069 Living with Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar, and Anxiety: Interviewing Leif Gregersen

This episode interviews Leif who discusses his life navigating the complexities of living with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. Leif opens up about the challenges he’s faced, the lessons he’s learned, and the resilience it takes to find balance in a world that often misunderstands mental health.

Through vulnerability and hope, Leif shares how he has turned struggles into strength, offering insight and inspiration for anyone impacted by mental health challenges. Tune in to hear his story of perseverance, growth, and finding peace in the chaos.

👉 Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more transformative conversations on mental health and overcoming adversity!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Later on in high school, I sort of found this miracle that would lift me out of my depressions and make me have a good time every time. It was called alcohol. And I started hearing voices telling me different things.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hi guys, Jenica here from Multispective. I'm here to share with you a new episode where I interview Leif Gregersen. He talks about life with schizoaffective disorder, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. He was diagnosed with all three of them. All of them were very debilitating for his life. And he talks about sort of the ways that it transitioned into his life, the ways it appeared in his life, the ways he managed it, the medication he took, the kinds of treatments that he had, and being in and out of different hospitals and hospitalizations. If there's anything that you would like going forward, any episodes or any kind of topics you guys would like us to cover, do let us know and we'll do the research for you to make sure that you continue to support us and we can continue to help you. Enjoy the episode. Leif, welcome to Multispective. I'm so excited to have you here.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Thanks. I'm excited to be here. This sounds like a great podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Thank you. Yeah. We generally feature all kinds of stories and we have had one story on air that kind of runs along a similar theme, but not enough. I feel like every story is very unique. And so I think our listeners will have a lot that they can take away from this, especially when it comes to this topic of mental health. So Leif, why don't you tell us sort of like where it all begins for you and where are you from?

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Well, first of all, I'm from a town called St. Albert, which is on the outskirts of Edmonton. Edmonton is probably most well known for two things, Wayne Gretzky and West Edmonton Mall. I currently live in Edmonton. I lived in Vancouver for a couple of years. Growing up in St. Albert was kind of ideal. It was a great place to be a kid, very safe place. It did get very cold in the winters and there was a lot of mosquitoes in the summer but eventually you get used to that the problem I really had was growing up somewhere in elementary school I started to show signs of depression and it was really difficult for me to get through and I did make a lot of friends I did a lot of fun things in elementary school like playing sports and I was one of the first things they did when I got into grade one was they put me into all sorts of specialized testing and And they found that I was eligible for a special program called Enrichment, where they take some of the better students and take them out of their classes when it's boring and teach them new things and critical thinking skills and all that kind of stuff. So in a lot of ways, I had a wonderful time, but it was hard on my dad. It was hard on my family. I don't know how far to go to answer

SPEAKER_00 3:04

your question. I just wanted to ask, what did depression look like for you as an elementary school student? How did your parents or how did people even detect this?

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Well, you know, I have actually some photographs. This is a picture of me sort of before the depression happened.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

You can

SPEAKER_02 3:22

see I'm quite a happy kid. You know, my hair is brushed, all that sort of stuff. I kind of looked like I really liked what was going on in my life. And then there's another picture from a couple of years later. And you can see a lot more kind of shyness. I didn't brush my hair. I wouldn't smile. I would keep my my shirt buttoned up to the top. I was very, very nervous and shy about that sort of thing. And so that's sort of what it looked like physically. But what it felt like was it sort of felt like I didn't, I didn't like myself and I didn't think anybody liked me or could be capable of liking me. I think that had a lot to do with fights I'd have with my dad, problems I'd have at school and things like that. And I felt, I felt very isolated even within a family and a school system. And although My relationship with my mom was wonderful. A lot of that was due to the fact that she also had a mental illness. She suffered from depression as well, and so we were kind of kindred spirits or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, a lot of things changed when I got out of elementary school. I wasn't treated special anymore, and there wasn't as much sports programs and things I liked doing. Yeah, it was quite difficult for the first little while.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Would

SPEAKER_00 4:44

you say that for you, the depression was purely genetic, or would you say that there were environmental factors as well to it?

