In Their Shoes
A glance into the world of schizophrenia sufferers.

“I can name films I’ve seen, like The Cell with Jennifer Lopez. There are a few others, and the psycho killer is often schizophrenic”.

This is the observation of a young man named Nick, himself a sufferer of schizophrenia. His views were aired in a film shown at the In Their Shoes event. An event aimed at raising awareness about the illness.

Schizophrenia has a stigma attached to it. Nick’s film assessment is the most contact that the average person has with schizophrenia sufferers. The next source will be the seemingly annual news story of someone who hasn’t taken their medication and obtained day release, with murderous results. Unsurprisingly this image isn’t a true reflection of reality.

The word schizophrenia comes from Greek. Schizos meaning broken and phrenos meaning mind. It is a chronic mental disorder, the cause of which is still unknown. The physical reason for the illness is a lack of a chemical called dopamine at the front of the brain and too much in the mid brain. There are some factors that are high in sufferers. These are; victims of child abuse, drug use and that a blood relative has suffered from the illness. However, these factors are not common to all sufferers.

There are many symptoms of the illness, but split personality is not one of them. The symptoms are grouped into three categories. Positive symptoms include hallucinations, delusions and disordered thoughts. Negative symptoms
are a lack of motivation and social skills. Finally there are Cognitive symptoms which are poor attention, memory and planning. These symptoms all make leading what we would consider a normal life extremely difficult.
Depression and suicide are high amongst those who are suffering from schizophrenia; fifty per cent suffer from depression whist ten per cent attempt suicide.

Nick’s symptoms were of the positive type. “The first time I realised there was something deeply wrong [was] when I walked into the pub to get some beers. I heard distinctly in my mind a female American voice, and it said ten four, he’s on drugs.”

At the In Their Shoes event was a room with a projection screen in it. The screen was hooked up to a computer running Second Life: Schizophrenia Virtual Reality World. I went into the room on my own, others had gone in
as a group. The first thing I was confronted with was a voice telling me, “Pick up the fucking gun”. I was shocked, and then looked at the screen. A gun was on a hallway sideboard. I took my seat and watched the strangeness
on the screen.

Although the graphics were as realistic as Lawnmower Man, the overall experience proved very effective. Everything that happened during Second Life was based on the symptoms of patients. Unpleasant words such as death and fascism stood out from newspaper headlines and book titles. The television talked to me, telling me how worthless I was (apparently a very common symptom). I only stayed in the room for ten minutes and found the experience unsettling. Sufferers of schizophrenia with positive symptoms have to live with these things all the time.

Treatments for schizophrenia began hundreds of years ago. The treatments included exclusion from the general public and starvation. In 1937 electric shock treatment was used. In the 50s the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine was used. Antipsychotic drugs are used today. There are other treatments used as well as drugs.

Dr Lars Hansen talked us through schizophrenia on the day. Dr Hansen has been working in psychotherapy for a decade. He demonstrated an exercise called the Old Bailey Game.

“A patient thinks the government is watching him. We take three chairs. The patient takes a turn in each. The patient plays the defence and has to come up with reasons why the government would be watching. Then he plays the prosecutor and has to come up with evidence against. Then they play the judge and decide if its true or not. It proves very effective.”

Treatments such as this help the patients to believe that they are in control of their illness. That they are not losing the fight. However, the antipsychotic drugs remain their strongest weapon. There are various types of drugs, typical and atypical, and some medications have side effects. Common side effects are weight gain and lack of sex drive with the inability to achieve climax. However, not all atypicals are the same and there are choices available to patients that do not cause weight gain or other side effects.

The second experience set up at In Their Shoes was the Weighted Jacket Experiment. My body mass index was measured. Before putting on the jacket my BMIi was distinctly average. A score of 23, smack in the middle of my ideal weight. Then I put the jacket on and began to fill it with weights. Patients have been known to gain up to 15 kilos per year as a side effect of their medication. When my jacket had been filled, my bmi had risen to 27, and I was
officially overweight. The next stage of the experience was to walk up and down stairs. Then to try and carry some shopping. The extra kilos making simple activities difficult. But without this medication the sufferers would not be able to lead anything approaching a normal life.

“There has been a very positive movement,” said Dr Hansen. “A rapid progress pharmacologically and also therapy wise. We can now treat patients with a modern medication that has an effect on several aspects of the symptomatology, both the positive and negative symptoms”.

The main focus at the moment is to rid schizophrenia of its current stigma. The image of the psycho killer still hangs over the sufferers. “People are scared because they don’t understand”, says Dr Hansen.

Nick expresses this with another cinematic comparison.

“A film a friend suggested I should go and watch was A Beautiful Mind. It was absolutely brilliant, it was so well done and it really showed the other side of the argument. I’ve met a number of people who suffer from one problem or another and largely they’re very friendly, sweet and frightened people. They are not hardcore, not violent knife wielding psychopaths”.

by Peter Prickett