A Life of Mystery and Faith

 Yes Andrea, it is right.  In the beginning it may be only coping, or coming to terms with the "new normal."  In fact I believe that when we're afflicted with anything that changes the way we have to deal with life, we have to go through the various stages of grief.  And to be sure God WILL bring healing if we ask though not necessarily cure.  And I did find healing and peace with His help over time.  And learned the difference between healing and cure.  In the early stages after the diagnosis I didn't want to be healed because I had so many other problems that to me were unconnected to my illness but were actually related, and those problems made it very hard for me to find paying work.  And I was afraid that if I were cured I'd have to hit the pavement AND look for a job despite those problems.  Then I learned that schizophrenia has NO known cure, and that all those problems were part of the illness.  At 58 I still can't work because I never know from one day to the next at what time I'll wake up because of the sedatives that pharmaceuticals put in antipsychotics, and by now I've pretty much given up on it.  I would have liked a career in Professional Writing in English.  That's what I trained for.  But it's unlikely now.

 I have to tell you that although I had prodromal symptoms all my life that made me behave oddly, the actual symptoms of the illness only started around the age of 28, so in my case that was in the second year of my first B.A., and I was diagnosed with schizophrenia ten years later.  In the meantime I had a primary diagnosis of psychotic depression that didn't fully account for what I was experiencing.  Back then, depression was considered as the common cold of mental illnesses and expected to last about a year.  But I kept getting depressive episodes because of the voices I was hearing in my head that told me mean things. I would also suffer from insomnia, which is why pharmaceuticals put sedatives in psychiatric medications : to allow people to sleep at night.  Otherwise, you can't function the next day.  So I'd get depressed and be treated with antidepressants for about a year; then the treatment would be phased out--because you have to be weaned off those meds, you can't go off all of a sudden because of the withdrawal symptoms, which can be quite nasty.  And some months later I'd start being depressed again, and depending on the doctor I might or might not be put back on antidepressants.  One doctor I saw on campus during my second B.A. would not put me back on the medication despite my insistence that I was depressed because he thought I was just being anxious.  Then again, he was not a real psychiatrist, just a GP with some training in psychiatry.  He had never completed his residency because he would have had to move to another city to do so, and he was too lazy to do that.  I had to go and see the pastor of the church I was attending for help in finding another doctor who would be willing to put me back on the medication that I needed badly. At that time I would start crying for no obvious reason on city buses. It was this same doctor who later diagnosed the schizophrenia six months after I graduated with my second B.A., the one in which I majored in P.W.E.  Have you ever met people with schizophrenia before?  It's referred to as youth's greatest disabler.