Coping With Paranoia as an LGBTQ+ Person (Part 1)
A Story of a Gay Man’s Experiences Managing His Mental Health, and What We Can Learn From It.
Also by Dwight Long:
I recently came across a suggestion on how to get started as a newbie writing online — write about your problems and solve them. That way, you can help others who might learn from your experience, and also help yourself overcome your problems.
I will be discussing a challenging depressive and paranoid disorder that I have, known as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. How I respond to this disorder is what I most want to change and continue to improve in my life going forward. It is a story about how careless attitudes and unkind remarks expanded out of control for me, affected my health and had long-term costs. I will describe what the disorder means to me, what I have done to manage it, and how that has evolved over the 40+ years I have had it.
In doing this, I want to illustrate the cost of people behaving badly toward others. Negative behavior in public such as making racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks, can have real costs to the mental health of individuals and to society. In Part II, coming in a future installment, I will further discuss solutions to dealing with my mental illness, what I have learned from having and managing it over the years, and how you can apply that to your life.
I first want to remind you that it costs you nothing to be kind and decent to people. You never know what someone is going through and you don’t know what your bad behavior may be costing them. I also want to influence and challenge how we think about the intersection of LGBTQ+ people and mental illness. I want people reading this to realize how the stress of being a young gay man in a straight world can sometimes be a trigger for a mental illness. This can be especially true for individuals like me with a predisposition to mental illness in their family and genetics.
I suspect that I am not the only gay man who has paranoia and depression in his life. As I have read, being both gay and paranoid has historically been a troubling issue in the mental health field. It has been an issue that I think has been often ignored, hidden, swept under the rug, and is little publicly discussed. I’m hoping my experience could be helpful to anyone who is having a difficult time coping emotionally in a sometimes tough world, including other identities in the Queer community.
In my 40+ years as a mental health out-patient, I’ve understandably been fairly private about my illness. I have not discussed it much with friends and family except with close family members and my health care professionals. I certainly haven’t posted about it publicly, so I am hesitant to open up, but in the hope of helping others and spreading awareness, here goes.
A mental disorder came into my life following a college fraternity initiation gone bad on a cold January 11th in 1981. I had pledged the fraternity in the second year of college. I don’t blame them and there was no physical hazing. The “hell week” of initiation involved what could be considered some mental hazing, but nothing unusual for the time in the early 1980’s. I can say that I had many friends in this group and I made some deeply-felt lifelong connections and friendships. During our initiation week, however, some of the more vocally homophobic members that I had not yet met and did not know joined in. They came to mentally haze our members. Most, but not all, of my pledge brothers laughed it off.
One of my pledge brothers put his fist through a wall, walked out the door and left us. We never saw him again and I wonder what became of him. For me, it was just hard at that point in my life to deal with these people and their hostility. I was young and not out, in a large group of other young, mostly straight, college age men. I put a lot of pressure on myself to conform and these people were calling me out for being different. I took the whole thing too seriously. At the initiation on Sunday morning, after running back to my dorm that Saturday night and then going back, I cried like a baby. That was not that unusual and other new initiates cried. Back in my dorm after that, I tried to catch up on my architecture courses and design work. I could not concentrate at all on my work. I could not keep my mind off of what I feared my fraternity brothers “must be thinking of me”. I was facing the fact that I was gay.
The following quarter in school was a disaster, I went from being ranked 13th in my class of 98 Architecture students with a cumulative sophomore GPA of 3.47 to earning a 1.5 GPA for the quarter. I went on my first co-op work experience. The school told me I had bit off more than I could chew and should get professional help, so I went to see a psychiatrist and started medicine. The meds helped right away, but not fully. I would never be quite the same young and naive person that I was in my first year and one-half of college.
Me in my younger days at 25 and in college.
My college experience was a long one, an 8+ year slog full of starts and stops. I left architecture after another year of trying to get back to where I was. There were many bouts with the illness. I finished college with a B.S. in Business and an M.S. in a program combining Math and Computer Science. I had spent my first 2.5 years as an Architecture major, worked in five internships in Architecture and IT, worked five summers in paper manufacturing back in my hometown, and totaled six years of coursework. College was very much more flexible than professional work and was a hodgepodge of academics, working, Greek life, socializing, friendships, relationships and exploring being a young gay man. Despite having to manage my new challenge, I enjoyed college and I pretty much thrived on it. My experience was filled with many highs, but even more extreme lows.
The Information Technology (I.T.) Career that I prepared for in school did not go as well. Working in I.T. was a different kind of stress than academic work, working in architectural design offices and the work I did in business marketing during the year between undergrad and grad school. Looking back, I don’t think that I.T. was a good fit for me and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone struggling with mental illness. I can remember working in open office environments in Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio over the 16 years I was involved in it. These open offices with cubicles always came with much noise pollution, stress and negativity which fed into and triggered my auditory hallucinations. I didn’t deal well with the stress of it.
