Science Fiction Story: The Misunderstood
In Dr. Adam Steiner’s Psy 321 Introduction to Brain and Behavior course, students are given an assignment of writing a science-based report, either fiction or non-fiction, about a topic in brain science. They are asked to tell an engaging story that uses and explains concepts explored in the course, and ensure that all details are based in scientific evidence, using peer-reviewed sources. If you’d like more details about this assignment, just use the contact form on this website to get in touch and we’ll share more information.
By Abbey Everson
The conjuring elements of my life are the reason I am who I am, today. These peculiar spells got me institutionalized in the Summer of 1973. I was 20 years old; the admission was not my choice. My family was convinced I had gone mad. I was initially diagnosed with Schizophrenia in my 19th year of life, when I had been experiencing illusive hallucinations of geometric shapes, hearing voices, and had an evident change in my behavior. I would not have characterized myself as violent, but I would say that I had intense alterations in my train of thoughts. They were confusing and different, just odd for me. My parents did not believe in the effects of mental illness. My father was more of the deal with it type, and my mom had suffocated with denial that her son had abandoned the normalized mental spectrum, but just for a moment. As so, they sent me to a mental institution because through the eyes my parents, I was nothing more than a clinically insane disappointment. To them, the effects of Schizophrenia did not exist because mental illness was just a disguise for the despicable beings that walk among us.
I won’t bore you with the details of the progression to my admission at the St. Peter’s Mental Institute. It’s irrelevant to this story. What I will tell you is that in my second year at the mental institute, I was brought forth to the board for directors, to which had a proposition for me. For years, the mental hospital had been trying to normalize the manifestation of severe mental illness, and they asked for my help to do just that. A genius of a man, named Dr. Robinson, had created a delusional drug that prompted individuals to suffer with the symptoms of a clinical schizophrenic. Because I was their most progressed patient with Schizophrenia and presumed psychosis, they asked if I believed my parents would be willing to volunteer, as they trusted it would help re-build our relationship. As I told you above, my mother and father were ashamed of my mental state, to which had damaged our relationship from the outside, in. I wasn’t crazy, but they thought I was. However, I had asked them to contact my parents, directly.
To my surprise, my mother agreed. My father did not. In a deviant way, I think the idea of experiencing how I live a day in the life as a schizophrenic brought her solace and back to earth. She arrived at St. Peter on September 19th, 1975. It was her first and last visit. She was greeted at the door by a team of researchers, scientists, and psychiatrists. Escorted to the laboratory, there sat a small glass with a liquid serum inside. She was instructed to drink the serum and stay still, as my mother was locked in this room for four hours after the ingestion. Researchers watched from a one-way mirror. The time ticked on and on, and from what they were able to tell me, my mother did not look mad nor lost. She looked scared.
After the four hours had ceased, my mother was interviewed about what she had seen, felt, and heard. In the interview, my mother had described her experience in ways that ran parallel to my very own; it was reviving. She had told the interviewer she sunk into a subjective dimension, each moment staggering upon the next. Feeling terrified, she was trembling and dissociating from the world; my mother said she could not scream nor cry. She had felt all these feeling of fear but could not act upon the hostility of the peculiar spells that were consuming her. The only thing that had felt present was confusion and panic.
Changing course of the interviews, questions about how she had felt shifted to what she had heard.
“Voices. Many of them.”
They sounded like her own thoughts through voices of a disembodied presence. These voices seemingly presented different attitudes amongst the same subject; contradictions flooding her ears from someone or something that did not exist.
“Leave now. They’re watching you. They’re using you. This experiment is fake,” one would say.
“Stay and gain perspective on your son’s psychosis. It is the only way to mend your relationship,” stated the other.
When the interview had come to an end, the researchers had agreed to let me sit with my mother before she returned home, upon her approval. She agreed. I walked into the interview room, and the eye-contact we had shared aligned with the way she was staring into my soul when she and my father had abandoned me just over two years ago. With tears plummeting from her eyes, she grabbed me tighter than she ever had before and said, “I’m sorry.”
I was released that very next day; my mother appointing herself as my primary supervision. Not my caregiver, as I can live an independent life. The night prior to my release, my team of psychologists and psychiatrists came together to design my treatment plan: the outside of confinement version. I was prescribed an antipsychotic medication, to which was a slightly higher dose of the same medication I had taken daily at the St. Peter’s Mental Institute. I was required to complete a physical examination and laboratory work before they could approve the higher dose. My physicians put an offer of intramuscular formulation on the table, but I felt more comfortable with my newly outpatient medication, as it reduced my acute episodes while I was institutionalized, as well my other symptoms. Although they were not as notable, my other schizophrenic symptoms that I experienced as an in and out-patient were as follows: disorganized thinking, as I tended to speak about things that were unrelated to the topic of conversation, and abnormal motor behavior that led me to act like a child. This heightened dose of medication helped ensure that at least 70% of my D2 receptors in my central nervous are inhabited by occupancies. Because D2 receptors are in the prefrontal cortex, allowing sensory gating functions to occur, weak occupancy of these receptors dysregulates sensory signals in the brain. This is neurologically aggravating.
Most importantly, because I went home with my mother, we had to reestablish the safe environment I once felt about my home, long ago. First step of outpatient care is feeling secure with where you do your treatment. With my father there, it was a difficult transition to feel safe within the walls of the place I grew up in, but we all managed. My antipsychotic effects began to diminish more and more as my father grew to feel almost relieved that his son was back. My cognitive behavioral therapist paid me a visit every Thursday at 11:00 a.m. Her visits rewarded me with a reduction in psychotic symptoms, as my hallucinations had occurred less and less, and I was strengthening my power to ignore the voices. At times, I had the ability to perceive between what was real and what was not real. That version of myself was quite literally a stranger, but I felt relief in knowing that he still was out there.
To me, my parent’s respective transition on accepting my psychosis allowed me to ignore their craving of my personal normalcy. My mother’s participation in the experiment allowed an embodiment of herself in the shoes of my own; she could now understand the life I, amongst many others, live. Most importantly, it allowed her to diminish her thoughts of my illness that the means of society first introduced her to. The public world didn’t acknowledge people like me. It did not understand people like me. I was not dangerous. I was not clinically insane. I was misunderstood.
References
Barrett, R.J. & Jenkins, J.H. (2004). Schizophrenia, culture, and subjectivity: the edge of experience. Cambridge University Press.
Cannon, T.D. & Marder, S.R. (2019). Schizophrenia. The New England Journal of Medicine. https://www-nejm-org.ezproxy.mnsu.edu/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1808803?query=recirc_curatedRelated_article
Mayo Clinic Press. (2020, January 07) Schizophrenia. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizophrenia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354443
Takahashi, Higuchi, M., & Suhara, T. (2006). The Role of Extrastriatal Dopamine D2 Receptors in Schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry (10), 919–928. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.01.022