A Double Tragedy

A Double Tragedy

When my mother was first hospitalized, she presented with paranoia. At that time, it almost guaranteed a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

But I lived with her. And even though I was just a child, I know now that it just doesn’t fit.

By today’s diagnostic criteria, her paranoia, when seen alongside her other symptoms of depression and mania, would most likely place her on the schizoaffective spectrum.

That in itself is a tragedy — at least, it ended that way for her, in suicide.

Because she was misdiagnosed, it set up a chain reaction of being prescribed the wrong medications, noncompliance, cycles of mania and lucidity, and commitment to hospitals and institutions. She was prescribed Haldol, which turned her into a zombie. So, she didn’t want to take it, and that set up the cycling in and out of delusion and paranoia. That’s how and why she was hospitalized eleven times in the ten years that she was “treated.”

But the real kick in the teeth is that that means she suffered needlessly.

It’s a thought that pains me still. I cannot change that past. I cannot find meaning in senseless suffering.

But I can honor her, and I can try through my own life and art to give it what she could not.