SPEAKER_02 4:52

That's hard to say. I certainly did have the genetic predisposition. I don't know. Sometimes I used to blame my problems on my dad's harsh behavior sometimes, but I don't know if that's really accurate. All I know is... You know, I would just live in depression. Later on in high school, I sort of found this miracle that would lift me out of my depressions and make me have a good time every time. It was called alcohol. I'm sure you've heard of it. And it would lift me out of my depression, but I would go into kind of a mania. And people did not want to be around me when I had been drinking. And, you know, I'd be animated and talking a mile a minute and stuff and doing dares and things.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

One... One would confuse it with just being a typical teenager, like just a teenager that is beginning to enter the world of alcohol and is just going a little crazy, like a wild teen. But for you, it was pretty crystal clear that it was something bigger than just regular teenage rebellion.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

Yeah, well, it didn't have much to do with rebellion because my parents were okay with me drinking and smoking cigarettes, funny enough. The drinking was kind of just something I wanted to do to be a cool kid. And then there were periods when I didn't have many friends in high school. And I would be constantly thinking about drinking because, you know, those were the times when I had the good memories. Those were the times when I would loosen up and stuff like that. But I eventually did actually get into a program and successfully quit drinking now for, I think it's just over 10 or 12 years. But at It's been quite a long time.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Congratulations. Thank you. So, yeah. So you mentioned that, you know, there was a history of depression with your mother. You said your dad was pretty harsh. So the home environment is not the most stable for you. You're kind of like you've got a role model, someone that you love so dearly and you get along really well with that is displaying signs of depression. That's your role model. And also you have someone else that's not really helping the situation. They're kind of perpetuating that a little bit more with their harsh behavior so it's also kind of making sense a little bit why that depression was kind of festering I guess for you what happens next like how does this kind of turn

SPEAKER_02 7:26

well just to talk about junior high a bit there was one really good thing that happened was my parents kind of forced me to go into air cadets and I didn't really want to go but once I got there and saw what it was like they couldn't stop me from going they had this band that played military music They had a flag party that had real rifles guarding them, and everybody wore uniforms, and you could earn your way up in rank to sergeant and corporal and teach other people stuff. It just seemed so cool, and on top of the fact that there was almost no adult supervision. I mean, this was all just stuff people my age were doing, and I threw myself into it. But one of the big problems that happened was that after the year ended I went to a summer camp for basic training. And when I came back after two weeks, I was way more gung-ho than I had ever been and totally military-minded. And I would wear combat uniforms to school, and I would carry jackknives and matches and things. And these were things that really scared my parents because they thought I was going to get into some horrible trouble and not be able to get out of it. And something did happen, actually, was I bought a BB gun without my parents. And I thought I was just playing a joke on them. I would shoot at my neighbor's windows and then kind of hide. And I thought it would make a noise and hit the window and they'd be mad, but they couldn't see anything and they didn't know what was going on. But one day a cop showed up at my door and I didn't know then, but I found out years later that I had done$6,000 worth of damage to their house. And sometimes I wonder why I wasn't sent to a juvenile detention hall or something like that. But what my parents did decide at that point was that I needed to see a psychiatrist. And then things sort of started to change.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So it sounds like for you, when you get into these, I don't even know if you would call this mania, but when you get into something, an activity, a task, you get really, really, really into it. So you've got kind of a bit of an extreme personality in a sense.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things I liked to do at the time was to make airplane models and I would just sit for hours trying to make them perfect and everything. I'd have these little toy soldiers and I would paint them so intricately that I actually would give them a mustache and stuff like that. It was a good hobby for me but I probably breathed in too much glue at some point.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Fair enough. So all of this is happening. All of this is happening. Your parents start to get really worried about you and your behaviors. They send you to see a psychiatrist. What happens then?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Well, you know, I didn't know a lot about what a psychiatrist was. Like, you probably know that a psychiatrist is a fully qualified medical doctor who's taken years of specializing in the human brain. I just thought he was another authority figure trying to get me into trouble. I went to see him in his office and he asked me a whole bunch of questions. Some of them were pretty embarrassing, but I answered them. And at the end, he said he wanted me me to come into the hospital for a week and so I did and it was horrible. I hated it. I would just stay in my room until somebody came and got me or something or pretend I was asleep when the nurses came to check on me so the records would be messed up with what time I had been sleeping. I just hated it. I rebelled against all of it and the one week stay ended up being a two week stay and when I left and went back to school and cadets and stuff I had really lost a lot of faith in everything I had been doing and I lost faith in myself and I thought people were labeling me as crazy and I ended up not doing that well in academics in the following year and I also ended up dropping out of cadets in the following year. Something I regret because there are a lot more opportunities I could have taken advantage of with them.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Were you diagnosed with

