But “medication compliance” may be iffy for other reasons as well. Some take medication when they’re scared and psychotic, then stop it once they feel better, only to get sick again. This sets up a destructive cycle into which many have little insight. Other people with schizophrenia don’t believe their difficulties constitute an illness. If the CIA and FBI control me through a microchip implanted in my tooth, how will any pill solve that?
If I hear invisible voices that sound real, and think bizarre thoughts that feel true, how indeed is medication even relevant? The solution is to get rid of the radio in the wall or go to the Middle East, find 22 linguists, and translate Gray Crinkled Paper.
I asked my dentist about my tooth. For a moment, he looked taken aback, but he regained his composure and answered with something like, “I understand you believe there’s a microchip in your tooth. I don’t think that’s possible. I think it’s a symptom of your illness. But I’ll take a look if it will make you feel better.” The technician, on the other hand, passed over the tray of probes then backed a safe distance away. Stigma.
Did you know that stigma originally meant the brand from a hot iron that they’d burn into a wrongdoer’s face as a mark of shame? That’s why many young people won’t take medication. Because it sets them off from their peers. It brands them as different. But all of us with schizophrenia are stigmatized when people mock “mental patients” or “schizos” or imply that we’re axe-murderers just waiting to happen.
Ignorance plays a big role in stigma. Exactly one hundred years ago, Clifford Beers wrote of being locked in hospital rooms and treated with such cruelty he considered it torture. Because of this experience, he went on to start the mental health movement. Much has changed, but much remains to be done.
Beers was wrestled into strait-jackets. I’ve been kept, sometimes for days, in four-point restraints. Do you know what it’s like to be grabbed by a goon squad of who knows how many people, slammed onto a bed and forcibly shackled to it, hand and foot, at times even your chest restrained so that you can barely breathe? If that sounds awful, it is. It is.
Beers later wrote: “In every institution where the discredited principles of ‘Restraint’ are used or tolerated the very atmosphere is brutalizing...[In such places] the gentler or more humane methods of persuasion will naturally be forgotten or deliberately abandoned.”
I suspect in fact that it’s mostly ignorance of better ways to handle things rather than a shortage of staff that has many hospitals still using restraints in this day and age. The gentler modes of persuasion, as Beers suggested, have indeed been forgotten.
