Medication not only way to treat
schizophrenia problems
by Margaret Boule, Oregonian February 28, 2002
02/28/02
A lot of people, describing events in their lives, say, "It was like a scene in a movie." But Candace McElroy goes to the movies and actually sees pieces of her life on the big screen. There she was, a mental hospital roommate of the main character in "Girl, Interrupted." "In the movie she calls me Georgina," says Candace. "She has me going to Vassar."
In real life, Candace went to Smith College. In fact, it was at Smith -- while watching a movie -- that Candace experienced her first psychotic break. Which led, eventually, to her voluntary two-year stay at the McLean Hospital for the mentally ill in Belmont, Mass., in the late 1960s.
Which is the same hospital where John Nash, the brilliant mathematician whose mental collapse is portrayed in the film "A Beautiful Mind," was institutionalized. More than 30 years after Candace left the hospital, it has become the stuff of popular memoirs, histories and Academy Award-nominated films.
Candace's reactions to what she's read or seen run the gamut from "comforted" to "angry." After seeing herself portrayed in "Girl, Interrupted," "I had to stop by the roadside and weep for 10 minutes before I could drive again. It brought back that savage misery, the hopelessness of how I felt when I was crazy. But I also cried with relief that I no longer feel that way, that I now have a life."
Thirty-five years after her diagnosis of schizophrenia, Candace has her master's degree in social work and is a mental health counselor in Portland. "When I tell people I recovered from schizophrenia . . . they say, 'Then you never really had it,' or, 'In the 1960s . . . schizophrenia was a catch-all when people didn't know what to call you.' I tell them I had all the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia . . . and five psychiatrists" from the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital "concurred on my diagnosis."
Candace says she "went crazy" while watching the movie "Asphalt Jungle" in 1963. "I was 19, and I had just been rejected in a relationship, which is often a stressor for late adolescents that pushes them into schizophrenia." The film dealt with rejection, and as Candace watched she remembers feeling "as though a tidal wave were crushing me. . . . I then had to disown all of the pain of my life, and began to soar upwards, like a mighty bird. . . . Outside after the movie the trees looked funny, like I was as big and tall as the trees."
Candace began seeing a psychiatrist at Smith, and, she says, "I just hung on . . . and managed to graduate. . . . Then I really began to fall apart." Her brain "was like a cyclone, with shrapnel in there. Insanity is like having 'Mein Kampf' blaring at you in a prison cell, and the cell turns into an oven whenever you want, need or feel something. . . . My psychiatrist said, 'It's time for McLean.' "
McLean, set on a bucolic campus, was filled with people whose families or insurance companies paid a fortune for their care, whether they were ill or not. "Susanna Kaysen, the author of 'Girl, Interrupted,' and I were on the same ward. . . . She was really just a hippie. I was really just a schizophrenic. She did not need to be there, against her will. I was there voluntarily."
Candace talks authoritatively about changing theories of mental illness, which have led to very different, sometimes harrowing, treatments. In the 1960s schizophrenics were treated "primarily with insight-oriented psychotherapy." Candace was never given medication. Later, "almost overnight experts began theorizing schizophrenia was biologically based, treatable only with medication."
Which is why Candace wants to share her story. "Most schizophrenics benefit from medication," she says, "and cannot benefit from insight-oriented therapy because it's too terrifying." Still, she believes psychotherapy alone helped her recover. In her case, "and in a few other cases, including John Nash, I would suggest they threw out the baby with the bath water" when experts decided schizophrenia could only be treated with drugs. "They've gone too far to the 'it's all nature' side of the pendulum. They need to start factoring back in . . . nurture. And it's a fight, because of the bottom line." Insurance paid for Candace's two-year stay in the hospital. It would not do so today, she's sure.
At McLean, Candace learned her illness was related to her mother's depression after her birth. With the help of the doctor who had worked with John Nash, she "found hope in other people, in relationships." After leaving the hospital she married a "very nurturing" man. They moved to Oregon, where her healing continued.
Today she has renewed her friendship with Susanna Kaysen, she has a career she loves, "and I finally feel like I'm alive." Oh -- and she's written her own book, which she's given to an agent in New York. "It's called 'Mad Girl: A Roommate's Sequel to "Girl, Interrupted," ' about my recovery after McLean."
Candace wants the world to know that for her and many mental patients, there can be good times and ultimately a rewarding life, long after the dramatic moments in the mental hospitals, after the credits have run across the movie screens.
Reach Margie Boule at 503-221-8450, 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201, or marboule@aol.com.
Source: www.oregonlive.com
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