Schizophrenia As I Live It (audio)

Navigating the Tightrope of Mental and Physical Health in Schizophrenia

• Diana Dirkby

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When my mother's schizophrenia cast a shadow over her physical health, the consequences were heartbreakingly irreversible. Her story, interwoven with my own, underscores the often overlooked but critical importance of holistic well-being. On today's podcast, I, Diana Dirkby, delve into the complex dance of managing both mental and physical health when living with a condition like schizophrenia. Reflecting on poignant experiences from "The Overlife: A Tale of Schizophrenia," I'll guide you through the necessity of regular health check-ups, the impact of antipsychotic medications on the body, and share my personal strategies for maintaining balance in the face of this illness.

As we journey together, I'll offer insights into the delicate interplay of mental and physical health, illustrating how one can support or undermine the other. I'll also shed light on practical steps for managing the side effects of treatment, the importance of professional guidance, and the pitfalls of short-term solutions like crash diets. For anyone touched by schizophrenia or interested in the broader conversation about health, join me for a candid discussion that promises to educate, empower, and inspire a more systematic approach to well-being.

#mentalhealth #mentalhealthmatters #mentalhealthawareness #schizophrenia #paranoidschizophrenia #schizoaffective #mentalillness #psychosis #depressionsawareness #fictionwriting #family #relationships #nomorestigma #fightthestigmaofmentalillness #letstalk #lookafteryourself #schizophreniaawareness #mentalillnessrecovery #mentalillnesstreatment #motherdaughter #brainhealth 

Pastime With Good Company by King Henry VIII, played by The Chestnut Brass Company 

Pastime With Good Company, composed by King Henry VIII, played by The Chestnut Brass Company

Diana Dirkby:

Hello, my name is Diana Dirkby and I live with paranoid schizophrenia. You are listening to my podcast, "schizophrenia as I Live it. Today, I want to talk about the importance of taking care of all aspects of your health, mental and physical and how important that is to fighting a mental illness. I often say that, and it's often said by the mental health advocacy groups that, a person living with a mental illness is a lot more than that mental illness. That's only part of their definition and there is much more to them than their mental illness. I'd like to kind of mimic that truth by saying that, as regards your health, there's a lot more to your health than your mental illness. Now, in the case of schizophrenia, which I live with and my mother lived with, it's a very jealous illness. It's a very jealous illness when you are in the midst of a relapse or you're having some days where you are really struggling. It's very jealous of everything else. It wants your attention, it demands your attention and you have to put a lot of energy into managing the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Diana Dirkby:

This is one of the themes of my book, "the Overlife A Tale of Schizophrenia, which is about a mother and daughter living with paranoid schizophrenia, just like I do and my mother did. The mother character in the book never faces that. She has a mental illness she refuses to acknowledge, and this was true in my mother's case and it had a really tragic impact on her health. She died at 65, and I'd say about 15 years before that she began to be paranoid about her doctors and did not have the checkups that she should have had to monitor what her general health was like. I mean, I was with her and I could see what her mental health was like. Everyone could see that she had mental health problems, but unfortunately we could not get her to have those treated. In the end she died of ovarian cancer. And that ovarian cancer was only discovered right at the very end of her life, when she was finally committed for being a danger to herself, so committed to a psychiatric ward. Now I don't know and nobody can know exactly what the prognosis would have been had she trusted her doctors. Ovarian cancer is a notoriously difficult cancer to detect in its early stages. So if my mother hadn't had a mental illness, it's not clear that the eventual outcome wouldn't have been the same. In other words, if she'd been without her schizophrenia, she may still have died with ovarian cancer.

Diana Dirkby:

But I'm talking about extremes here and it's necessary also to look at the less extreme aspects of your health. The mental health advocacy groups quite correctly say that mental health is your health. But I'd like to kind of underline that mental health is part of your health, so it's part of what you need to take care of.

Diana Dirkby:

As an example, many people are rather distressed when they first begin to take antipsychotic drugs because they are inclined to put on weight. Now, this may seem a very vain and trivial thing in the face of schizophrenia symptoms, and indeed it is. It's much more important to get your schizophrenia symptoms attenuated and to be able to manage them than it is to fret about a few extra pounds. But for some people it's a lot more than a few extra pounds. In my case, I did not suffer with this side effect from antipsychotics. I went to the doctor yesterday and I'm the same weight as I've been for years and years, and the antipsychotics never had much impact on my weight.

Diana Dirkby:

However, your weight is an important part of your physical health. If you become overweight and for some people it is indeed as a result of taking antipsychotic medication some then you need to address it without going on crash diets and getting yourself all upset because you have a bad relationship with the scale. You don't like the numbers that it's giving you each time you weigh yourself. I think it's much better to do something a lot more systematic. Now, for those of you who can afford it, you can go to a nutritionist and work with them on getting your weight within healthy limits. So you can go to them you can say look, I'm taking this antipsychotic medication. I believe it's making me put on weight. Can I work with you to get my weight within healthy limits? Now, not everybody can afford to go to a nutritionist and not everybody is in a state of mind, when they're struggling with their mental health, to set all that up.

