When The Police Came To My Home

In this episode, I will describe several incidents where I got into trouble with law enforcement for totally harmless behavior because I have always been open about living with schizophrenia. This fact is a reason to be open about living with schizophrenia, not to hide it. I passed with flying colors, and that helps reduce the stigma.

#schizophrenia #police #lawenforcement #mentalillness #family #relationships #challenges #fiction #novel

Transcript

When The Police Came To My Home.

I live with paranoid schizophrenia. You may ask, “What Is That?” There are as many answers as people living with schizophrenia

Yet, no matter how often you explain it and reassure people you are harmless, they still may practice stigma, mainly out of fear that your possible loss of touch with reality will damage their fragile lives.

That’s how the police ended up at my home in Texas. One symptom of my schizophrenia, mixed with complex PTSD, can be the impression that unpleasant words are running through my mind at a pace too furious to control. About 8 years ago, before I retired, that led me to over-Tweet. I guess you’d call it over-Xing these days, which sounds faintly obscene. Someone from my workplace complained. I had a lawyer who followed my Tweets closely and said there was nothing wrong with them except that there were too many and at times they espoused strange views. None of these views was controversial.

I began to do much better, but the police still felt pressured to come to my home due to complaints about my Tweets. They had even printed a lot of them out. Luckily for me, it was a calm day. Many people with schizophrenia who are reported to the police for a symptom don’t have that luck.

When they knocked at the door, I was playing the piano, which was already an indication that I was doing better, as I couldn’t think straight enough to play when I was doing poorly with my schizophrenia.

I invited them inside. I didn’t want to lower the tone of the neighborhood, which is very conservative, by leaving them at my front door.

When I asked the police why they were there, they said, “Your Tweets have some of your colleagues at work worried. We thought it was best to visit you and see what state you are in.” I told them, “I don’t have any guns, if you want to search the house.” They said that wasn’t necessary. They were embarrassed that I looked nice, just getting about my day, and tweeting too much. They gave me a business card for someone to call at the police if I was having a mental health emergency. After a while, they left. They could report that I was not dangerous to my colleagues.

I was amazed that Tweets could lead to such a scenario. A quick look at Twitter reveals people far more prolific and obnoxious than I ever was.

When I was sure I was over the worst of that period of bad health, I deleted all my social media accounts and restarted from scratch, being careful about what I posted. My social media has been under control for a long time now, it’s rather too conservative, and I miss out on some traffic because of that.

So, what is schizophrenia anyway? You can look at my first podcast, the one before this one, entitled “Schizophrenia As I Live It” by Diana Dirkby. You can access it from my webpage https://dianadirkbywrites.com, and it’s on Apple Podcasts. It contains a lot of information on what schizophrenia is like for me. Also, my book “The Overlife: A Tale of Schizophrenia” by Diana Dirkby includes a lot of material directly based on my personal experiences with schizophrenia.

During this podcast, I will mainly rely on reading extracts from my book “The Overlife” to describe paranoid schizophrenia.

 Another way to find out about schizophrenia is from the many people who live with it and post their experiences on social media. For example, many people are living with schizophrenia who have bravely posted about it on Instagram: search for the hashtag #schizophrenia to learn what it’s like for them. For a scientific approach, you can’t do better than Chapter One of the famous book “Surviving Schizophrenia,” 7th Edition: A Family Manual by E. Fuller Torrey. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in schizophrenia. I will put a link to the book in the Episode Description.

My schizophrenia will still be a topic in this Podcast, but it will be part of something broader. How do families cope when they are facing a severe problem?

As a follow-up to the police incident, I was scared every time I saw a policeman that I was going to be arrested, and that lasted for several years. I couldn’t think of a charge they could hold me on, but I wouldn’t be the first in that position. The mistreatment of jailed inmates who need a psychiatrist, not a jail, is disgraceful. I am not a specialist on this topic, but many mental health advocacy groups are working hard to improve the statistics.

At about the same time as the police incident, I was charged $400 by law enforcement in Texas for using foul language. Sometimes, the only relief I get from the word soup in my brain when I am sick is to say the words to myself. The words aren’t always pretty; I was overheard in Texas and reported for it. Something similar happened in Alaska: I made a joke in bad taste that some people took seriously, and the police were again called to sort it out. These people knew I live with schizophrenia. They reported back to my accusers that I wasn’t dangerous and that they couldn’t take a joke. Again, I was lucky.

Throughout all these debacles, I always had the support of my spouse, and I think my days of nearly getting arrested are over—at least, I hope so

When the police came to my home, I was seated at the piano and resumed my seat to talk to them, which greatly put them at ease. If you watch the video version, you will see that my attire and virtual background are full of musical notes.

Thanks for tuning in to my Podcast. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and like and comment on my videos.

#schizophrenia #police #lawenforcement #mentalillness #family #relationships #challenges #fiction #novel