Dealing with Schizophrenia

(April 22, 2006) -- When her schizophrenia was at its worst, Vicky Collins carried a stuffed rabbit everywhere.

The rabbit, Velvie, made her feel more secure, even if people stared.

When voices told her to kill herself, Collins would clutch the soft, brown rabbit with the red velvet dress.

Her longtime friend Kevin Bomhoff remembers the stuffed bunny.

‘‘I noticed when she stopped carrying the (rabbit) and started carrying books,’’ he said.

That’s about the time Collins started getting better.

Academia replaced Velvie as Collins’ security blanket. And the voices — while they still speak sometimes — became quieter.

Collins — a daughter, a sister and a social worker — wants you to know a few things about mental illness:

— You can get better.

— You can be successful.

— You can make up for the years you lost.

Collins, 47, lost about 20 of them.

Around the age most people are engrossed in their first jobs or starting families, Collins was a patient at a mental hospital.

Now she works full time, teaches and has a master’s degree in social work. Her diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder with a borderline personality disorder. She suffers from symptoms of schizophrenia and depression.

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain with symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and withdrawal. Many people with the disease have trouble expressing thoughts. Their speech can be difficult to understand.

The man accused of killing 17-year-old QuikTrip clerk Brian Hall last month in Wichita had schizophrenia, his family says.

Anthony Ray Barnes, 40, is accused of first-degree murder and aggravated assault. His sisters said he had stopped taking his medication before the shooting occurred.

Comcare of Sedgwick County, which provides mental health services, says 14 percent of the nearly 5,200 adults undergoing treatment there have one of six types of schizophrenia.

News of the shooting saddened Collins.

‘‘Never would I harm another person,’’ she said. ‘‘If I was in the public and thought that about schizophrenics, I’d be scared, too.’’

Collins had symptoms of schizophrenia as a young woman, but she didn’t know she had a disease.

‘‘I knew I had problems, but I didn’t know to put a name to it,’’ she said.

As a senior in high school, she went from being an honor student to flunking out. She had trouble concentrating and organizing her thoughts.

She attempted college but landed on academic probation.

She had migraines and began seeing a neurologist. At 20, she tried to kill herself.

She says the voices that spoke to her were ruthless and persistent. They told her, over and over, to kill herself.

On Jan. 2, 1984, she was taken in handcuffs to the Topeka State Hospital, a mental hospital that has since closed. She had tried to kill herself again.

She waived her right to a hearing and declared herself incompetent. She did so, she said, to spare her parents.

Over the years, Collins also has spent time in the psychiatric unit of a Wichita hospital and at Comcare’s ‘‘partial’’ hospital, a structured daytime therapeutic program.

Comcare has since replaced that program with one in which clients go out into the community to receive services.

The medications Collins took initially numbed her brain and left her in a condition that was barely better than the symptoms they tried to control, she said.

People who didn’t know her might have described her as ‘‘not quite there.’’

Collins now takes eight medications daily and says they — particularly Clozaril — work far better.

In 1996, with the help of the new medications, Collins resumed her studies at Wichita State University. She eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

But she started preparing for college four years before enrolling. To help develop an attention span, she read children’s books. To get used to sitting still, she took art classes.

She finished her undergraduate degree in 2001. She earned a master’s degree in social work in 2003 and her license a year later.

‘‘She’s an academic animal,’’ Bomhoff said.

Bomhoff, community support coordinator at Wichita State University’s Self-Help Network Center for Community Support and Research, has known Collins since the ’80s, first as a patient and now as a colleague.

Collins completed her practicum at the Self-Help Network, which works with nonprofit and community organizations across the state.

She now works there full time as a project facilitator. Her colleagues say one of her biggest strengths is helping people with mental illness learn coping tools.

Her downtown office, filled with plants, fish and Beanie Baby bears, overlooks a flowering Bradford pear tree.

Just recently, a fellow member of the Breakthrough Club, a place where people with mental illnesses can go to look for jobs and socialize, asked Collins about her job.

Does she answer phones?

Does she take out the trash?

Collins answered that she writes grants, does research and teaches classes for Wichita State’s Leadership Empowerment Advocacy Project, which gives students with mental illnesses the opportunity to experience college life.

Despite her successes, Collins is not cured. She struggles daily. She keeps in check with a pill planner that monitors her medications.

Recently, she was so depressed she wondered to herself who would take care of her cats, dog, fish and hermit crabs.

Luckily a friend called her at the worst of it and helped dig her out.

While she still plans her own death at times, she no longer acts on those plans. In the past, she overdosed on pills. At one time, she had a shotgun and shells. She has burned herself.

‘‘My impulse control is a lot better now,’’ she said.

Her younger sister, Pamela Self, is proud of Collins. She said she remembers when Collins appeared dazed and confused much of the time.

‘‘The changes in her are just outstanding,’’ Self said. ‘‘I am so, so happy for her.’’

Collins lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment. About 86 percent of Comcare’s patients with schizophrenia live independently.

Her interest in American Indian cultures is apparent at home. Indian art hangs on her walls. A curio cabinet holds more Beanie Babies. Fish tanks bubble.

She gardens in a shared plot at the apartment complex. Last year, she planted too many tomatoes, and they didn’t fare so well. This year, she’ll plant a smaller crop.

She reads all the time, especially books on leadership and mental illness. She especially recommends ‘‘The Day the Voices Stopped,’’ by Kenneth Steele. She listens to the radio but rarely turns on the TV in her living room, she said.

Collins is proud that she takes care of herself. She has gone from depending on a disability check to earning her own money.

She’s soft-spoken and modest but points out that her supervisors treat her like everyone else at the office.

Bomhoff and Greg Meissen, director of the Self-Help Network, say that’s true.

Meissen was Collins’ academic adviser at Wichita State. He said she put a lot of thought into how to accomplish day-to-day successes. If she felt overwhelmed, she would figure out which class was the best to drop and would do the least amount of damage to her academic record.

‘‘And she has woven the best support system around herself,’’ he said.

Collins wishes other people with mental illnesses would believe in themselves. She says the stigma of mental illness keeps many from getting the help they need.

advertisement

She sees a therapist once a week, a case manager once a week, a psychiatrist every six weeks and her primary care physician, Donna Sweet, every two months.

Collins hasn’t tried to kill herself in years.

She partly credits her doctor for that. Sweet, Collins said, drilled it into her head, repeatedly, that self-harm is not acceptable.

‘‘I don’t think anyone wants to die,’’ she said. ‘‘They just want the pain to go away.’’

Last updated: 04/06

top ~ next ~ articles table of contents ~ send page to a friend

We subscribe to the HONcode principles. Verify here.