SPEAKER_02 11:38

anything at that point? illness, I was told almost nothing. Not even my diagnosis. And they prescribed me some pills. And I wanted to know what they were and what they did and stuff. And they just said, oh, it'll help smooth out your highs and lows. And I didn't even understand what highs and lows they were talking about. Shortly after leaving the hospital, I stopped taking the meds. And my dad asked me about it. And he said, you know, why aren't you taking them? And I said, well, the doctor said it'll smooth out my highs and lows. And I really felt Yeah. Fair point.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

like back in the day, it was just not understood as well. Whereas now the system is quite different in that sense that like, you know, as the numbers have grown, as more people are being diagnosed with it, as people are understanding it better, they're kind of like, you know, putting it more, putting more emphasis on like, you know, educating individuals that might have it.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

There is a lot more of it going on. I wouldn't really say there was enough of it going on. Some of the things that I think are a bit unfortunate is Well, in Canada, they have this thing, Bell Canada Let's Talk Day. Bell Canada is our phone company. If you send a text on Bell Canada Day, 5 cents or 15 cents goes to mental health research or something. But kind of the problem with some of these big campaigns is they only address some of the more popular mental illnesses like depression and anxiety and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

And

SPEAKER_02 14:01

they don't get a lot into the really chronic severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder But there is more understanding and things that have improved. One thing I did want to mention was that I didn't really have any real lasting recovery until I was placed in a group home. And in the group home, all of a sudden, for the first time in my adult life, I moved there when I was about 29. But also for the first time, I was getting regular meals, regular sleep, regular medication. Everybody else in the group home either had a mental illness or knew how to deal with one. And so there was very little stigma. And sort of in that micro community, I really kind of thrived. And that's when I started writing my books and publishing them and all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

But yeah, so Lee, so you mentioned that you... You were diagnosed, the first time when you were diagnosed with bipolar, they'd given you medication. What kind of effects were those, what meds were they and how did it affect you? I know you mentioned that you stopped at some point, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Yeah, I couldn't tell you what they were named, but all I remember is it was like I had a couple, taking the medication was like having a couple of shots of champagne or something like that. It kind of left this sort of bubbly, bubbly giddiness. It's hard to describe, but. But I didn't like what it did for me, basically.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Yeah. And I just wanted to ask, for you, at what point did you start to accept that this was an issue or that this was something that you had that needed to be treated?

SPEAKER_02 15:41

Yeah. Well, I sort of have to explain a couple of things that happened in my second year of grade 12. That's when I was first admitted as an adult patient. Right. It started out, I was working in a gas station. I was short of credits because I had failed some courses in grade 10. And so I went back to school for a second year of grade 12. Halfway through, a very close friend died by suicide. And I was absolutely devastated by it. And then the whole time I was arguing with my dad, I was getting closer to 18 and he wanted me out of the house. And so we were fighting a lot. And then I also lost my job at the gas station and got a job on the night shift at a grocery store. And so So I was going to school all night. I was working all night. I was going to school all day. I was fighting with my dad. And I was dealing with the loss of a friend. And somehow, slowly, I just started to slip away from reality. And I started getting some little strange ideas, which we call delusions. I wasn't hallucinating yet, but I would at a later point. The delusion I had was basically that here I have all these problems. and i can solve them if i'm just the most perfect student the most perfect son the most perfect worker and all these things and i i would push myself to do impossible things like study all night going to school after work and and uh you know i i tried and failed to be perfect and uh and then it just got more and more difficult from there and i started hearing voices telling me different things that were things like the royal family wanted to save me from my mental illness so Or I don't know, someone had gotten me a job as a professor at the university or something because I was so smart or just a lot of strange delusions. And these progressed. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

I just want to go back a little bit more to the condition, right? So can you just tell our listeners what exactly is it called and explain to our listeners what does it mean? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

So I have an illness known as schizoaffective disorder with anxiety. And that means I have symptoms of schizophrenia, symptoms of bipolar disorder, and also I deal with a lot of anxiety. One of the amazing things about the anxiety is the more I sort of push my limits with anxiety, the more comfortable I get talking to people and doing things. I owe a lot to an organization called Toastmasters, and they teach public speaking and they encourage you to develop your leadership and public speaking skills. And they They've helped my anxiety a great deal, along with other things I've been dealing with. But to go back, the bipolar, there's different types of bipolar, but basically it just means you go to highs and lows. Some people can rapidly cycle. Some people can go more slowly. And schizophrenia, schizophrenia is mostly characterized by psychosis. That's when you're having hallucinations and delusions and paranoia. And schizophrenia actually also has, those are the symptoms. that add something to a person's characteristics. But schizophrenia also has things that are taken away. And people with schizophrenia often lose ambition. They lose desire to interact with their community. Some of them have difficulties with hygiene. And it's a really debilitating disease, probably much more so than most people think.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

