiences.

"There really does have to be more education, more understanding of what mental illnesses are and what they entail," she says.

"There is still tons of discrimination."

Up to 70 per cent of people with a mental illness recover, says Summerville, in that they learn how to manage their illness and live rich, full lives.

The major hurdle that still must be overcome is the stigma attached to schizophrenia and mental illness, he says.

"Families need to be just as literate . . . about mental health and mental illness as they are about physical health and physical illness."

Photograph of Nigel Bart by John Woods, The Canadian Press.