I faced what should have been a difficult decision for me immediately after my first full-blown psychotic break, where I was an inpatient for three weeks and then a partial daytime patient for two weeks. I decided without hesitation to still begin a PhD program that started in two months, where I would move to another state all by myself in a month after daytime hospitalization ended. When leaving the daytime program, I was given a Global Assessment Functioning score of 60%.
I refused to let anything stop me, even a psychotic break that left me cognitively impaired. I saw getting a full academic scholarship and stipend to a prestigious University as the honor of a lifetime. But in that year, I could not hold a train of thought, focus well, or think on my feet. In my second semester, there was a teaching style that called for me to enroll in disability services and receive accommodations. I made a full cognitive recovery by the one-year mark of a school calendar, after two semesters and a summer term, but I was soon taken off my antipsychotic by a psychiatrist. I then started to slip back into another break. I left the program, moved in with my parents, and then had my second full break and then another.
After three breaks in two years, I was cognitively impaired to a greater degree than ever before. I thought everything in my academic career I had worked so hard for was wasted. I was given disability papers to sign, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever work again. Slowly I did start to work again and build a new career, but it took humility, patience, and luck. My cognitive recovery simultaneously and gradually took place.
Here is what I have learned about experiencing cognitive impairment and recovering.
Living to Your Potential and What-ifs
One of my biggest fears has been living to the potential I could have achieved if I had not been mentally ill for a decade and then had three psychotic breaks. It’s almost impossible not to ask what-ifs, like what if I had never gone off my antipsychotic? Where would I be in life, and would I be different as a person? Would I be more successful? The truth is that it is impossible to say, and thinking too long about this is counterproductive and produces negative thinking. You can’t automatically assume that your life would have been better had you not been ill. Your challenge of being mentally ill could have been replaced with another challenge.