And as far as I know, for a schizophrenia can be very different for different people as well. Some experience auditory hallucinations, some visual, some delusions, and they can all vary person to person, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Yeah, definitely. And the type of medication used can vary too.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Right. Also, yeah. So what was it for you then? What were you experiencing most of the time? You mentioned the auditory and also the visual hallucinations, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:36

Well, the time I was in psychosis was, at least where I lived, was kind of short. But the time of me having psychosis while in the hospital was kind of longer. In my early admissions to the hospital, I tried most to keep to myself but sometimes I would you know I just the one thing I most remember was I was on this locked ward and it was a horrible place and there was thick greasy smoke lining the walls because at the time they allowed smoking in the day room or whatever they called it and I was sitting next to a friend and we were both just just finishing high school and he was drawing something and I was watching this TV program I had no interest in and he just said to me, do you like to draw? And I thought about it for a while. Yeah, I do like to draw. I'm no good at it, but I like to draw. So he handed me this picture of a tiger and some blank paper and he says, just try and draw this. Just try and copy it, whatever. And so I sat down and I started doing it. And after like 10 or 15 minutes or so, I started really kind of enjoying it and trying to make the right angles and everything. And while I was doing this, my friend said the most profound thing I'd ever heard. He said, you see, now that we're doing this, it's no longer a mental hospital. And that's just a small example of how important people like rec therapists and occupational therapists can be. Because when I was in the hospital, I had the same potential I always did. I just had to adjust for the idea that I needed medications and treatment and consulting with a psychiatrist. But I still could have done probably most of what I wanted to do with my life. But I, you know, I just kind of needed somebody to encourage me and help me help me to not want to give up and

SPEAKER_00 22:29

things like that. loved and that is the thing that can help so many people come out of so many different states is when they really genuinely believe that someone is there on their corner yeah um so can you can you just like tell me did it ever at any point for you become borderline danger dangerous um Did you ever act on any of these thoughts that you were having, or did you ever get violent with anyone in these times?

SPEAKER_02 23:21

There was a fair bit of violence in my life, just as a general rule. When I was in air cadets, we wouldn't be enemies or anything, but we'd often wrestle each other or fight each other in different ways to just improve our skills and all that. But there was a lot of violence at home, my dad being a drinker and all that stuff. I just there was this one thing that happened my dad said oh that never happened that never existed and then I remind him of the time he broke his finger on me and I was sitting at the kitchen table and I said something that he didn't like and he walked up to me and he said now you listen here you little and he's about to swear at me and poke me really hard but his finger went and then I heard a snap and he broke his finger on my shoulder and so I like to Well, he's passed away and I loved him dearly. And I kind of slipped and I swore at her. And this guy came rushing out and slammed me down to the ground. And they gave me this injection of whatever a vile substance they did to patients back then. And then they threw me in the isolation room. And this was a common occurrence. I mean, there was a lot of abuses going on. I couldn't talk about it now. But one of the interesting things is for some people, three years I actually taught in that same hospital creative writing and I developed another course for them in in sort of current events stuff because a lot of a lot of patients don't get to read the paper or they don't get to watch the news or they don't know what's going on in the outside world so I did the creative writing and then I also did the current events and yes it's not it's not a totally bad place and and they do help a lot of people uh but violence is is a problem and i don't know if it's still a problem but i would assume

SPEAKER_00 25:48

that's really sad that it's like they're kind of treated like prisoners in a sense it's like instead of looking at them as individuals that are really struggling and trying to get through you know the the day that it's kind of like cause for punishment like they should be punished for you know for this

SPEAKER_02 26:04

yeah it was kind of interesting in my uh in my creative writing class i i remembered what it was like to be in there about how all you think about is when you're going to get out of there. And so I had my students each write two lines of a poem that we called Discharge Day. And so they would write two rhyming lines about, you know, what they would do. And I sent it off to a magazine and they published it. And the payment wasn't huge, but they sent me$25. So I bought coffee and donuts and stuff for the students.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Can you just walk me through, like, what would a what were the programs that were put in place for the patients there? What kind of rehabilitation was actually put in place for patients?

