Liz Grace (pen name)

Conquering Deafness and Schizophrenia: Liz Grace

See the condensed story in Newsletter Issue 25

Liz Grace describes her childhood as happy, up until she was 10 years old when her mother died from breast cancer. Afterward, she remembers life as lonely and difficult. Following her mother’s diagnosis, her maternal grandparents moved closer to Liz’s family and were always loving, supportive, and emotionally close to Liz throughout her whole life. However, she was not close to her three siblings after her mother’s death.

Liz remembers doing satisfactory work in elementary and high school, but it was not her best. She was smart, and though she often didn’t do her homework, she sometimes corrected her teachers’ academic mistakes in math classes.

Liz decided to add another year of high school, often called a “victory lap,” because she had failed three of her classes during her fourth year due to lack of motivation, which was caused by her declining mental health.

Staying in high school for an extra year was difficult because all her friends had graduated and moved on to college. During that year, Liz sank into a deep depression. She hated herself and was unhappy. Her memory was failing her, and she struggled with basic memorization in classes.

At times, while in high school, she experienced voices in her head, laughing at her like a laugh track on a TV show. Fortunately, these voices disappeared for many years and would not bother her again until adulthood.

In October 2005, during her fifth year of high school at age 17, Liz experienced her first suicidal thoughts. Her grades dropped, and she chose to see a counselor without telling anyone.

Thinking that her conversations with the counselor were strictly confidential, Liz confided that she was still thinking of killing herself and had a plan to do it by overdosing on pills. She was immediately hospitalized for her first time, for three days. Upon discharge, Liz made a promise to her counselor that she would not hurt herself. But Liz was unable to keep her promise. That afternoon while at school, Liz swallowed a bottle of Tylenol. She expected to die, but instead, became very sick.

Soon after, a teacher found her feeling severely ill and called an ambulance. Though it was too late for her to be treated with charcoal, she still made a full recovery.

From age 16, Liz also struggled with rapid hearing loss due to a genetic condition. Looking back, Liz believes that her hearing loss exacerbated her struggle to blend in socially. At that time, she volunteered with teenagers with special needs, and some of her closest friends were in a local youth group.

Liz would be in and out of hospitals five times during her last year of high school. At times, she was incorrectly diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. And though she was struggling with psychosis, her treatment team failed to recognize it, thinking that she was simply seeking attention. During her third and fifth hospital stays, she was forcefully restrained during a meltdown, which is still traumatic to her today. She also was put on an antipsychotic medication which did work well for her, but it had bad side effects such as weight gain.

Just prior to her fifth year of high school, Liz was told that her father was about to be remarried to a woman she barely knew. The stress of this and still coping with the loss of her mother led to her third hospitalization, which would last six weeks.

While her dad was busy preparing for his wedding, he had no patience for Liz’s psychotic outbursts, and he kicked Liz out of their house. Since 2006, she has had no contact with him. Fortunately, Liz’s grandparents took her in and were loving and accommodating, meeting all her needs.

Liz was excited to graduate from high school and finally move on to enjoy the independence of being an adult. After high school, she enrolled in college in Toronto where she lived in a dormitory on campus. At this time, she was taking an antidepressant, but she went on and off of it. Finally, she realized she needed the antidepressant, and in treatment, she lived in nearly full remission. She excelled in college without any hospitalizations for the next eight years.

After two years, in 2008, she graduated from college with an occupational therapy assistant diploma and enrolled in undergraduate studies. As an undergraduate, she worked as a dormitory resident assistant and always scored high grades. She completed a bachelor’s degree in child health in 2012.

Unfortunately, while doing her best in school and scoring high grades, Liz’s hearing loss progressed, and she developed profound hearing loss by her third year at the university. Over several years, she learned American Sign Language and benefitted from a large Deaf community in the town where her university was located. She would spend every Friday night learning and practicing sign language. She eventually used both sign language and captions to make it through her college studies.

In 2012, Liz began studying for a master’s degree in occupational therapy, which would take two years.

During Liz’s last year of her master’s program, in 2014, she had surgery for cochlear implants, enabling her to eventually regain some of her hearing. Though hearing again was a breakthrough and radically changed her life for the better, the stress and excitement of getting the implants led to her first clinical manic episode, though Liz had not had a psychiatric break since her fifth year of high school.

