Blog 03/27/2025
“Tell me a story.”
I, Diana Dirkby, have often said that a mental health consumer is not defined by their mental illness. The proof is that I have been plagued for many months with an as-yet-unexplained infirmity that has nothing to do with schizophrenia, except that coping with it brought on a two-week schizophrenic relapse in February 2025, which was cured by my medication, by resting, and by my spouse’s care. I corresponded with my doctor about it so she knew I monitored my progress.
The non-schizophrenic infirmity consisted of a series of unexplained falls over many months, several of them quite severe enough to sprain joints and break bones. The worst to endure was a fractured vertebra in my upper back, which confined me to bed and painkillers. As I suffer from mild epilepsy and, after running some blood tests that showed the dosage of my epilepsy medicine was too low, my doctors doubled the dosage, postulating that epilepsy was causing the falls. This idea turned out to be catastrophic as I started to have digestive problems. After two weeks, when I couldn’t digest anything, I returned to my regular dosage, and my digestion bounced back quickly. I am too thin now, but I don’t expect that to last as I am already putting on weight steadily. I have had no more falls since the short schizophrenic episode in February 2025. Of course, I am being extra careful where I put my feet!
From my previous podcasts, you will know that I recently published two books: The Overlife, A Tale Of Schizophrenia (https://www.amazon.com/dp/191685219X/) and Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPXW76DV/).
Both books are fiction novels. Most books about mental illness, including the brain disorder paranoid schizophrenia, are scientific books or memoirs. The same can be said about books on child abuse, parental or sibling. These books are primarily valuable educationally and help reduce ignorance, which is often the source of stigma.
By contrast, there are many fictional TV shows and movies that cast the villain as someone with a mental illness or a past featuring abuse. In the case of mental illness, it is usually a psychotic disorder. It teaches that we must fear such people, thereby adding to the stigma of some of its worst traits, especially the terror of mental health consumers. There are some notable exceptions, like the movie “A Beautiful Mind” about the Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who lived with schizophrenia, and the Apple TV series “The Crowded Room,” inspired by the story of Billy Milligan who lived with DID: dissociative identity disorder, once known as multiple personality disorder. In an earlier Blog post and in my Podcast “Schizophrenia As I Live It,” I explained how schizophrenia and DID are not the same mental disorders, even though they are often confused. Then there is the recent movie by Nadine Crocker, “Cont;nue,” which treats suicide. These pioneering movies and TV series that get it right are welcome in a film and TV library that mostly gets it wrong.
Most people don’t get to make movies, but they do get a chance to express themselves through writing, whether it’s a greeting card, an email, a Blog, or, more ambitiously, a poem or a book.
The under-used fiction genre in writings about mental illness has many advantages. Your fiction book can contain as many facts as you care to put into it as long as you write well enough to tell the reader what is fact and what is fiction. One significant advantage I found was that, unlike memoir, I could leave out many people who exist in my real life but who had no place in my book or didn’t want to have a place in my book due to the stigma of mental illness.
Unfortunately, the excluded people include members of my family and my spouse’s family, who I always treated well and who didn’t miss out on anything because of my schizophrenia. It’s the word “schizophrenia” they can’t cope with, especially if they fear you will one day turn up on their doorstep with your mental health problems, something I would never do. The excluded people also include work colleagues who I have known for many years without mentioning my schizophrenia. Once they witnessed symptoms of my relapses, they didn’t want to know me, even if I recovered well and caused no harm to anyone. Like Sarah in my book “The Overlife. A Tale Of Schizophrenia,” some over-reacting people called the police only to be told by the police that they were, indeed, over-reacting. Tragically, not all encounters with law enforcement go well for the mentally ill. This awful situation is one of the main preoccupations of many mental health advocacy groups, and they are right to fight.
There are, of course, notable exceptions in all the groups I mention: family, friends, and colleagues, who have witnessed me at my sickest and only love me more for the shared experience.
To a more stressless advantage of fiction, you can get all your facts across and tell a good story simultaneously. It’s like putting a pill that tastes strange inside peanut butter, honey, or anything else whose taste you like. You can deal with a serious topic, which is an effort for the author and reader, and still have fun with human interest tales.
I know my books will have a more challenging time getting recognized because they are fiction, whereas people are looking for books on mental illness and child abuse containing only facts, but that’s a choice I consciously made.
As the brilliant writer Walter Mosley, author of “Devil in a Blue Dress,” said in his course on the Masterclass App, and here I don’t have the exact quote, but he said words to the effect of:
“No matter what you write, tell me a story.”
#SameHere #schizophrenia #psychosis #friends #family #mentalillness #fightthestigma #fiction #writing