SPEAKER_02 27:32

Well, a little hard to wake up because usually you're given fairly heavy medications. Generally, like when a person goes to the hospital, they over-medicate a little bit just to get them to a baseline. And so it can be really hard to get up, but you have to get up and eat breakfast or they'll flip. And I remember one day in particular, I got up early and I wanted a cigarette. I did quit smoking 20 years ago, but at the time I was a smoker. I went in and waited in the tv room for the nursing office to open because they were holding my cigarettes and as i was watching the tv the anchorman on the tv was saying things about me and it was such a realistic hallucination that his mouth moved according to the words and and he seemed to be saying all these things that i was i don't know some kind of rich person or whatever i couldn't really make it all out and then i went to the nursing station because it had become six o'clock and And they gave me a cigarette, and I smoked it, and I felt a little better. And then I went back, and I think I ended up having three cigarettes that morning. And after I had the third, the TV was no longer talking to me. And I found out later that actually a lot of people with mental illnesses smoke cigarettes. And one of the reasons is not just it calms you down, but actually nicotine affects some of the same neurotransmitters that psychiatric meds do. And I'm not saying it's good for you or anything.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

I would have thought that maybe like in a sense that would help something like anxiety. And so when your anxiety is kind of put at bay, then everything else sort of like falls into place as well, right? So I guess in a way that makes sense too. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02 29:46

that's a definite possibility.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yeah. So to go on with

SPEAKER_02 29:50

what the day is like. Oh, go

SPEAKER_00 29:52

ahead. Yeah. No, yeah, I would like to hear this first.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Oh, okay. So it's hard to wake up. You wake up. You stumble off to breakfast. They have different programs. I remember one time I was there, they sent me to a woodworking program. And then another time I was there, we actually had to take and disassemble meters, like electric meters or water meters that came from people's houses. And so we had to take them apart piece by piece. And it was actually a good thing to keep me busy, but it just kind of irked me. I mean, at the time, minimum wage was like, I don't know, six bucks or something. And they were paying us$1.50 an hour. And it just didn't really seem fair, but you give up a lot of things like that. So I would go to my program, come back for lunch. One of the funny things is almost every time I went to the hospital, so I remember having a buddy in the hospital, somebody you kind of hang out with and talk to and watch out for and whatever else. And if you don't have a buddy, to hang out with, it can be really difficult and isolating to be in the hospital. And then there's the negative part where you can make a friend in the hospital and then when you leave, maybe they go off their medication, maybe they have symptoms you didn't think you'd have to contend with. I ended up making a good friend in the hospital and then we became friends after we left the hospital a couple of years later because I ran into them and we were in the same neighborhood. And he did nothing but take major advantage of me. And it was really bad. He was the type of person to make up a lot of lies about people, to manipulate them. And I didn't realize it. I just thought he had interesting circumstances or whatever. He would talk about his family having a lot of money or owning a farm or things like that. But it turned out he was definitely a user and abuser. And I had to cut ties with him.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

What was he suffering with?

SPEAKER_02 32:05

That's hard to say. I know he was a patient, so I know he had something serious going on. But I actually did some reading on the subject of pathological lying. And he seemed to be the type of person who would lie often, many times a day, and there would be no point in his lies. He wasn't trying to talk his way into getting a gold card from his bank or something. He would just tell people that he had millions of dollars and it was all going to his sister or something. It's hard to say, but he was a pathological

SPEAKER_00 32:43

one. So when you were buddied with someone, the nurses or the doctors never told you what was the condition that your partner would have?

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, that would fall under confidentiality, I'm pretty sure. No, they didn't. There was one nurse that I went to and I just asked her, why do you discourage... people from making friends in the hospital and she said well what happens is people make friends in the hospital and then they they make plans to be friends after and all of a sudden they call us up and they say this person took my bank card and drained my account can you please tell me his name so i can reach the police and she said there's nothing they can do they can't give the name it's confidentiality and she says sort of incidents like that happen a lot but nobody actually told me yeah don't hang out with this guy he's uh He's a user or anything like that. The closest it came to a doctor actually telling me something like that was I was in the waiting room to see my doctor, and there was a friend of my ex-girlfriend's who was also in the waiting room, and I was talking to her, and basically the doctor warned me that she was HIV positive. But she had told me that already. I knew about it.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

So, I mean, I would imagine in circumstances like this, like where if you had known that this guy was a Yeah, definitely. The funny thing about being

SPEAKER_02 34:21

a pathological liar is it's not considered a mental illness. There's no pathological liar in the DSM-5 or whatever it is now. What they believe it is, is there are other illnesses going on. Right. Like, in

SPEAKER_00 34:46

a sense, this person could have been in a delusion or so far from reality that actually he genuinely believed what the lies that he was putting out there. So one could question, was it a pathological liar or was he actually going through a massive delusion? and genuinely believed it.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

That's really hard to say. I do know that in my own case, the first year I lived away from home during Christmas time, I had an apartment in Vancouver with a friend. And I had called up someone I had dated in high school. And I called her up, and we talked quite a bit. And I started having delusions. And I wasn't trying to lie, but I had these strange things going on. Right. Right. A psychopath because a psychopath is somebody with no moral boundaries. They will do just about anything without feeling bad about it and they'll hurt people. I

SPEAKER_00 36:18

wanted to ask, and this can be useful for anyone that could be either a family member or someone with it or someone living with it themselves. What is it like navigating the world in general? Would you apply for jobs and would that be something you would tell the HR? Or would you be able to hold down jobs? What about dating? What was that like, like functioning in the world with it?

