Tag: mindset

Schizophrenia in Creativity and Productivity

(Note: This post has been adapted for The Schizophrenia Diaries, but is mostly a repost from A Productive Hannah.)

In some ways, I honestly don’t remember much around the origins of this blog. It was summer 2020 (and let’s face it—who has a great memory of summer 2020?). I wasn’t yet back on antipsychotics (by weeks to months), I was facing a pandemic, a world on fire, the recent death of my grandmother, and the one year anniversary of discovering my father’s death (leading to PTSD). I was mostly lost in a creative haze, spending hours every day on the swingset at the nearest park in heat over 110*F—dissociatively daydreaming up new plotlines with a song on repeat—or curled up in the fetal position on the floor in my office, near catatonic and hallucinating. It was A Time. 

However, it was one of the most prolific periods of my life. After spending most of a year after my father’s death pouring emotions into Contrivance, my primary fiction project of almost a decade, instead of sleeping at night, I was (mostly) taking a break from Contrivance’s dystopian doom and gloom that now seemed all too realistic, focusing on what I thought would be a quick, simple side project to perk me up, which eventually became the I’ll Give You series, my first real foray into erotica, which now has four books published and more in the works (spoiler alert: not a quick, simple, or always cheery side project after all).

And, I started The Schizophrenia Diaries, after having casually maintained a different blog for about a year. My first post wasn’t about writing or creativity at all. It was about Farrah, my so called schizophrenia tamagotchi, my recurring puppy hallucination, who had recently come about. From there, I wrote about all manner of mental health related things for about six months, essays as ideas came up, then floundered a little on what to do with the blog. I was back on meds, and out of therapy. Vaccines were on the horizon. The election was over. I’d recently gotten married and published my first book. Things were good, and while I was grateful, I wasn’t sure what to write about now; without acute symptoms to reflect on, I got a little lost. Things on the blog slowed down, and I didn’t make a post in 2021 until mid April.

I had thought about it in the meantime. I didn’t really want to abandon the blog. Schizophrenia is highly stigmatized and misunderstood. Stories of schizophrenics are rarely told at all, and even more rarely do we get to tell our stories ourselves. I felt it was important—part of something bigger than me—to write on it. But, the blog was neglected when I was doing well, which gave me mixed feelings on it, and I wasn’t sure what I had left to say. I thought that maybe I needed more of a theme, an angle, something to ground the project besides processing symptoms as they arose.

I reread some early posts on the blog. What grabbed me was my last post before things really slowed down, a September post before two more that December and then silence for four months. (Note: I know I made some posts that were later taken down, so there may be minor inaccuracies here.) The post that grabbed my attention was about psychosis as a part of my writing process, how my schizophrenia and my colloquial tortured artist syndrome intertwined, about how my psychotic daydreams fueled my writing, how the darkness of the things I tended to write about both contradicted my triggers and calmed me down, and so on. 

That. That was my angle. Because even when my symptoms improved, they were still there—and the most cohesive way I could talk about them was through how they impacted my creative processes. No matter what, I was always writing. I always had that to talk about. 

With reframing and revising, things picked up on the blog again, even when my mental health was largely okay. 

I talk a lot about psychosis and creativity—but what about psychosis and productivity, one of my other passions? 

I mentioned that one of the worst time periods in my life as far as symptoms was also one of my most prolific—how does that work? 

There’s definitely a balance.

After having made it without meds for about two years, when I started again, the first night I took Seroquel—well, firstly, it knocked me out so unexpectedly hard and fast that I fell out of my chair at my desk—the change was immediate. For a few days, I was basically symptom free. It was almost like I didn’t have schizophrenia, overnight. I realized how bad my sleep had been—which didn’t help anything. It had been so bad, I realized, as Seroquel knocked me out at night, I wondered if I could chalk almost everything that year up to sleep deprivation, the miracle of Seroquel to the miracle of sleep, more than its use as an antipsychotic. 

But during those few days, I felt… conflicted. 

