J. Peters

J. Peters

Author and Social Worker: J Peters

Schizophrenia snuck into my life in college. I was starting my last semester at Binghamton University in upstate New York. I had no idea I was getting sick (a common symptom of schizophrenia called anosognosia). Something seemed wrong with everyone else, primarily Binghamton University and the English department. I was so confident in my perception that when people suggested I was sick, I didn’t listen to any of them.

It was my last year of college, so most of my friends had already graduated the previous semester. There had been 8 or 10 of us friends living together for 4 years, and I missed them. I panicked after spending the summer before my senior year with my remaining two friends. I realized I didn’t have a real plan after graduation. After all, I was going to graduate with a degree in English. The job prospects and reality of beginning my life were daunting. In hindsight, I realized my anxiety at that time was beyond normal in its intensity.

I spent the last summer in Binghamton taking classes. After spending the summer and almost the entire year at school without returning home, it became clear that I had a real fondness for the university and being a student. While many say college was the best years of their life, I took it a step further. I began preparing to become a lifetime student when I applied to the English PhD program while completing my last year as a bachelor’s student. Though many of my friends and peers were applying to PhD programs, they could envision life after the program and saw more education as a stepping stone to a career. I planned to be a student forever.

I was enthusiastic and eager to learn about language, new words, and philosophy in college. Though I always planned to be a student, I had other lofty ambitions. After getting my PhD, I would use my newly found language understanding to become an English professor.

I was just one semester shy of getting my bachelor’s degree. To finish my degree early, I planned to complete 19 winter credits in 4 weeks at 4 universities. This was an unrealistic and unhealthy pace, as many students were reluctant to take more than four credits at the same time. The anxiety involved in taking on so many credits would eventually contribute to my first full-blown psychotic break.

Shortly after the winter session began, I received an email informing me of my rejection from the doctoral program in English. I was left in total disarray, feeling betrayed and increasingly confused about the events unfolding around me at the university. Despite being rejected and without a workable plan to keep studying at Binghamton, I hoped for the best for my status as a student. My determination to stay optimistic and keep pressing forward in the face of rejection was becoming delusional. The delusional system at work in my mind would only grow more complex as the spring semester unfolded.

That was when I angrily emailed the department to petition my entry into graduate classes. My presence in the department became increasingly visible. The staff started complaining about the course petitions and that it seemed like I was forcing my way into the graduate program. While I had the best intentions, my behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. The department eventually contacted the dean and the university ombudsman. According to the dean of students, I was described as “alarming.” They enacted rules to establish boundaries between the department staff and my ongoing presence in the office. I wasn’t allowed to enter the graduate school area of the department office, a restriction put into place by the university ombudsman.

My biggest problem at the time was the paperwork involved in petitioning the program for permission to begin graduate classes. At one point, I would need to hand the English department secretary a piece of paper signed by the professor of the petitioned class. All this was before course registration took place on the Internet.

At the time, I experienced symptoms impacting my mood. I was becoming increasingly grandiose. I was entitled to be admitted to any academic program I chose. I developed an obsession with English history, especially King George III, the king in power during the American Revolution and during the aftermath after England lost. In my mind, I had a special relationship with the English language, like how King George had control of all facets of English life, including language, as a monarch.

I invented a word on my own, “meta-power.” This was when my delusions began to take over, and I became fixed on specific themes that seemed to consume my thinking. One of these delusions was that I could write a new journal article I intended to publish. It was titled “Contesting Admission.” This journal article would feature my new word, “meta-power,” and I believed it would turn around the recent adverse events in my life. I expected the paper would overturn the admission. I had such high hopes for the article, I conceived it as a “super weapon” as is used in war, changing the tide of my circumstances.

I entered the English department office before the deadline passed to add classes. In my hand was a course petition. As I knocked on the door to the office where I was not welcome, I compared my situation to the American Revolution. I remembered the shots heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. This knock was heard around Binghamton University, but nothing significant came out.

That was when the graduate secretary of the English department picked up the phone and called the police. I still remember walking into that office, looking up, and watching the secretary as she picked up the phone and said, “I am calling the police.”

Believing I was a victim, I didn’t think the police would do anything or respond to her call. I was wrong again. Within minutes, the university police arrived. They handcuffed me in the department corridor and walked me out of the building, only to put me in the police car and take me to the university barracks. Very much visible and now on everyone’s radar, I found myself handcuffed to a pole in the university police barracks.

I was left handcuffed for hours in the barracks, crying uncontrollably. The police gave me a citation for loitering. While in custody, I was still lucid enough to interact somewhat sensibly. Fortunately, the only infraction I had committed was disobeying the ombudsman’s rule. The district attorney dropped the charge when my case went to trial months later.

The police incident frightened me. I was anxious about my status at the university after I was arrested. I was preoccupied that the university would take further harsh action against me. I started to get paranoid at this point. I felt like I could not turn to the university for clarification on moving forward with my education, and I was left isolated and agitated. Unfortunately, in my case, the trauma of my arrest and isolation from support, including losing my friends and staff members at the university, only hastened the progression of what would be later understood as symptoms of schizophrenia.