Diana Dirkby:

Fortunately, there are now many things available online. So, personally, I have a Fitbit watch and the model is Sense, so it's a bit on the pricey side for Fitbit, but there are many, much cheaper alternatives, all vastly cheaper than an Apple Watch. I found that the Fitbit app and the watch together are very, very good at providing information about my basic health. So you can take a basic membership to Fitbit or you can take a premium membership, which is what I have, because with the premium membership you also get a whole lot of cool workouts that are fun to do and not ridiculously overtaxing. So this brings me to another point is that schizophrenia can be completely exhausting as you combat its symptoms if you're going through a bad phase and it's really really hard to think about physical exercise. But it does pay off. If you can just commit, say, to walking half an hour outside. If you don't want to go on your own, try to find someone to go with you. If you haven't got the appetite for going outside, but you can afford it, you can buy yourself your own treadmill. If working with others is helpful, you can take a membership in a gym and go there every day or so, maybe with a friend, and use their equipment. And, as I say, if you have an app like the Fitbit app, the workouts that they have if you take the premium membership don't require you having complicated equipment. They just require you to have a few dumbbells of five pounds to use.

Diana Dirkby:

So exercise and diet are fundamental to anybody's good health, and they are equally as fundamental to someone living with a mental illness. So just because you live with a mental illness doesn't mean that you should put up with being overweight and not getting exercise. You need to have those as part of your day. More seriously, sort of in between what happened with my mother with ovarian cancer, and between this talk of weight and exercise, there's a whole lot of things which are more important than the diet and exercise, but less important than cancer. A lot of other things can go wrong.

Diana Dirkby:

You really need to make sure you see a family doctor that you trust a couple of times a year, and it's important that you have a family doctor. So I'll call this doctor a family doctor or internist, someone who can check your general health through blood tests, x-rays, whatever. And my own psychiatrist helped me be critical of my family doctor until I found one that I really trusted and is a really, really good doctor who can work with her. She doesn't live in the same city as me and sometimes not in the same state when I go from Texas to Alaska, so she needs to have good family doctors close to where I'm living so that she can work with them. Now I divide my time between Texas and Alaska. In Texas I have found such a doctor, and in Alaska, even though we're in a relatively small town, I have a really great doctor, and in fact I saw that doctor yesterday, because you've probably picked up by now that I'm accident prone.

Diana Dirkby:

I managed to get a concussion about 10 days ago and I needed to see him about that, and he gave me excellent advice, and the best part of the advice was don't worry about the things you can't get done because you have a concussion. So he said go to your list of priorities and strictly do the things that can't wait, and then for the rest of it you simply have to relax and rest as much as you can and let your head recover. That's the quickest way to getting rid of the concussion. Now I also have absence epilepsy, and so I have a neurologist who I see once a year. So I'm working with a psychiatrist I consult every few months, a psychologist I talk to once a week, a family doctor I see as needed, but not less than twice a year, and a neurologist that I see once a year. So that is my minimum doctors network and I consider all aspects of my health to be important and I consider that those parts of my health that are not related to my schizophrenia nonetheless affect it.

Diana Dirkby:

What I have found is, if I'm struggling with schizophrenia symptoms or having a bad day, it helps if I do something healthy like take a walk or just get outside, even without taking a walk, just sit outside in a chair and maybe have a few days of eating healthy food, so I feel good about myself. I I have the physical health I take care of to fall back on. I am taking care of myself and that gives me more energy for those times that I need to engage with my mental health and get things on a better level. So I really urge you if you've seen a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist wants to help you with psychotic symptoms, don't don't shy away from taking the antipsychotics because of their bad reputation for side effects like putting on weight or like making you sleepy and so on. I suggest that you talk with your psychiatrist and your family doctor about how to get around those side effects. So I cope with the side effect that my antipsychotics kind of knock me out for rest of the day by following the advice on the bottle and taking them nightly. So I don't expect to do anything except relax with my husband, watch TV and so on after I take my antipsychotic medications at night. And, as I say for the weight problem, that hasn't been an issue for me, but that's probably helped by the fact that I've pretty much always exercised and eat reasonably healthy without it being boring. So I think that has helped me keep my weight down and be on antipsychotics.

Diana Dirkby:

Your psychologist, of course, can help you with how you feel about your health. But I think the best person to talk to, aside from your psychiatrist, is your family doctor and discuss anything that may be worrying you about your health. It's really, really essential to have a good general health so you have the equipment to fight your mental illness when you need to. Okay, so that's all I have for today and the podcast is coming a little late because of my concussion, so this is the first day I was up to doing it since the last podcast. I do hope you will keep checking back. I do hope you will give some thought to buying my book, The Overlife Tale of Schizophrenia, by Daiana Dirkby, and I hope you have a wonderful day and, as always, thank you for listening.