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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Having successfully overcome mental illness, Patricia
Prince now offers hope and understanding to others
who are suffering.
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At one time, mental illness claimed Patricia Prince's entire life. For years she's been living with the everyday uncertainty of mental illness -- a condition that's mangled her life for more than 20 years. Suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and depression, she knows her disease is always lurking.
But today Prince doesn't feel like psychological prey. For the last six years, she's worked as an administrative assistant at Mental Health Consumer Network (MHCN).
In the past, Prince's network consisted of family and friends who encouraged her to keep fighting her illness. Today she's the one offering understanding and hope to other MHCN clients. It's the kind of assistance that only one who's been there can share.
During her early childhood, Prince lived with her mother and extended family in their own home with all the luxuries a child could want.
But as older family members died, the family lost incomes. Prince, her mother and five siblings were forced to move to the ghetto.
"We were doing really well and, all of a sudden, nothing," she says.
The family ended up in public housing, where there were activities and friends to keep the children occupied.
Prince got married the first time when she was 15 years old. Her husband left her with three young children.
Her second husband walked out on the family, unable to deal with Prince's mental illness.
By the late 1970s, Prince was hospitalized for mental illness but recovered quickly. In 1983, she suffered a nervous breakdown at work and was fired.
"I lost my job, my house, my husband, my car and my three children," she says, ticking off the sum total of mental illness' yo-yo effect.
Between 1983 and 1990, Prince spent a total of three years in the hospital. Like an invisible barrier, mental illness alienated her from many of her friends. She eventually became homeless.
Today, at age 47, Prince can't believe she has lived through all of the things she's faced in her lifetime.
"None of it seems real," she says. "It seems like a dream, a nightmare."
Prior to her breakdown and the diagnosis of schizophrenia and clinical depression, Prince had a good life. She was working as a mechanical drafter and attending night school to get a degree.
But eventually the disease infiltrated her life like sand through cracks in the pavement.
"I started having delusions on the job and in school," she says. "My mind would race."
Prince was besieged by anxiety and paranoia. She believed people at work and school were spying on her, that people were listening in to her phone conversations and that the government was watching her every action through a camera in her television.
"I was reading a science book one day and they had these listening devices that you could point toward a source and hear what was going on," she says.
That convinced her even further that spies were watching her.
"The delusions kept coming faster and faster," Prince says.
She developed a ritual fuelled by her psychosis. She'd drive from her home in Pleasant Ridge to Montgomery to use the Jeanie machine because she thought local banks were cheating her out of her money.
"My mother took me to see a doctor, and after three or so meetings, they knew I needed help," she says.
Prince's mother offered to take care of her children until Prince was able. Another seven years of her life fell away.
Like many people experiencing problems with mental health, it took trial and error to find the correct medication, and many produced terrible side effects.
"There were just tons of medications," she says. "It was almost like experimenting until they came out with Prozac."
But Prozac couldn't silence the voices inside her head. It took still more medication to find the right mix.
"I finally had enough common sense to use logic and not get rid of the voices but ignore them," she says.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Prince's symptoms weren't atypical for sufferers of schizophrenia, who the institute reports often suffer debilitating symptoms such as hearing voices unheard by others and/or believing other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts or plotting to harm them.
By definition, schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and disabling brain disease, according to the NIMH. Furthermore, about 1 percent of the population develops the disease within their lifetime. Available treatments may relieve many symptoms, but most people with schizophrenia continue to suffer some symptoms throughout their lives. It is estimated that fewer than one in five people affected recover completely.
Again, Prince says the support of her family and friends helped her through her illness.
"I was very lucky," she says. "Most of my friends stayed my friends. It was me who shied away."
Although her three children were young at the time of her nervous breakdown, Prince says they understood their mother was ill and stood by her.
"They never held that against me to this very day," she says.
Surprisingly, Prince cannot recall suffering depression as a teenager or a young child.
Prior to the onslaught of her illness, Prince raised her children. Anything in the house that needed to be fixed, she was the one to do it. Everything, that is, but her health.
According to Prince, she was "too busy with a husband and children" to worry about her own health, a domestic quagmire many women find themselves trapped in.
"I was told by my mother that I had to be my husband's backbone," she says. "I had to hold him up. But when I got sick there was no one to hold me up."
After her first husband left, Prince continued to try to support her children and attend their outings and school functions.
"It was hard," she says. "But little did I know I was headed for a nervous breakdown trying to do all these things."
When she was no longer able to be the one in the forefront, the family's finances fell into shambles.
"When I got out of the hospital, there was no money," Prince says. "My bank account was empty."
Then he left. She says he wasn't equipped to handle her illness. She might never know what his excuse was.
"He never gave me one," she says.
The Christmas after Prince left the hospital following her nervous breakdown was a tough one. The only present she could afford to buy was a Michael Jackson figurine for her youngest son.
Though she lost all of her material possessions, she didn't lose the love of her family. When Prince's mother made the choice to take in her grandchildren while she was sick, her mother's husband decided to leave. As a result, her mother lost her home.
"It wasn't just me," Prince says. "This illness affected everybody. I felt so guilty."
Things looked up for Prince after she was released from the hospital. She got her own apartment and received welfare and food stamps, and she visited her children whenever she could, bringing them small tokens of her affection.
Before she was mentally ill herself, Prince thought only white women had nervous breakdowns, that they sat on a couch, talked about their problems and were cured. A black woman, Prince later learned that mental illness doesn't have a color or gender preference.
During the throes of her illness, Prince lost her faith in God. At one point, she completely turned away from her long-held beliefs and became an atheist.
She thought she would die mentally ill. During her recovery, however, her faith was renewed. She says many people who suffer from mental illness eventually experience a sort of "spiritual awakening."
"He doesn't let us suffer long," she says of God.
She likes telling the clients who come to the MHCN that there's hope for living with and treating mental illness.
"Whatever you do, don't try suicide," she warns. "The longer you stick it out, you can get better. You have to be brave."
Prince's mother was diagnosed with cancer two years ago, something that almost sent Prince through another nervous breakdown. Today, the cancer is in remission.
"I really relied on therapy and medicine a lot when she was sick," she says, adding that her friends and family were also helpful during that rough time. "You only spend an hour in therapy and you're around your family and friends most of the time."
Today she's come full circle back to the life she enjoyed years ago. Little things otherwise taken for granted make her feel whole again.
She lives in a house in Avondale and owns a car. She spends her free time with her children and grandchildren, cooking Sunday dinner for them twice a month.
"I've heard people say cooking has a lot to do with keeping family going," Prince says.
Prince plans to go back to school one day, but for now she's living life one day at a time.
"Just getting my sanity back is enough," she says. ©
Places to Turn for Help
The Mental Health Consumer Network offers the Warmline at 513-931-9276. The Warmline is a 24-hour line anonymous service for consumers of mental health services who want to talk or need advice.
The Mental Health Association has a support group clearinghouse for mental health related support groups, information and services in the Greater Cincinnati area. Call 513-721-2901 for more information.