At that time, it was as though I went into exile, losing touch with many more friends and staying away from campus. My symptoms improved somewhat with less intense stress, but these symptoms would soon return in full force. I began to hear voices in the upstairs area where I was living. I was confused and didn’t know if I was an undergraduate student or a graduate student or if perhaps, I had even graduated. I thought I might be in a unique program for only the most gifted students, which was not communicated to me for a critical, unknown reason.

I began to think I could transmit thoughts from myself to another person’s mind and influence their thinking. I was soon convinced I could read people’s minds. Anytime I saw literature posted on a wall in the community, I believed it had to do with me and my situation as a student.

As my symptoms worsened, it became harder and harder to study. In my final class, I was hallucinating and hearing so many voices that I wasn’t sure if it was the teacher talking to me or voices. Ironically, the class was titled “Voices of Foucault,” which didn’t help. I was already normalizing the onset of what were auditory hallucinations. I thought to myself, “This is intense! A whole new world!” In hindsight, I was making up my reality to cope with feeling disconnected, unaware that I was floridly psychotic.

The voices manifested as old friends: faculty members, sometimes as my parents, and as various other people I had known throughout my life. I often heard my mother and women I had had relationships with in the past. Eventually, I could not tell the difference between different voices and often wondered who had spoken.

At one point, I sensed I was in a courtroom, and a judge and witnesses (my professors or old friends) were speaking. They talked about what was happening in the English department and whether I should graduate or be a student.

I heard the police and emergency personnel beckoning me over a loudspeaker, threatening to enter my building by force. I also heard the CIA and the FBI. The CIA told me I was in a training program, but they later said I was in a CIA witness protection program and that I needed to be in the program for protection because everyone was trying to harm me. Then, the voices of the FBI told me not to listen to the voices of the CIA.

As my voices grew more frequent and louder, I was still convinced the experience was average. By the end of my final semester, I had lost most of my ability to communicate, was unkempt, and was utterly delusional about what I was doing at the university and my status as a student. Despite this, I graduated from Binghamton University with a bachelor’s in English in 2008.

Shortly after graduation, I began wandering around the community, loudly talking nonsense. Suddenly, the CIA or FBI (I can’t remember which) told me to throw a rock through my car window to retrieve something from inside. I broke the window, climbed inside, and then, after throwing a rock through the other side, I climbed out. At that point, the police came, determined I was unwell, and took me to a hospital.

My parents were generally unsurprised, as they had watched me deteriorate for half a year. However, they were shocked when they saw how sick I had become. When they visited me in the hospital, I could barely speak and could not converse with them for more than five minutes.

While hospitalized, I did not know where I was, believing I was probably in an FBI/CIA training lab. After three weeks in the community hospital, my clinicians decided I had “failed” their inpatient program and sent me to a state hospital where I would stay for nearly two months.

I regularly moved furniture around the hospital to cover the electrical outlets, fearing the hospital would use them to monitor me. I was placed on a “one-to-one,” where a staff member monitored me around the clock. This lasted for weeks.

Initially, I refused medication, unsure of what it was and paranoid it would contain a microchip that would always monitor me. I began an older medication, which began to clear my mind.

However, eventually, during one family meeting, the psychiatrist in the hospital and my social worker emphasized the importance of taking medication to treat my new diagnosis of schizophrenia. Until then, I had no explanation of how or why I was in the hospital. The diagnosis made everything much more straightforward. That was when I agreed to begin injections of aripiprazole (Abilify), which were highly effective. I remember my hallucinations dissipating, becoming harder and harder to hear. Finally, my medication had wholly cleared my mind.

In terms of my healing from schizophrenia, finding the proper treatment fit can be difficult. Not all therapists are a good match. Facilities, programs, and treatment centers are not one-size-fits-all, and finding the right setting for some people may take some time.

I began outpatient mental health treatment, psychotherapy, and medication, being discharged from the state hospital center in Binghamton, New York, and coming home. Shortly after returning home, I began treatment at a local hospital with a partial hospitalization program. I completed the program within the usual length of stay, two weeks.

My experience in the partial hospitalization program was pleasant enough. The staff was friendly and skilled, and I was moved through the program quickly enough. Referred to the hospital’s outpatient mental health program, I would do a seven-year stint with various therapists and psychiatrists over the better half of a decade of recovery.

During the initial phases of treatment, I made incredible gains. By 2009, I was connected to a motivating therapist at the hospital back home in Westchester and a clinically savvy psychiatrist. I was adherent to my treatment, medication, and therapy. I was still on an intramuscular injection (IM) that worked well for me, aripiprazole (Abilify Maintena). Today, I have been on Abilify Maintena for 15 years.

