The Dennis Hou Blog

So I recently watched "Limitless" over the weekend and realized how applicable the movie would have been if the protagonist was originally a schizophrenic who found anti-psychotic medication. Of course I will go more into depth about this in the post, but please do not read this if you do not want any spoilers for the movie. I would definitely recommend the movie it was quite an intriguing journey. Image from https://deadline.com/2014/10/limitless-series-from-movie-bradley-cooper-alex-kurtzman-bob-orci-set-atcbs-1201268933/ How Limitless Could be About a Schizophrenic The movie starts off with the protagonist, Eddie Morra, who is struggling in his day to day life as an author. While this part may be a bit of a stretch, it seems that before the start of the movie, he was living a normal life, having both a girlfriend and a contract on a book, though the book hadn't been started in any serious manner. He seems to struggle in a manner that I was like when I was psyc...

I do apologize for not posting for so long. I just have been busy with school and then had my laptop stolen and so on. One of the reasons I've decided to write today is because mentally I think I've reached a sort of milestone in my life. It all started with a Facebook post that I was viewing right before my biochemistry exam around 2 weeks ago. For some back story, I live in Canada, and Bell, one of the largest telecommunications companies, runs a mental health campaign every year. My Facebook friend had talked down about it as an unsentimental marketing ploy, a perspective which I completely understand. However, I pointed out that while Bell may be using this as a marketing ploy, they are the only company out there that even acknowledges mental illness as a real issue that affects people. Oddly, I am not here to talk about Bell, but rather about the fact that that moment was the first moment where I really talked about mental health, and in particular my mental health in ...

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...