Meet Three Young Adults Living With Schizophrenia

Yesterday, after I told you about Schizophrenia: Public Attitudes, Personal Needs – NAMI’s survey results and other information about schizophrenia – I watched MTV’s True Life: I Have Schizophrenia. (I’m starting to wonder if television is going to die out completely if everything is available online!)

The show didn’t really go into too much depth; of course, I didn’t really expect it to, given that the show is less than an hour long and it covered three different people with schizophrenia.

However, it covered all the main points. It’s interesting and worth a watch regardless of your level of experience with schizophrenia.

As I watched the show, I jotted down typed out some notes about each of the three people – notes on basic information about them and notes on my thoughts about them. Read on to check them out, and then after you’ve watched the show perhaps you’ll have some notes of your own to add.

Amber:

Amber is a 19-year-old Hampton University student who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia during her freshman year of college. Throughout the show, we see Amber trying to find a balance with which she’s comfortable regarding her mental illness and her school work and performance. (Amber’s school work suffered severely the year she was diagnosed; something with which she wasn’t familiar and something she’s struggled to get control over.) Amber takes medication for her paranoid schizophrenia, sees a mental health professional, and even gets active with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Although she ends up dropping her speech class due to the stress and anxiety it causes, Amber finds support from her mother, her professors, her mental health professionals, and NAMI.

Of the three people featured on the show, Amber seems to be the most…”cheerful,” for lack of a better word. Although she’s not “happy” about her diagnosis, she’s determined to live her life to the fullest – and try to live her life as closely as possible to the way she used to – regardless of it.

Ben:

Ben is a 23-year-old man living at home with his very supportive family in Pennsylvania. Ben has schizoaffective disorder, and began experiencing symptoms at the age of 18 when “Marcus” (not a real person) began talking to him about committing suicide. Ben has been taking prescription medication for several years and now – at 15 pills a day – feels his treatment is helping. Ben doesn’t feel strong enough to work, live on his own, or attend school full-time, but at the end of the show we’re told Ben is taking classes for computer programming, continuing with medication and therapy, and taking steps to lead a “normal” life.

Ben strikes me as someone who is very aware of his illness and doesn’t screw around with it. For example, during the show both his father and grandfather have cancer, and – as he deals with “God” telling him the cancer is his fault – he’s worried the sadness of the situation will send him back (in terms of progress). Ben is slowly and steadily taking the necessary steps to regain some sense of “normalcy” in his life, and he has a supportive family (and outside support group) to help him.

Josh:

Josh is a 24-year-old man, also from Pennsylvania, who has schizophrenia. Although he has no formal education, Josh is “willing to do” whatever he can, and at the time of the show he worked as a laborer for construction. Josh has been in and out of mental hospitals for a number of years, but unlike Amber and Ben, Josh doesn’t take medication for schizophrenia and he doesn’t see any kind of mental health professional. Josh opts instead to self-medicate with marijuana, which only worsens his paranoia and delusions. Of course, Josh doesn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing, because he considers hearing voices a “luxury” for his loneliness. Throughout the show, we see Josh go from living in a hotel, to his mother’s house, to a friend’s house, back to his mother’s house, and finally in an apartment an organization that helps the mentally ill assisted him in getting.

Of the three people, Josh is the one that doesn’t seem to have any direction, and you won’t feel any kind of closure with him once the show is over. He refuses treatment, which makes things tough on his Mom. At one point she even considers having him involuntarily committed. While both Amber and Ben have warm and supportive family members, Josh’s mother seems at her wit’s end. I think this is understandable, given Josh’s refusal to get help and find ways to better manage his schizophrenia.

If you watch the show, you should also check out the following posts from MTV’s Remote Control Blog:

• A Note from True Life’s Ben About Schizo-Affective Disorder
• True Life: “How We Found Our People”
• True Life Q&A: Your Schizophrenia Questions Answered By an Expert
• True Life: I Have Schizophrenia (Sarah’s Story)

Any thoughts on the show?

Image: Newscom

If you have a mental illness and are still living the life you love, head on over to This Is Why I ROCK! and enter!