When Farrah—the dog who’s not real, mind you—found out—when I decided—that I was likely going back on meds, she worked those puppy dog eyes real hard. Why would you want to get rid of me, Mom? I tried to telepathically communicate to her that as far as I was concerned, I was happy to keep her, if I could get rid of the corpse and the blaring music and the black blobs and the flashes of light and the white noise and the maggots and all of the other issues. Later, I came to realize that Farrah—this is my current working theory, at least—represents the part of my mind that wants to be psychotic, freely creative without the limits of pesky reality.

During those first few days after Seroquel, I felt… a little empty. Numbed. Better than I had in months, maybe a year, in certain ways, but… something was missing. My daydreams were missing, my fiction fuel—they were back in the normal human range. It was like watching a movie on a decades old television versus watching it in IMAX 3D. I couldn’t get reality to go away entirely even when I tried—and normally, I didn’t have to try; in fact, normally, I had to fight to get back when my alarm went off telling me it was time to make dinner or something, nudging me out of daydreams. 

Despite how well I seemed to be doing, I wondered if I might lower the dosage. 

But, my body quickly adjusted. A few days later, I could sink into my daydreams that deeply again, but I had some more control over starting, and I didn’t have to fight quite as hard to stop. Other symptoms stayed improved but didn’t vanish. And, not lost in the daydream stage forever, it was easier to get out when I wanted, to grab a pen, and start putting daydreams on paper. But things can get pretty bad—lots and lots of time lost in fantasy on the verge of hallucination, not quite in my control—before I totally stop getting to the part where I write them down. After meds, I was overall less purely prolific, except for a few really, really bad parts of that prior year or so. 

However, that was just about fiction word count. I thrived in other areas like I never had before, where psychosis was mostly a burden. It’s not much of an advantage as far as being a housewife, a landlord, a butler school student, an alternative sexuality educator, a group organizer, or even a nonfiction writer (overall, my blogging writing has picked up since). In fact, those last three non writing areas were all things I seriously picked up within a year after meds for the first time. I found more balance. I wrote a little less fiction at times (we’re still talking frequently upwards of 25,000 words per month), but I did everything else that was productive a little more, more than enough to fill the gap. 

Even my fiction did pick up a more productive edge, though. Things other than sheer word count matter for that. Pieces actually got finished, typed, edited, formatted, and posted, in a largely linear way that didn’t contradict itself, with improved quality. More than the three people closest to me began to read it.

I see this psychosis equals creativity but lack of balance thing in my past, too. My schizophrenia was early onset. My symptoms first appeared around my fifteenth birthday, mid ninth grade. I was producing writing like crazy—even winning multiple rounds of National Novel Writing Month per year (this means writing upwards of 50,000 words in a month—many times, I got closer to 100k). However, school wasn’t going so well. I dropped out before the end of tenth grade. Now, I see why I was writing fiction like crazy while failing to turn in five-hundred word essays that weren’t word salad gibberish, or be non catatonic long enough to show up to class, or finish taking a test without yelling at demons only I could see.

So are there pros to schizophrenia for productivity, for me, as a fiction author? Yes. In other areas? Less so that I see right now, though I frequently joke that my general, various anxious neuroses are the edge that keeps me moving so quickly, lest I die tomorrow. Are there cons? Of course. Many. Still, I wouldn’t quite hit the cure button, for myself. 

It’s just, as many other things are, about balance.

Sundowning, and Daydreams vs. Hallucinations

Recently, I read The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey. It’s a great book, and it emphasizes managing your time, attention, and energy. One of my key takeaways was to stop fighting my natural sleep patterns, to shift my schedule, and go to bed and wake up a little later, like my body wanted. 

However, this meant sacrificing the hour of writing I had scheduled early in the morning, before brunch with my wife. This didn’t feel like a huge loss, though. I frequently didn’t get much done in that hour, when my body wanted to be asleep. I had to fight for every word, and it wasn’t actually when most of my writing happened. 