About the hallucinations, an odd thing happens in my brain when I’m in public around strangers and trying to work in office settings. I often sense people are talking and thinking negatively about me. This doesn’t happen so much when I’m with my friends and with people I trust. When I am not taking my medicine, I have frequent auditory hallucinations of people saying critical things to me, though I almost never stop my medicine unless I’m trying a new one. I’ve tried new meds. in hopes of greater relief from the paranoia. When I am on my meds this is more of an involuntary. “audiation” or something I hear automatically in my “minds ear”. I often say to myself, did I just hear that? I have asked people I trust to listen if they heard any people around me saying anything, and they almost always reply, “No”.
I imagine this sounds wierd to a lot of you, but I believe it is actually a fairly common thing for many people with mental illness to experience. There is a “Hearing Voices” movement in the UK, US and internationally that claims this is a common thing for many people who should not considered “mentally ill”. I don’t know if that’s true. It is probably a matter of degree and frequency. This certainly does not mean that I am suddenly going to fly into a rage and take a hatchet to someone, as in the stereotypical view of schizophrenics in the movies and TV. Sometimes I do react to it by feeling anger or with tears. Mostly, though, I just try to keep it to myself and try not to do anything to upset anyone.
The feelings I have when I feel persecuted are often intensely painful emotions, as well as the aftermath of painful feelings that linger and won’t go away. Hearing a particularly rude comment from a stranger can sometimes ruin a day. Most of the time I never really know for sure if the rude comments were a hallucination, or if the person possibly could have really said something. It can be hard to let go of that thought. It makes it hard to trust my mind and can leave me with an unsettled feeling.
I realize some of this may be rooted in feeling shame for being gay and for feeling awkward socially about being gay. Shame is still a huge issue for many gay people, even in the 2020’s. This is described well in. “The Velvet Rage, The Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World”, by Alan Downs, PhD. , 2012. I realize that many LGBTQ+ folks who may be younger than I am may not have this feeling of shame. But my feelings and the response of my generation to our growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s are as valid to me as the feelings of those who grew up in more understanding and enlightened times are to them.
I know that I must take my meds regularly. They have been miraculous and I do believe I would be in a hospital without them. My doctor has prescribed a few newer medicines for several years now. There is one for psychosis (Invega) and two for depression (Prestiq and Wellbutrin). For many years before taking the newer Invega and Prestiq, I was prescribed earlier forms of medicines for psychosis (Trilafon) and for depression(Effexor). These earlier medicines had many side effects which included making me feel drowsy all the time and sleep more than I normally would. The newer meds have almost no side effects, except maybe I sleep too little now. So My doctor has me taking a small amount of Trilafon at bedtime, which helps me sleep and further helps with the paranoia.
I am now motivated to do things like study jazz piano, read books, articles and write. These are things I could not do for many years before, when I was on the older meds, because I slept a lot and was depressed.
I also take Neurontin, which I have found wards off the strange visual perceptual changes I would otherwise temporarily get without this med. I used to get these perceptual attacks when I walked to class in college. The doctor calls them “visual illusions”. I start noticing all the cracks in the pavement when I’m looking down and walking. I notice imperfections in surfaces. I notice all the many different typefaces on the various things around me, like on cars, signs, packaging, etc. I’m typically calm when it happens so it’s not really a panic attack, but It is very distracting. I have to get off the road when I’m driving.
One day, I got the attack while taking a mathematical statistics exam in graduate school. The professor asked me, “what was I going to do when I get these attacks when I am working? “. He wanted me to drop out of grad school. I asked him to let me retake the test and he said it would be unfair to the other students. But he gave in and let me retake the exam. I told him that as long as I could make passing grades (my grades were always good as I was a good student), that he couldn’t make me drop out of college. He had a point though, and staying employed has been a challenge, but I don’t believe in giving up.
I have more recently tried to contribute in other ways. Having my illness has given me the gift of believing strongly in the power of kindness and making people fell better than they did before they met you or were with you. When I think of what impact I may make after I’m gone from this life, I think a lot of it will involve what people do after they have met with me. I hope they will feel better through my piano music, writing, kindness and empathy for them. I believe that we are all connected a lot more closely than we realize. I think that even small actions can affect larger positive results and consequences in the world, like ripples in the water spreading out.
I’m going to pause now. In my next installment, I will write more about what I think we can do to solve these problems, what I have learned from having them, and how you can apply what I’ve learned into your life. I apologize for not having covered more of that in this article, but it’s getting long enough. I have a lot of ideas and will get to them in Part II next time. For now, I want you to take away the fact that it costs you nothing to be kind and decent to people. You don’t know what people might be going through personally or what health issues they may be dealing with, and you don’t know what your bad behavior could be costing them.
