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Wednesday May 31, 2000 THE OAKVILLE BEAVER C3 By B a rb Jo y SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER January 1987 will always be a flashpoint month in Bill MacPhee's life. That was the month the police picked up the naked and shivering 24year-old and took him to hospital. He had schizophrenia. What's it like to have schizophrenia? What goes on in the mind? That was the focal point of MacPhee's talk to an enthralled audi ence at the Oakville Schizophrenia Society gen eral meeting last Tuesday. The publisher of The Schizophrenia Digest was disarmingly honest in describing his battle with the illness. It was depressing and, at the same time, uplift ing. That fateful January evening in Fort Erie, MacPhee said he had decid ed he had an engagement somewhere. First he show ered but was so confused he couldn't decide how to turn the shower off. When the tie he wanted to wear became entangled, he threw it aside. Then he got into his car, drove a short distance' and then abandoned it. "What am I out here for?" he asked himself. "Then I decided I'd have to prove myself to God." To do it, he walked along a four-lane highway with cars skidding around him in their efforts to avoid him. He was not consciously trying to commit suicide. "I didn't want to die," said MacPhee. "I was carry ing out my voices' orders. When you hear about sui cides, they might be uninten tional suicides because most voices say bad things." Regaining the sidewalk, he decided he needed only God, not clothes, so he took off all his clothes. The jet flying overhead became a biblical sign of flight. He looked up at a street light and said; "Beam me up, Scotty." Scotty didn't beam him up. Instead he sent the police. Even then, it didn't occur to him he was mentally ill. He was fixed on the idea that all people were mismatched and he had to match them up genetically. That was his job in life. He had to have time to do it but these uniformed men were Roman guards who were taking him away to kill him. In that case, he wouldn't have time to change the world. He was living in the unreality of full blown schizophrenia. The symptoms had begun about three months before. He said a genetic `set' for schizophrenia was triggered by a stressful relationship with a woman. These two factors caused biochemical changes in his brain. The symptoms were scary. He had come to believe he was the centre of the uni verse and everything that happened in the world relat ed to him. People on televi sion were speaking directly to him. He was compelled to look into their eyes so he squatted down to get eye contact with zoomed-in faces. He wanted them to remove their glasses - some times they did - so he could see them better. Colors were brighter; voices were louder. At Niagara General Hospital he recognized an orderly's face. It was the same one he'd seen in the knots in his bamwood wall at home. He took a swing at him, knocked him to the floor and was quickly inject ed with Haldol. He ended up, shackled and strapped, in a seclusion room. Still plagued by delusions and paranoia and still "very ill," he was an angry hospital patient. He tried to throw his bed out the window, ripped out drywall, plugged the toi let and flooded his room. After five weeks in hospital, Haldol gradually erased the paranoia, delusions and hal lucinations (positive symp toms) but he spent five years on a couch in his parents' home struggling with nega tive symptoms, sleeping most of the time and con tending with parents who got on his nerves. He had no energy, no motivation to do anything, no self-confidence and felt completely "bland." He hated Haldol which left him "zombie-like," thirsty and pacing the floor. Six times he went off his med ication and found himself doing bizarre things like walking over cars. Six times he was back in hospital. He felt "stuck." After several attempts, psychiatrists finally found a medication that worked for him by relieving both posi tive and negative symptoms. Slowly he regained most of what he had lost. At least, mentally. But he still needed some direction. Enter Martha. The stu dent in social work took an interest in him and suggested weekly penmanship and photography classes. Thinking of all the steps he would have to take to make himself presentable - show ering, shaving, brushing his teeth - he didn't want to go at first. But he did and it was the beginning of the road back to normalcy. A persis tent Martha then led him into a position with the Scouts which in turn built him a social network. His earlier church association and Bible-reading led him to become a Born-Again Bill M acPhee Christian. His thoughts finally turned toward employment but how could he get a job? He had been out of work for five years. Yet he had always been goal-oriented. At 13, he had been an ice-cream vendor and from then on he was always working at something in or around his home town of Fort Erie. Before schizophrenia struck him down, he had been a professional scuba diver and had travelled to countries like Singapore and Thailand to promote an underwater skills program. When illness hit him, he was working in a printing shop. Ready now to "take any thing," he approached a fel low church member who offered him a job as flag man, directing traffic around road construction. "You should have seen some of the traffic jams." After that, he tried many jobs, most of them unsuc cessfully. Then, one day, he read a book about starting a business with no capital. He was intrigued. The light went on. He knew schizo phrenia and thought he could turn out a magazine based on it. After taking a business school course and making a business plan, he launched his own magazine, The Schizophrenia Digest. For six years, it has been a suc cessful publication. 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