So, I looked to reschedule my official writing time according to the book’s principles, figuring out when my energy naturally peaked. Except I realized that I didn’t want to write at that time. I wanted to write when I had less energy, when the daydreams that fuel my fiction are sleepier, more like full dreams. I wanted to write at night, perhaps right before the daily dose of my antipsychotic, when its concentration in my body would theoretically be lowest. But not in the morning, too tired to get words down at all—which also sometimes happened at night—when my daydreams were too hazy, not vividly dreamlike. 

I ended up not structuring my writing time via strict daily timeblocking at all, for now preferring the flexibility of a monthly goal, the ability to separate sleepy, creative, psychotic daydreaming/brainstorming with pen loosely in hand and the part where I actually get coherent paragraph after paragraph down on paper. But it was an interesting observation. 

I more recently started reading another book: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks. From that, I learned about sundowning—a behavioral phenomenon that occurs in people with Alzheimer’s and other conditions. It involves symptoms of confusion and distress that start around sunset and continue through the night. It can also cause hallucinations and occur in people with psychosis. 

I found that interesting, as someone who had recently expressed a preference for at least brainstorming at night—because my semipsychotic daydreams ranged closer to full psychosis at that time. Even more so than in the morning, when my daydreams didn’t seem to have the same grip despite my initial theory of low energy being the important part. I also pondered the stereotype that writers are night owls. 

Additionally, I’ve long struggled with determining what my daydreams are. Just a bit of creative type syndrome? Maladaptive daydreaming? Part of my actual psychosis? I’ve had a lot of creative type friends, though, and my daydreams don’t work like theirs do, much more all consuming. They fit well into the maladaptive daydreaming category, but I still feel like they go a step further; I don’t only struggle to control compulsively slipping into daydreams, but the contents of them also slip out of my grasp. Thus I have always defined them as semipsychotic, though they also don’t fit the way I describe my more typical hallucinations. 

But in reading Hallucinations, I stumbled across something else: the difference in eye movements between seeing, normal and maladaptive daydreams, hallucinations, and dreams. While your eyes tend to scan real areas and track real motion, most people’s eyes go still—glaze over, zone out, if you will—when they are visualizing or daydreaming, unless maybe it’s something very dynamic, or if it’s scanning a visualization of certain kinds of information. In maladaptive daydreaming, this is also common, though some people sometimes truly act out the daydream, usually reserved for private situations. The eyes move—while eyelids are closed—when dreaming, during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep (current research suggests this is part of processing new/changing imagery, not scanning visuals in dreams). 

When hallucinating, the eyes often move as if seeing something real. This has been studied a lot in terms of Charles Bonnet syndrome (visual hallucinations connected to loss of vision), as it has interesting implications about the difference—or lack thereof—in seeing versus perceiving. 

So I tried a few informal experiments. I asked around, watching as others visualized/daydreamed, and asking what they saw when I did, and a few times, I sat in my office, left a recording Zoom meeting with just me in it open on my laptop in front of me, and sank into my daydreams, then watched the recordings and what my eyes did. 

While I had no dramatic behaviors to note—I didn’t fully act out the dream, and didn’t do anything consciously—my eyes, always open, definitely moved. Remembering what I’d been daydreaming about, I noted that they sometimes tracked motion within the daydream, from roughly the perspective of the point of view character (all in third person, but kind of flipping back and forth at times the way the camera does in a movie)—following a character scrambling away in a chase. Or, my eyes acted out the way the observed character’s eyes darted back and forth looking for a direction to run. Different bits. 

But this helped confirm for me that my daydreams might go a bit beyond, and I was clearly able to observe that they did so more at night, in a way that made sense as a form of sundowning (among other evening symptoms—a heavier leaning towards more typical hallucinations, mood symptoms, dissociation, PTSD flashbacks, hypervigilance, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, catatonia).  

It can be very beneficial, validating, to find the word for something, a more objective way to look at it, to find out that other people do it, too, even for phenomena I had already casually observed. 

So, I was glad to come across these things.