Just as she was finishing graduate school, Liz’s psychosis returned. Approaching graduation with her master’s degree, she began to make some poor and reckless choices. She walked nine kilometers over four hours through unsafe neighborhoods, desperate to lessen the extra manic energy she was experiencing. She could not focus or sleep.

Weeks before her next hospitalization, when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she landed her first job as an occupational therapist. On her discharge from the hospital, her doctors felt confident she could handle her new job. She left the hospital on the antipsychotic medication quetiapine as well as haloperidol, valproate, and lithium.

After leaving the hospital and beginning her job, Liz quickly realized she was unable to perform. Liz’s first occupational therapy job gave all new employees a three-month probation period. She was fired only one week later for manic behavior.

Plunging into depression, Liz found she could not eat, sleep, or even shower. She needed friends to call her to remind her to go to bed or to eat. Soon after, her friend drove her to a psychiatric emergency room.

Unfortunately, hospital staff did not allow Liz onto the psychiatric floor with her service dog, who had helped her for years through her hearing loss. Liz was quickly discharged from the hospital against medical advice to get her dog back. Still manic, talking too fast, and unable to focus, a few days later she was readmitted to another floor where she could be accompanied by her dog.

While in the hospital, Liz remembers the walls “bleeding.” She kept washing the walls to try to clean up the blood, though the walls were clean. She slept at night clinging to a plastic knife which she felt she needed for protection. She also believed she was working with Steven Hawking, to solve mysteries of the multiverse, and she was actively looking for black holes.

A few weeks after the completion of graduate school and after her hospitalization, Liz moved in again with her grandparents. She entered a day program at a Toronto psychiatric hospital from the summer of 2014 until early 2015. She continued to take medications throughout this whole period.

Although Liz was very medically compliant, she remembers not being able to take her medications for a few days when she ran out of them. Off medications, Liz felt more awake and alert, but her psychosis quickly returned. After one time briefly discontinuing her medications, she realized how badly she needed them and would never discontinue them again.

In the summer of 2015, Liz determined that she was well enough to work again. She landed a new job in occupational therapy with flexible hours located an hour and a half away in a small town. Her grandparents were worried about her, feeling she was not ready to work.

By the beginning of 2016, while working, Liz began again to believe that she was collaborating on a physics project with Steven Hawking. She heard someone shouting her name, and there was noise in her head, like a quiet radio where she could not make out the words. Her hygiene suffered and she did not frequently bathe or brush her teeth. At this time, she had no mood symptoms. Her diagnosis was changed from bipolar disorder to schizoaffective disorder.

She decided to take a two-month leave of absence, spending several weeks in another day program. Fortunately, at her new job, she was considered an independent contractor and her hours with the job were flexible.

Finally, thanks to effective antipsychotic medication, in 2016, Liz had achieved recovery. From 2016 until 2022 she worked about 30 to 40 hours a week in field, living independently. In 2017, she bought a house in a rural community about an hour and a half outside of Toronto.

Liz began another new job at a pain clinic in January 2022. Initially, the stress of changing jobs landed her in the hospital again for four weeks, but that hospitalization was to be her last, to date.

Over the years, many of Liz’s friends have had difficulty understanding and accepting what has happened to her through her challenges in her mental health. She finds that while friends after graduate school often do not understand, she has kept several relationships from her undergraduate and graduate years, where she was excelling academically and personally. She sometimes struggles to go the next step in relationships, moving on in her relationships from acquaintances to friends.

Today, Liz has insight. Prior to a manic episode, she feels fidgety. If she starts to experience a great deal of stress, she may become slightly paranoid. In the past, she suspected her colleague of trying to get her fired but quickly recognized this as a delusion, and with rest and a medication change, the delusion went away. Recently, she found herself driving too fast and recklessly and realized the need to rest and discuss it with her treatment team. When she experiences mild paranoia or other symptoms, she is quick to share this with her case manager, therapist, and physician.

Today, Liz has achieved recovery on the antipsychotic cariprazine, bupropion, and the
mood stabilizer lithium. She is surviving, thriving, working full-time while being the primary caregiver for her grandmother. She also has her own small business and participates in various community activities.

Liz is the author of the book Resilient: Surviving My Mental Illness (2023), which is available on Amazon. She is actively pursuing speaking engagements in order to share her book, her message, and her story.