The Dennis Hou Blog

I guess it was due time for me to make a post about what it is like in a psychiatric unit. For inspiration, I ended up watching a bunch of movies and TV shows for research, which was much easier than what I did for some of my other posts—those involved reading research papers, etc. I do want to start off talking about what I thought a psychiatric ward was like when I was a kid, long before I started experiencing any schizophrenic symptoms. And this story starts off with a TV show called “SpongeBob SquarePants”. The Episode of SpongeBob: “Doing Time” – Season 3, Episode 5 I picked this particular scene of SpongeBob, because when I was 10 years old this image was what I pictured a psychiatric unit to be like. Even to this day, I can still picture this scene—that is how I knew where to look for it online. The backstory is essentially SpongeBob being SpongeBob, messing up during a driving test and causing plenty of vandalism before crashing into a tanker truck carrying ...

As a schizophrenic, taking medication is an important part of my daily life. If I were to stop taking them, bad things could happen overtime. I guess an issue is that not enough is known about schizophrenia to know how long it would take for the symptoms to come back. Actually, I am fairly confident that psychiatrist have no set time for how long it takes for a patient to feel better when being first put on anti-psychotics. So how would they know how long it would take for one to relapse? The fact is that everyone reacts differently to the same medication—I’m assuming there are no concrete universal indicator. And also from experience, I know that the way I behave on the outside is not the same as how I am feeling internally—yet what I portray on the outside is how I am diagnosed. I guess in some regards it is good there are many different anti psychotics out there, as it means if one medication doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world for you. Again as I had mentioned in the ...

I think I made a footnote in a previous post about the dangers of clozapine, but I kind of want to go into it more here. Personally clozapine had saved my life, by truly giving me a life worth living. At my worst, the paranoia and hallucinations made me isolate myself, and the loneliness was in my opinion the worst feeling of all. Clozapine is the only anti-psychotic that I respond to, and it helped me live a normal life. I remember that it took about a year in out and of institutions before I was finally put on clozapine at all. It is a wonder how such an effective drug has the reputation of a last resort drug. It was delayed to the point that by the time my psychiatrist tried to start me on clozapine, I was so unwell my hallucinations told me not to take it. The voices told me they were dangerous. And thus when my psychiatrist told me either to take it or go to a long term facility, I chose the long term facility. There the psychiatrist didn’t know my condition, so I was put o...

When I was stuck in a long-term psychiatric unit at my rock bottom, my psychiatrist made me do Electroconvulsive Therapy. It is a form of “shock therapy”; where seizures are induced through light electric currents that “reset my brain”, according to what she said at the time. For me, it was to be done three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for ten sessions.   Luckily, my psychiatrist felt four sessions was enough, before putting me on medication. The fact it was only four treatments made me relieved, because for some reason it was one of the scariest things I had to do in my life. The fact that I was lying in a bed waiting to be knocked out just freaked me out. But during my stay there, I read a bulletin about older treatments for schizophrenia. For my own interests, I decided to do some research and present it to you here. These forms of treatments occurred over the course of the 20 th century, the popularization of medications. Looking back, some of these metho...

There is no surprise that I am a preacher of medication. As a schizophrenic, talk therapy, CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy), and other forms of treatment don’t really help with symptoms of schizophrenia. To get away from the debilitating combination of hallucinations and delusions, medication is a must take. Personally, for me, I had been put on trial for many different antipsychotics during my year and a half stint being in and out of the psychiatric unit. I remember the first medication I was on, Risperdal (risperidone). The psychiatrist swapped it with Seroquel (quetiapine), due to my complaints of a swollen tongue. From then, I went from Abilify (aripiprazole), to Zeldox (ziprasidone), until finally I was put on Clozaril (clozapine), known to be the most powerful antipsychotic. After being put on Clozaril, my symptoms began to go away (1). All this was over the course of a year and a half. It should be noted that I am still taking Clozaril to this day and would not stop in f...

The symptom that I find the most troubling about schizophrenia is delusions. Before I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I didn’t know what a delusion was, and thus I had this stigma that schizophrenics had to be crazy off the bat. My logic was that just because I would hear voices, doesn’t mean that I had to listen to them. If they were voices, fake voices, then couldn’t I tell? Of course, at that time I did not know how debilitating schizophrenia is due these delusions. The fact is that delusions essentially make it impossible for a schizophrenic to function in society. The craziest part about delusions is that you will easily believe something you had already perceived as false. Commonly, when I was delusional, I was still convinced that the voices I was hearing at the time had to be real regardless, while I already knew I was a schizophrenic. They just seemed too convincing to me. And they would give me excuses, such as saying that the medication that I was already on already ...

As a current University of Toronto undergraduate student, I have dealt with overwhelming amounts of stress during the school year. I am going into my fourth year of studies, and I do have to say that I learned a lot, educationally, in my three years here. I guess the gist of the post is that I understand why most people get schizophrenia between 18-25 years of age, due to these stressors. I have had schizophrenia since I was 15, but that is a story for another day. University is just a stressful time for everyone. I remember during my freshman year I procrastinated for a month in the beginning of the year and from then a domino effect sort of happened. By the end of the year I was so sleep deprived, and began drinking coffee more than once daily just for the caffeine – I missed the days I drank coffee as an enjoyable beverage. But for me, as a schizophrenic, as long as I take my medications, I can function relatively well in society. Now there are things that I do that I am ...

Lately I’ve been feeling tired, have a lack of appetite, and am nauseous all the time, but my physician said physically I was fine. Thus the general consensus is that my anti-psychotic medication, clozapine, is causing these side effects. After blood work and everything came out normal, this seems to be what is expected. I guess this post is about the fact that I’m at the point of taking my anti-psychotic medication that those scary side effects of long term antipsychotic usage (in my case, clozapine) are starting to show up. I remember when I first started taking clozapine, I knew that at some point I would get many of the serious physical side effects, but I thought it wouldn’t happen until my late 40s-early 50s. These include excessive weight gain, type II diabetes, and epilepsy. Granted, being tired and nauseous all the time is not the worst ailment in the world. However, now it means I wonder how soon I will start running into those scary things mentioned earlier. I ...

I understand that stigma is a tricky thing to really discuss. From my personal experiences, I would have to say that stigma was one of the reasons I was hospitalized in such a bad state. I had called the police because I believed that my parents wanted to kill me. I had started hearing voices and talking with them many months prior, but I was so scared of living in a mental institution for the rest of my life that assumed they had to be real; that I was psychic. Of course now I know that with daily medication, permanent institutionalization is not necessary. Thus, I understand stigma is a dangerous thing that can make a mentally ill person refuse treatment, even though it could potentially change their lives for the better. But this isn't a post of battling stigma, or trying to overcome, for I've seen how difficult it can be. Rather this is an anecdote of how ridiculous stigma can become at times. I'm not sure what the other schizophrenics will think, but I found this mov...

I guess I made this blog because I realized that I need to accept fully accept the fact that I have schizophrenia. I do take the required medications daily, but it's more out of fear of what I will become if I stop taking them. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was around the age of 15 and had to be hospitalized for about a year and a half. I ended up having to go through many different medications through this process, until the anti-psychotic Clozaril saved my life. During my hospitalization, I felt extremely lonely even around other patients, and was sometimes isolated from others due to my erratic behaviour. While this was many, many years ago, I still push it to the back of my mind. I remember having an outpatient ACTT team that helped delivery my medication and schedule appointments with my psychiatrist, and I did not treat them well. I was often at school when they delivered it, and I was always late to my psychiatry meetings. I felt that I did this because treat...