לורי ראסל

When a Patient Becomes an Academic: Laurie Russell

See Laurie’s feature in Issue 8

Laurie’s first contact with mental health services took place in 2005 when she was still at secondary school, and she cut her hand with a craft knife for no apparent reason. At the beginning, nobody suspected anything more than a “teenager’s mood disorder” or even a kind of “typical” self-injurious behavior found in girls of her age. Laurie, however, did not carry out the act out of distress, impulsivity, or sadness. Instead, she had always claimed that she was not the one who did it, that she was not in control when it happened–someone else told her to cut her hand. Even her child psychiatrist dismissed her claims as manipulative excuses indicative of an emerging borderline personality disorder, and this “someone else” in her mind was a sign that she was “communicating her distress clearly.” Her child psychiatrist found her difficult to diagnose and determined she had clinical depression.

Disillusioned and severely let down by her first adult psychiatrist, as she started her undergraduate studies in pharmacology, Laurie’s condition deteriorated. The other person from outside her own mind told her to injure herself more and more severely to the extent that it became life-threatening. Still, Laurie denied that she wanted to do any of this. She developed the idea that her blood was contaminated with messages “from the air,” that her thoughts were not hers but were accessible from her handwriting, and that none of these belonged to her own self. None of these were of her own volition. She was a puppet under the control of some sinister force.

Laurie’s other symptoms included somatic passivity, thought interference (especially thought insertion) and associated self-disturbances. Delusions of persecution and auditory-verbal hallucinations were present although they were not as severe as the former three. As she continued to spiral downwards, she hit her lowest point, a serious suicide attempt in November 2008 that she insisted was not her own behavior.

When she was found by the police, she was forcibly committed (called “sectioned” under British legislation) to a psychiatric hospital. And sadly, Laurie was handed back to the same psychiatrist who discharged her with no follow-up care at all. Her future husband (then partner) arranged for her to seek a second opinion, and she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on an antipsychotic medication. This, for Laurie, was absolutely life-saving. She also requested a new psychiatrist in the National Health Service. Despite a few more hospitalizations and changes in medication in 2009 and 2011, she has not been an involuntary patient for over 10 years.

Although she had to take a whole year away from her undergraduate studies, she managed to gain the highest mark in her final year research project and a year later she was awarded a distinction in her master’s degree (the highest classification) in psychiatric research methods. She thinks her psychotic break helped her choose her future career in psychiatric research. In 2014, she was able to secure a UK Medical Research Council-funded PhD studentship focusing on studying cognitive neuroscience of early psychosis, including the early stages of schizophrenia. She successfully passed her PhD oral exam three years later with only minor corrections. Although she continues to take her medications, she is also no longer in need of psychiatric care. Today, she works with a general practitioner and no longer needs psychiatric care from mental health services.

More recently, Laurie secured a tenured permanent academic position in mental health research at a prestigious British university. While her personal experience, especially that of a fragmented self-consciousness, inevitably informed, if not inspired, her own research, she views herself not as a psychiatric patient but as an academic and researcher who stands on equal footing with everyone else at her stage of the career. She does tend to downplay her psychiatric history, not always because of potential stigma (despite this being a sad yet relevant concern), but because she does not wish to be defined by a label (either given by psychiatrists OR by other patients). And there is so much more to what she can offer than simply being a psychiatric service user.

When a patient becomes an academic, it means that nobody should be limited by their experiences of mental illness alone. It means that it is still possible to thrive despite a lifelong diagnosis such as schizophrenia.

Laurie hopes she will continue to contribute to her beloved scientific field and to the wider society and engage in influential research that has real-life benefits so that more patients, should they choose to, can become academics.