SPEAKER_02 36:44

Well, to address the job question first, I'm really fortunate to have a couple jobs. If I were to go to a regular employer, I probably wouldn't talk about my mental illness. I'd just sort of stress what I've done. But the problem is that when I talk about what I've done, here I have written in these three books about mental health and these 50-plus articles about mental health and have written a blog. It's pasted all over there that I have a mental illness. Yeah. isn't really not much point in trying to hide it but the beneficial position i'm in is that i work for the schizophrenia society and having a mental illness is actually a requirement of my job

SPEAKER_01 37:25

oh okay

SPEAKER_02 37:27

i also uh have another job coming up in the new year where i'm going to be teaching creative writing on psychiatric wards in edmonton and uh yeah again that's something they want people with lived experience for and uh yeah so it's for me i'm really fortunate me Maybe there's jobs I wanted to go after that I didn't think I'd be capable of. It is very difficult for me to work a full-time job. I can say that. The stress gets really bad and you just, you get to a point where, you know, the money doesn't matter. You just don't want to stress yourself out so bad and have something negative happen. But, you know, I just, most of the time, I feel I can be honest about my illness because one of two things happen is one person says, oh that's amazing my uncle had that you seem to be doing so well what's your secret you know so positive and then there's some people that say oh you're crazy I hate crazy people or whatever and those people aren't really worth hanging out with anyways

SPEAKER_01 38:32

and

SPEAKER_02 38:34

as far as dating goes it's kind of interesting because I went to Vancouver I went to flying school for a while I made a decision to come back to Edmonton and deal with my illness so I came back and I started to go to an adult high school and I think I was only 19 at the time maybe just turned 20 but I went to the adult high school and I met someone and we were sort of boyfriend girlfriend for a couple of months but we stayed friends and that was 35 years ago or 34 years ago And we're still best friends. She's married, not to me. And yeah, it's just an amazing relationship. And I have a couple of people in my life who are very close friends. As far as dating goes, you know, when I was younger, I didn't have a lot of problems meeting women, going on dates. But now I sort of feel I'm too old and too tired for

SPEAKER_00 39:40

such things.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Fair enough. Yeah. Because this actually reminds me of an episode that I did previously with an individual who also lived with schizophrenia and actually talked about, you know, it being a very isolating experience for him. And he has a small selection of friends that have stuck around. But he said, for the most part, he lost a lot of his friends, and he struggles with keeping down jobs and relationships. So, you know, I just wanted to put a little bit of like, hope out there for those that might be having it that, hey, you can have a job, and you can have friends. Here's another example of someone who managed to turn it into

SPEAKER_02 40:18

something successful. thing to diagnose because there are parts of the symptoms of schizophrenia that look like other illnesses and with my diagnosis it took an extra long time because it was like a couple of diagnoses plus anxiety. And the funny thing was I didn't know about that diagnosis until long after I left the hospital. I had moved out of the group home and they gave me all my forms and it just said diagnosis schizoaffective disorder with anxiety.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

So all along you knew you had something, you knew about the bipolar and probably the anxiety as well, but you didn't actually know the schizophrenia part.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Well, before I knew about the schizoaffective diagnosis, I was already going to the Schizophrenia Society and they just kind of had a policy that if you have a mental illness and you experience psychosis, you're welcome to come to the Schizophrenia Society. And then I actually found out I don't know what I did have, schizophrenia. Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Yeah. Can you just, actually I wish I asked this earlier, but I want to know about the triggers for you. How long did it take for you to understand what those triggers were and how do you manage or maintain them now?

