My name is Christina Bruni, and I’m almost famous as the Health Guide for Health Central’s schizophrenia community Website at healthcentral.com/schizophrenia where I’ve worked over 6 years. I had a 9-year run as the Living Life columnist for SZ magazine, formerly Schizophrenia Digest.
Since 2002, I’ve done public speaking engagements on mental health recovery, as an In Our Own Voice presenter for NAMI-Staten Island in New York City and a soloist talking numerous times for clients at Zucker-Hillside Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Treatment in Hollis, Queens. I conducted a successful poster session at the yearly NAMI convention in San Diego, titled Five Steps to a Successful Recovery from Schizophrenia.
In June 2000, I graduated from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, with a Masters in Library and Information Science. I’ve worked over 12 years as a professional librarian. Before this, I had a 7-year gig in the gray flannel insurance field.
In 1990, when there was no recovery movement to speak of, and it was unheard of for someone with schizophrenia to work, I obtained a job as an administrative assistant to the director at an insurance firm. She sent me to get trained, and I obtained a Property & Casualty insurance broker’s license.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1987 when I was 22. I had a breakdown on Friday, September 25, 1987, at five o’clock in the afternoon. My break with reality was sudden, total, and irreversible. By 9:00 am that Saturday morning, my mother drove me to the emergency room at St Vincent’s hospital. She figured out where to go because my father had a nursing license at the time. I was given Stelazine within 24 h of exhibiting the delusions, paranoia, and odd behavior, and hospitalized on the ward. Within 3 weeks of being hospitalized, I was released and no longer had any of the symptoms I experienced when I had my breakdown.
It was because of my mother’s one courageous act to drive me to the hospital that I am recovered and have been in remission over 20 years. In April 1992, my first psychiatrist instituted a drug holiday that failed. I had to be hospitalized that July for just under 2 weeks, so I could get stabilized on the medication again.
My first psychiatrist died of a heart attack in the spring of 1998. I was in graduate school and working full-time in the city at a law firm while I took two classes a semester and spent 40 extra hours each semester as the editor, publisher, and reporter/writer for Keyword, the library science program’s newsletter.
The psychiatrist I started to see in the city was unprofessional. At the end of every session, he turned around to ask his own version of a “doorknob question”: “Are you in a relationship?” I found this odd yet didn’t think anything of it because he was The Man who could give me my drugs. He also kept asking me to switch to an atypical, and I refused because at the time I had no symptoms.
Five years into this dance, I canceled our last appointment and didn’t go back. A woman who used to be my friend at the time referred me to her psychiatrist. Dr G is a true professional who treats me like a human being and respects me. I’ve been seeing him since July 2003, going on 10 years.
I’ll tell you that recovery is possible for most people even if it seems just starting out that their lives are a long way off from the finish line. Recovery is not a race nor is it a competition.
Remember, all of us are human beings. Dr G told me at one of our first sessions when I lamented the cross I have to bear: “You see me? I have a thing. The guy in the other office? He has a thing. You just have something a little harder.”
As soon as Dr G said that, I felt better. In April 2007, a week before my birthday, I called him up and told him I had to come in immediately. He scheduled an appointment for the next day.
My brain had shut down. All during the time, I saw the other psychiatrist in the city, I had trouble falling and staying asleep; I would stay up late writing the manuscript for my memoir and often I would break night. My thoughts raced at night; I began having troubling thoughts, not symptoms.
Dr G on that April night in 2007 instituted a crosstiter from the Stelazine to the Geodon. For 16 years, I had taken only 5mg of Stelazine a day and then 10mg when Dr G upped the dose at our first meeting, when I told him I had trouble sleeping and I was afraid he would think I wasn’t doing well. Dr G had told me, “Sometimes we all have a hard night” and raised the dose to 10mg a day.
Within 3 days of taking the Geodon, I noticed an improvement. In the fall of 2007, I saw a therapist for 10 sessions of cognitive behavior therapy. This brief chance meeting with the therapist, and a mild dose increase of the Geodon, changed things dramatically.
To this day, I have no signs or symptoms of the schizophrenia I was diagnosed with when I had my complete breakdown in 1987.
Yet, I do not want you to judge other peers by my success. I’m fond of saying that in recovery, the playing field is truly level when you compete against yourself and no one else. My literary agent secured a book contract for my memoir, Left of the Dial, but the publisher went out of business so she is shopping the manuscript to other editors.
I’ve also written a mental health self-help guide, Live Life Well, that my agent is shopping to editors. I speak out as someone diagnosed with schizophrenia because only silence is shame. I wanted to stop taking the Stelazine to prove I was normal; I was doing so well; I thought I could risk trying to function without the medication.
I don’t recommend a drug holiday for most peers. I will go to my grave championing early if not immediate intervention with medication and therapy when someone exhibits severe psychotic symptoms.
I owe my recovery and my life to my mother, Mary Ann Bruni. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr G for treating me like a human being.
If you ask me, the goal is to be well and whole after you have an episode. I healed with the right medication, therapy, and support.