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