Don’t get me wrong. There were setbacks, but they were my learning moments. Eventually, I learned about my disorder, gathered insight and better judgment, and returned to the classroom after a year at the local community college, where I completed a paralegal certificate. Even through my psychosis and treatment, my goal was always to pursue higher education. Using references from my paralegal program, I re-applied to Binghamton University. I knew I would never be admitted to the English department again. After all that I had been through, it also would have been an extremely unhealthy decision to do so.

I wanted to continue healing from my illness and not re-invent the unfortunate experience in college. So, I decided to apply for a master’s in social work (MSW) instead of another English degree. Since Binghamton University has several schools, my reapplication to the university was swift and without incident. I was admitted to the MSW program without problems in 2010, two years after getting sick.  No one investigated my former issues as an undergraduate student.

I liked my treatment team at home and didn’t want to begin with a new therapist and psychiatrist upstate. I also wanted to stay on my injection since it controlled my symptoms. To do so, I traveled to and from the hospital at home to Binghamton every month to obtain my injection, though the round trip to and from the hospital took six hours. I had proper support for my education despite the distance in treatment. Despite commuting, I never missed an IM injection, which enabled my full recovery. I graduated with my master’s on time, exactly four years after I had graduated with my bachelor’s in 2012.

Graduate school was also vital to shaping my concept of healing. I began thinking about self-management while studying social work in graduate school. I still remember sitting in class one afternoon when I was a student. I was 27 at the time. It was a seminar on the theory of human behavior. Students were debating how everyday people could best self-monitor their mental health. In doing so, students and faculty suggested that self-awareness will lead to better mental health. Throughout graduate school, using the skills and information I learned, I constantly applied them to my health and recovery and would recommend these techniques to clients following my graduation.

For over a decade after my initial “break” or “the first episode of psychosis,” I spent time in therapy and self-guided reflection, thinking about my mental health. After graduating with my MSW, I returned home, began working as a social worker, and practiced in the community where I grew up.

I passed my initial social work licensure exam (LMSW) two months after graduating. That fall, I began working in Westchester County for a local agency as a mobile mental health therapist for the Mental Health Association. DCMH, the Department of Community Mental Health in Westchester, funded the program. As a family specialist, I later worked for an ACT Team (Assertive Community Treatment Team). After my time with ACT, I began supervising social work MSW students from various universities in New York City in an Article 31 licensed clinic.

My passion for mental health reached beyond practicing as a social worker. I wanted to create a blog different from others I had seen online.  l launched my Mental Health Affairs blog in the autumn of 2016. Mental Health Affairs (MHA) evolved into multidimensional and blended peer and clinical research elements. My blog was an experiment to merge “two worlds.” Indeed, the common theme I settled upon to bridge the peer and clinical gap was self-management. Under the auspices of self-management, clinicians and peers can benefit from better teaching and self-employing techniques to better regulate their emotional and behavioral health.

By 2017, my blog had gained the attention of the mental health community across the pond. In 2017, I was asked to speak at a blogging conference in England on mental health blogging. With my parents by my side, I crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary Two to Southampton, England, and spoke about healing, blogging, and self-management in London.

In 2019, I authored a memoir about my experience in college titled University on Watch (pseudonym, J. Peters). Today, my blog, Mental Health Affairs, is the most significant player in my healing and contribution to mental health. As noted in my book University on Watch, “This is why, after 10 years of recovery, my parents continue to support my writing on mental health and understand how this act of writing on mental health, spreading awareness to others through blogging, and learning self-management skills is used by people carrying a mental health [psychiatric] diagnosis to self-soothe, and to diffuse and disrupt their new or active symptoms” (J. Peters, 2019). MHA brings readers the most critical and rigorous analytical commentary on the status of medicine, psychiatry, social work, psychology, and allied fields intersecting with mental healthcare today.

Through my work as a social worker, therapist, and disability rights advocate, I’ve fought for those without a voice in the system. Currently, I chair the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB committee) for the New York City Department of Mental Hygiene (DOMH). I’ve been a member of the CAB since 2020. The mission of the CAB couldn’t be more essential to the rollout of a significant new initiative impacting mental health in New York City (NYC).

CAB members and I meet periodically with a liaison from NYC DOMH and other high-level managers and program directors, including managers from programs including Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) mandated treatment programs. We all sit at the CAB committee to review new initiatives in NYC that will impact mental health services and people with psychiatric diagnoses.

In 2020, I was awarded the Bold 10 Under 10 Award from the Binghamton University Alumni Association. I gave a speech at homecoming about my success as a social worker in the first 10 years of my career after graduating. The following year, I partnered with OnTrackNY of Binghamton. I talked at the university about early intervention for people experiencing first-episode psychosis, as I had experienced in college.

When I am not blogging, teaching, or speaking at an event, I am busy running a private mental health therapist office, Recovery Now, LLC, which I opened in 2021 and where I practice as a psychotherapist. Ultimately, schizophrenia aside, nothing worthwhile in my life came easy, but it has been an incredible journey, and I wouldn’t give it up for any other life.

https://mentalhealthaffairs.blog/