Overcoming Schizophrenia

Thank you, Sunlight Village Board of Directors, staff, and volunteers! I had a great experience at your mental health conference: Our Children, Our Future , on Saturday, June 18, 2011. I appreciate all your warm welcomes and support. It is nice to know I have friends in Dayton, Ohio. I would love to work with Sunlight Village again in the future! (The picture to the left, shows myself and Founder and Executive Director of Sunlight Village, Robbie Brandon) At the conference, I delivered the speech, The Gift of Recovery: A Consumer's Perspective. I shared my personal recovery story from the diagnosis of Schizophrenia until the present. I went into detail about my recovery process because I wanted others to understand that recovery is a life-long journey that takes work, persistence, and support. I enjoyed the interaction with the audience.

March 13, 2006 By Pamela Spiro Wagner I could be your daughter or your son, your sister or brother, your mother or father, your friend or your neighbor. I suffer from schizophrenia. For decades, I’ve lived, along with almost three million other people with schizophrenia, in a desolate, dark, little room with a large padlock on the door. The room is stigma, the darkness is fear and the lock is ignorance. I want to speak to you today, having had schizophrenia for decades, to break down the walls of fear and suspicion, unburden you of the myths and mysteries that lead to stigma and get you open that door. I’d like to tell you some reasons why medication compliance is such a difficult issue in schizophrenia and a little about how I began to recover. Medication. What a struggle! I was never going to take medication. Medication meant I was sick. I hated the label, I hated the very idea of a label. But I hated the side effects most. Never mind what medication did FOR me, I hated what it did T...