MARYSVILLE – There are days when the voices are so overwhelming that Sanchez Wallace can barely think.
He tries to ignore them, but sometimes the only way to block them out is to talk – to himself, to strangers on the street, to anyone.
“I’m constantly having conversations with people,” said Wallace, 25, of Marysville. “That’s the only way to get rid of it. If I go out there and shut my mouth and don’t say anything, then they come at me again.”
Wallace, who has schizophrenia, is one of thousands of mentally ill people in Snohomish County who have been helped by Compass Health and other organizations. He still struggles, but he’s now living on his own in a Compass-owned apartment.
“Without Compass, I’d be out on the streets somewhere, without food, without anything, completely oblivious to what’s going on around me,” he said.
Wallace probably wouldn’t have gotten help if he had waited until now to seek help from Compass. Federal rules are now being enforced to prohibit states from using Medicaid funds for people not on Medicaid. When Wallace asked Compass for help in October, he wasn’t on Medicaid. He is now.
Compass is why he is stable enough to enroll in classes in digital music and algebra this fall at Edmonds Community College, he said. He’s also hoping to get part-time work. Wallace gets counseling two hours a week from Compass.
Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder not usually diagnosed until someone reaches their late teens or early 20s. Only one in five people with schizophrenia recovers completely.
Wallace has progressed, but he’ll probably never completely stop hearing voices or coming up with ideas that others think are bizarre – such as that there’s a plot to impose the colors red and blue and that we’re all living in a giant computer.
He was not formally diagnosed with schizophrenia and paranoia until last year. But about four years ago, he started hearing voices – a classic symptom of schizophrenia.
The voices caused other problems. Once, while living with friends in Lynnwood, a voice told him to take out the garbage while he was naked. A neighbor called the police, who then called his friends’ landlord. His friends told him to leave.
Other times he accused friends of thinking mean thoughts about him.
“I could see their mouth wasn’t moving, but I could hear their thoughts saying something that wasn’t nice,” he said.
After being forced from friends’ homes, Wallace sometimes spent nights on the streets or in a homeless shelter.
He drifted from job to job, in part because voices would tell him to do something different from what his bosses wanted.
On Oct. 9, a few days he was kicked off a Greyhound bus in California when passengers complained of his loud conversations with friends who weren’t there, he voluntarily checked into Compass Health.
Wallace credits Compass’ counselors with helping to save his life. He has changed the way he interprets the voices. In March, while he was still on his medications, he described the voices as “just a faded thought, something in the back of your head.”
Last month, a few weeks after he all but stopped taking three types of medication, he said confidently, “They’re real.” The voices, he now believes, are God talking through other people.
At a recent poetry slam in a Seattle nightclub, Wallace rapped about his disillusion with medications: “While they’re drugging me up/And calling me nuts/Guess what?/All the drugs you legalized for money/Finally caught up.”
Everyone at Compass tells Wallace to stay on his medication.
Cathy Papp, supervisor of crisis beds at Compass, said that, if he does so, he has a good shot at a being able to one day hold down a full-time job and raise children. But they all realize it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Wallace said he’s sick of the drowsiness and mood swings that the medications cause. At age 25, he can’t imagine taking pills every day and feeling doped-up forever – even though Compass doctors say he might always need the medications.
“The meds sedate you to a point where you’re a drone,” he said. “All they do is keep you so drugged up you can’t pay attention to the voices, much less anything else around you.”
Wallace is not alone in avoiding his medications. Most mentally ill people sometimes go off them, said Dr. Shirley Stallings, medical director of Compass. It may be because they dislike the side effects. Or it could be because the drugs are working so well that the patients start to feel normal, and they no longer think the drugs are necessary, Stallings said.
It’s also because taking medications is an acknowledgement that something’s wrong, Papp said.
“The public doesn’t accept mental illness,” she said. “They equate it with being bad, even though it has nothing to do with that. So people don’t take their meds because they don’t want to feel like they’re one of those bad people.”
Wallace knows how others see paranoid-schizophrenics. He usually doesn’t tell people about his illness because he doesn’t want that to color what they think of him.
“I don’t want that to immediately become the judgment of how they base everything I say and everything I do,” he said. “If I say something that seems out of place and someone doesn’t understand, they immediately go, ‘Oh, that must be one of the symptoms.’ That might not necessarily be what it is. Maybe they didn’t understand me.”
When off the medications, Wallace is more distracted. As he sat at a small table in his studio apartment one morning, his worn Bible opened in front of him, he often looked toward the floor as he debated with himself whether he will ever need to go back on his medications.
“Oh, I’m going to have to go on my meds real soon,” he said. “Yep. We all know what’s going on with me right now.”
He paused. “Please stop talking for me,” he blurted to the voices inside his mind. “Please stop.”
He got up, walked toward the window and stared into the distance.
“These are considered symptoms that make me a paranoid-schizophrenic,” he said after a few minutes. “I can’t go around and tell people this without being told I’m crazy and there’s something wrong.”
Wallace no longer is sure that he is mentally ill – although he says it’s a possibility.
That worries Stallings. A common obstacle to recovery for many mentally ill people is when they refuse to believe that they’re sick and need help. “What’s important is to gain an awareness you have a mental illness and an awareness that the voices aren’t real or weren’t real in the past,” Stallings said. “You can’t learn to ignore something if it’s your reality.”
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