Columns

When I was in high school, I was brilliant but undisciplined. I often skipped homework but usually got very good test scores. If a subject interested me, effort didn't feel like effort. What stopped me from attending college was the ostracism, bullying, physical attacks and harassment of other male students. (When I tried junior college with the idea of transferring to a university, I discovered that the same awful young men who'd come after me in high school were there and would continue.)

Instead of college, I obtained employment that did not involve any brainpower, and it was night shift. The origin of my ensuing mental illness could have partly been working nights at too young an age. However, there were other, additional factors that made me ill, including genetic ones. A history of social difficulties was included in the mix. 

Following my first psychotic episode in 1982, Dr. Trachtenberg did not have a fabulous prognosis for me and believed I could do moderately well--or something to that effect. 

Then I was an outpatient, and the psychiatrist I saw suggested I do the same kind of work that I'd done before; nighttime cleanup. Apparently, he believed that the origin of my illness was strictly a brain malfunction. Yet, I suspect that the nature of this work worsened my condition. 

If he had said I should go to college, the course of my life might have been much better than it has turned out to be. And my life was full of people who believed I was limited. 

My father encouraged developing technical skills. I ignored this. Meanwhile, many people assumed a lack of intelligence, since I'd been diagnosed schizophrenic. 

I can't really blame anyone else for the flawed course of my life; my path was up to me. 

But my point is this: a psychiatrist or other mental health professional, when she or he says a patient is limited, doesn't necessarily know enough about a patient to make that assessment. Secondly, when someone in some capacity of authority decides a patient is limited, it can do damage. 

Being taken for a fool by fools, is how I see it. People who claim they are intelligent, are experienced, are authoritative, may be painting with too wide of a brush. And, based on how I appear or on what other people tell them about me in meetings and written in charts, they consequently assumed that I was a dumb idiot, or, at best, fairly intelligent. And their perceptions of me followed accordingly. 

At twenty, I went into electronics training. This reaffirmed my belief about myself of having a good brain. I was considered "top student" in a class of about a dozen "very bright students." The illness and the medication hadn't ruined my brain. 

Still in my twenties, I had a career in repair of analog televisions. (This was decades before modern televisions came into existence.) I did component-level troubleshooting, on analog electronic circuits in televisions, mostly using a Volt-Ohm Meter. 

Later in my twenties, I tried on some other jobs. The television repair jobs were demanding, and I wasn't always able to keep up. My condition was also worsening--I didn't know that at the time. 

I also started up my own repair shop, which I called "Poor Man's Electronic Exchange," in Concord. I had a Yellow Pages listing. At the time, everyone used Yellow Pages, because there was no internet yet. 

The prognosis of psychiatrists did not hold true. 

In my late twenties and early thirties, I barely worked, and tried some part time positions. I worked for an organization called "Sapling Project" based in San Francisco. It was a project aimed at helping mentally ill people to develop careers in computers. The project ended, and I negotiated to keep the computer I'd been loaned in lieu of final pay. When I got closer to forty, I'd begun my writing career. And it has been a ton of work for essentially no money. 

When a psychiatrist tells you what your limitations are, you don't have to buy that. Psychiatrists are very capable of human error. 

Psychiatrists and other doctors are right about some things some of the time, and they can save your life. Or, they could be wrong, and this could result in dire consequences. It is up to us to parse what we can use and what we can't.