Diary: Introduction

I first started having symptoms of schizophrenia in my second-last year of university, when I was 23 years old. I became habitually late for work (I was in my 2nd co-op job, alternating between work and school). I had been living in a treatment centre for young adults outside of Philadelphia, and one day I contemplated swallowing all 6 of my pills (called at that time minor tranquilizers). At that time I naively thought that only 6 pills would be a fatal overdose. Four years ago (I'm now 49) I swallowed 3 bottles, or 180 of my what are now called anti-psychotic pills, which could really have been a fatal overdose, but survived. That was my 3rd and hopefully my final suicide attempt.

Thanks to the emotional and financial support of my parents, I somehow managed to graduate, with a B.Sc. in Computer Science, in 1984. In those days jobs were plentiful, and I worked as a computer programmer for 16 months in Toronto, got depressed, and quit. In 1987 my luck turned for the worse. I was attending a computer training course (learning word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) and I landed 2 job interviews with a computer company, in which I would be doing something similar to my previous job. Periodically I had meetings with my worker at the training program, and the guy from the computer company attended one of those meetings. The only problem was, nobody told me he was coming to that meeting, and I didn't show up. Bye-bye programming job. The 2nd piece of bad luck that year occurred when I was kicked out of a group home for being too noisy. I was in the habit of talking to myself in a loud voice, laced with profanities, when I was in my room. But they didn't tell me that was the reason, they told me it was because one day I didn't go to my day program at the computer training course. Had they told me the real reason, I could have suppressed my crazy talking, or at least made it quieter.

My luck turned for the better in 1990. I had spent the previous 20 months in hospital (8 months in the Sunnybrook psychiatric ward, and 12 months in Homewood Sanitarium in Guelph). My mother had heard that the survivor-run courier company A-Way Express needed someone to computerize their operations, so they hired me. But after 6 weeks I got laid off, as they already had MBA students performing that task. A few months later a guy at a non-profit called Fred Victor Centre wanted to start a computer company staffed by consumer/survivors, and heard about me from his contact at A-Way. So he hired me, and I worked in the computer centre (initially just one computer, and later 10 computers for community members) at Fred Victor for the next 5 years, doing technical support, and I also dabbled in desktop publishing. In 1996, a computer company in the same neighbourhood heard about Fred Victor on the CTV News, and they hired 4 people who worked at or hung around Fred Victor, including me. I was hired as a computer programmer, and I was so desperate I offered to work for free (but they paid me anyway). That was over 12 years ago and I'm still with that computer company, working part time. It doesn't pay very well, but I consider myself lucky to have a job in my field, considering that I have mental health issues. I now also work every Thursday afternoon at Sound Times (a drop-in centre for consumer/survivors), teaching members how to use the computers, a job I've held for 4 months.