SPEAKER_02 42:04

Well, I took a very helpful course called the WRAP course. It means Wellness Recovery Action Plan. And there's actually an app that you can get for a phone where you do the same thing. But basically in the WRAP course, they taught me how to First, start with how I know I'm feeling unwell, what I think might have triggered it, like just making lists of things to watch out for. And they sort of escalate. And you can go from, you know, maybe I need a 15-minute break and splash some cold water in my face. Or you could go as high as saying, I think I need to be taken to the hospital. And when you put down that you want to be taken to the hospital under certain circumstances, you choose. You choose the hospital, you choose the doctor, you choose the treatments. They might not be taken into account in your case, but the RAP program just sort of gives you that power to take control of your own illness. And yeah, I hope that answers your question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Yeah, that's really helpful. That's a useful tool. I remember you mentioned that for you at one point, one of the big triggering things was the violence at home, the overachieving mentality that you had. the grief and all of this was compiled that caused you to sort of like have a psychosis so could it be something like um experiencing an extreme sort of pain like a grief or a loss or lack of sleep um that could also be triggering for people

SPEAKER_02 43:36

all of those things uh can affect a person who's properly medicated and diagnosed with a mental illness uh lack of sleep grieving a loss the mental illness doesn't so much control the parts of your brain that would grieve a loss or feel a lack of sleep. But it's hard to describe it. It sort of takes down the walls of coping strategies and stuff like that. And so if I was in active psychosis and I missed sleeping last night, I might be thinking I can't sleep in this apartment, so I'm going to go to a friend's and sleep or something. And that actually happened once where I was in psychosis and I went to my dad's. And during the night, I kind of started yelling and screaming that people were trying to kill me and stuff like that. And yeah, so the trigger for that was simply me being on a medication that was working and then being switched to another medication that didn't work. And it ended up in me spending five weeks in the hospital.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

And that's the thing, especially like with mania, when you're in a bipolar mania phase, i know it's very common for for individuals to really they have like too much energy they're not able to sleep and so that just kind of like really doesn't help with the schizoaffective part because then you can enter into psychosis while having mania would you find that that was the most common um thing for you like when you were in psychosis you were in mania as well well or

SPEAKER_02 45:12

yeah well i actually have few examples of psychosis in my life one of the things like if i stayed up all night it can be a problem and i can off I haven't experienced like just maybe missing a dose of medication and having psychosis right away it can actually take months it could even take a year before I get all the way into psychosis and have enough problems I need to go to the hospital but one of the things I try to do to prevent like going going into psychosis from missing sleep or something like that is my medications are supposed to be taken morning afternoon or morning evening and night time before I go to bed. I used to take them, like I would take the morning ones when I woke up, whether it was morning or not, whether I'd slept a long time or not. And I would take the bedtimes ones when I finally felt like going to sleep. And it wasn't giving me a proper level of the medications I needed to stay sane. And I ended up getting quite sick. And so what I do now is I get up at 5 a.m., I take the morning meds, and I'll either stay up if i'm going to work or i'll go back for a nap and then the five o'clock meds uh in the evening i'll take those right at five o'clock and then again the nine o'clock ones i take right at nine o'clock and i found that keeps me a lot more stable you can lose a great deal of the dose effectiveness if you mess around with the times you take them and all that so so that's just one small small thing

SPEAKER_00 46:44

yeah wow um would you say that that was the worst psychosis that you had that was resulted in you in the five weeks in the psychiatric

SPEAKER_02 46:53

ward? Well, I'm sure I've had worse. It was bad. It was pretty bad. But actually, the hospital was kind of a nice place. You know, I would get up and they had a gymnasium, so we'd shoot baskets or whatever, play badminton. And the meals were really good. And they had somebody teaching classes and different coping strategies and different things like that pretty much all day. So we could go to, it was sort of like going to school all day. Yeah, the staff was great. It was still difficult to have the illness and cope with it in that environment, but it was the best possible environment. And it was, I should also say that it was much different than going to the psychiatric hospital where treatment is not as good. The food definitely is not as good. And yeah, incidents of violence and the incidents of violence are not just from the staff. It's probably even a little more rare that the staff does that, but some of the patients can be aggressive and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Yeah, that's true too. Yeah. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

Yeah. So can you just tell me a little bit more about the treatment process? So you talked about you getting on medication, trying different kinds of medication, finding the one that works for you, and also trying to maintain a certain level of balance and control in your day-to-day life to make sure that you're not entering this. You said that, oh yes, I remember the question, that now that you have awareness of the Do you feel like if you were to enter a psychosis that you would be able to know, like, for example, you're having auditory or visual hallucinations or delusions, are you able to sort of tell like, no, this is just a delusion or this is just a hallucination and that kind of like help you to at least act? as if you're you know in reality or are you completely unaware of it when you're in

SPEAKER_02 48:44

it um well it can be pretty convincing um of course you start with a delusion so you have this fixed false belief and it it kind of comes out of your subconscious or something like that i wouldn't i can't really explain the chemistry of the brain uh but you start you have this fixed false belief and you really think it's true and then if you have any doubt you start to look for like visual clues and or auditory clues or you know use your senses to find out what's going on and um schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder kind of takes over your mind and uh gives you hallucinations that reinforce your delusional thinking and then on top of it the other positive symptom they talk about is paranoia and when you're experiencing paranoia you're that much more susceptible uh to a false idea and a false hallucination. So when you're really in psychosis, it is difficult to know what's going on. I have a recollection of being in Vancouver, and it wasn't the greatest week for me. I was quite ill. I was staying in a traveler's hostel where you get like one bunk bed in a dorm room, and I had a bad, bad dream. And it was about someone... I had gone to cadets with and I did something horrible to her in the dream and I woke up and I was in such a vulnerable state that I wasn't sure if this dream had really happened or not and so I decided to go for a walk to clear my head and I was getting bombarded by all these delusions and hallucinations and I went walking in Vancouver on the North Shore and basically I started thinking that I was in 1992 or whatever it was I was in the future and I was a robot like in the Terminator movie and that Vancouver had been replaced and I was actually walking in a replica of Vancouver on the moon so I had all these bizarre ideas but I did have sort of a concept that things were going wrong because what I finally did and you might laugh because it's such an ancient device to use I went to a pay phone and I called the police and I said I think somebody must have put some hallucinogenic drugs in my food or something I'm having all these ideas and so like I was sick and I knew I needed help but I was still really stigmatized and ashamed of the fact that I was ill so I lied to the police and they did take me to a hospital and I got the help I needed fortunately but yeah so you kind of do know like you're under distress you're under a lot of anxiety and stuff like that Yeah,

SPEAKER_00 51:41

especially at the early, I would imagine, especially at the early stages of psychosis, it's like you're, you're still kind of semi there, you're still semi aware of the reality, but you understand that you're slipping, you haven't really fully transitioned where you're, you're truly believing everything yet. So you're able to sort of like, you know, help get the help that you need, right? Yeah, that's really interesting. So yeah, tell us, tell us, and this is going to be my final question to you. A little, a little message that you would like to pass on to our listeners today and sort of like where you are now as

SPEAKER_02 52:13

well um geez you know uh i think my one of my biggest things uh one of my biggest regrets in life was not finishing high school even though i took a lot of courses afterwards and i i'm pretty well educated in my field um i just sort of think you know do whatever you can to get as much school as you can without letting a mental illness get in the way and one of the reasons I say that is there's an organization in Edmonton and I don't know where all they have similar places like this but it's called EPIC which stands for Edmonton Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic and I wrote a story about them for a magazine called online magazine called Urban Affairs in Edmonton and basically what they do is they're connected with police and crisis team members and all that and what they try to do is to reach you young people before their illness sort of goes sideways on them and get them all the treatment they need so they can continue with their schooling, continue with their work, whatever they're doing. And they deal with people age 16 to 35. Another one of my big regrets is that when I was 18 and I went in the hospital, I was kicked out of school. I lost my car. I lost my job. My home was not a place I could go back to and you know I've always sort of felt that that's not what a hospital should do to someone I sort of felt the hospital instead of being sort of hidden away where it is off the highway there's these bad roads you have to ride down to get to it and it's this huge place with all these buildings but it's kept like a secret it's like they're ashamed that people have mental illness if they put the hospital in the community, like in downtown or something, people could leave to go to work. They could take classes. There's just so much more that they could do for people who are patients. And that'll help with removing the stigma too. Yeah, definitely. More acceptance. So my advice is to get the treatment you need. If you feel you're having a problem, talk to a doctor and be as honest and open to them about all of your symptoms. That's something I definitely do. I didn't do. It caused me a lot of problems. And, you know, basically just try not to let whatever you're dealing with derail your life. You know, keep on with school, keep on with work and all that. And there's a lot of hope in the future for all kinds of mental illnesses.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

I love that. Yeah, thank you so much for that, Leif. It's been really, really useful, really informative. But also, you've been very, very vulnerable with us today. So I really appreciate you being here with us and sharing that.

SPEAKER_02 55:11

Well, thank you so much, Erika.

UNKNOWN 55:13

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 55:17

I'd like to recognize our guests who are vulnerable and open to share their life experiences with us. Thank you for showing us we are human. Also, a thank you to our team who worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 55:38

The

SPEAKER_00 55:41

show would be nothing without you. I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and you're listening to Multispective.