SAN DIEGO, Calif. (The Oklahoma Post) Dec. 30, 2025
Reader Submission by Sean Ryan
Let me start out by apologizing for not having all the answers. I’m not a genius who goes around like Einstein cogitating and imagining solutions to problems. I probably create more problems than I solve. I drain the economy more than I add to it. There are some people, I’m sure, who see me as something that detracts from society rather than contributes to it.
These opinions, in most cases, come from people who see people like me as a part of some larger group for which they attach all kinds of stereotypes. They judge me based on my seeming place in a crowd rather than sitting down with me, over coffee and a muffin, and actually finding out who I am and what I stand for.
In the world of social media, for which I have close to zero presence, people are discovered out there in the world. You can see their pictures and their plates of food. You can get your eyeballs on photos of them in bikinis or their pets in sweaters. It’s a disposable culture that we’re living in.
I would argue that real depth, the kind that comes from sitting and thinking, correctly, about a problem or topic, is a type of depth that the modern world does not much tolerate. When I first got diagnosed about twenty years ago, with paranoid schizophrenia, social media was just coming into the popular consciousness. It was the newest thing. People liked it. It was one step above email because there were pictures readily available and people could read what others commented about an outfit or a new job promotion.
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with social media. I’m not here to make an indictment about our culture. I’m just here to lay down a few observations that I’ve picked up along my path of travel through the world as someone who is classified as gravely disabled and who takes an antipsychotic medication for a condition I may or may not have anymore.
The problem with conditions like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia is that there is no blood test that can be administered for a definitive diagnosis. It is, from what I understand, simply a presentation of symptoms, most often, which are self-reported. If you happen to end up in front of a psychiatrist in a state of psychosis—sorry. If you tell the doctor the truth then you most likely will end up with a label slapped onto your permanent records and be treated for most of your life, as nuts. Now, this is not strictly true, but close.
The strict truth of my condition is that it improved after getting on medication. It got better after graduation from college. It got better after learning to write at a professional level. I read a lot. I wrote a lot. I learned slowly. I struggled.
I do not know many people who do not struggle, most likely, each and every day. For some, it is just getting out of bed in the morning. For another, it may be the loss of a foot that makes getting around harder to do. For someone like me, for many years, it was living with brain fog to the level of a national crisis.
When your brain is not functioning properly, most often, you are out of luck. There are doctors who will prescribe medications. They will claim to monitor what these medications are doing to you. You will see the care provider every now and again. You might even develop a good relationship with them.
Up until about four years ago, I had a wonderful therapeutic relationship with my psychiatrist. I’d seen him for about thirteen years. I used to see him once every two weeks. Then I got put on another medication that was once every four weeks. Then, the one I am on now, which is an injection once every twelve weeks. Sadly, I had to stop seeing him for injections because his company was sold to another company that no longer wanted to take insurance from people like me. I’m at the bottom of the food chain. I had an emotional final visit, which I kept, mostly, hidden. And I never saw him again.
I want you to stand up and stretch your legs with me. Come on. Roll your shoulders. Do you feel better? It’s important to get the blood flowing to all the tissues of your body. Take a deep breath and we’ll continue.
Now that I have your full and undivided attention, I want to tell you that you are human. That means that you think, mostly, about yourself. It means that you have a certain level of self-consciousness that never goes away. You are either getting enough sex, not enough, or somewhere in between. You are married or single. In a relationship or happily alone and left to yourself most of the time. Where I fall in this spectrum, in all honesty, is that I’m mostly alone. I rent a room, through government assistance, in an affluent neighborhood. I have my own private bathroom. I keep my environment clean and tidy.
This is a far cry from the last place I was at that had a years’ long cockroach infestation. They crawled all over me when I was sitting watching videos on my laptop. Why I did not get this fixed is one of the main reasons that I am writing this piece.
Being on an antipsychotic and being left mostly to yourself means that you don’t have a will to do anything that you have not made a habit for yourself. This means that basic pieces of hygienic living are not always in place. For instance, I’m due for a teeth cleaning and probably to have two cavities filled, but I’ve put it off and off some more. Why have I done this? Because it is just me in this world.
I have nobody to care for. I have no wife. No kids. I’m alone as alone can be. I’m forty years old and a writer of small importance. I live at or below poverty level. I have family to help me go grocery shopping, get to and from church and to get to family events.
I live in a sort of fever dream. I have periods of extreme exhaustion. I have to take blood pressure medications because my antipsychotic medication raises my blood pressure so much. I have just recently gone to the doctor to have my health checked and hopefully maintained. If you look at some statistics, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, I may only have ten to fifteen more years to live. I am obese. I eat too much. I exercise too little. Need I go on?
These are systemic problems and I should take care of them myself. I need to be a better advocate for myself. The problem is, what am I advocating for? Do I really want many more years of working myself to death? Do I really care about writing and publishing? Do I want to look, every day, at the prospect of spending 90% of my time alone? I mean, I’m not suicidal. I’m not angry. I’m just someone who is doing the best he can with very little chance of escaping the fate that was brought his way when he reported his symptoms to that psychiatrist all those years ago.
After I stopped seeing my psychiatrist, I was convinced I needed to keep on my medication. After all, once I got on medication, my parents seemed to get off my back. I felt like meds was most of what was keeping me sane. I found a psyche nurse who could prescribe me the medication I was already on. I check in with her every twelve weeks, around the time I get my injection. It’s not much of a therapeutic relationship, but it’s enough.
That’s a word that matters in this world. Enough. It’s not glitzy and glamorous, but it’s enough. To tell you the unvarnished truth, I live at the level of someone from the early 1800’s. To someone from that time period, my life is akin to that of a royalty. The problem is that it’s 2025 and the modern world is passing me by. I don’t have any actual problem with that, but I feel like I’m disappearing—like I’m on the downward slope and about to fall off the edge of existence. When I was young, I imagined myself as a father. I would be a husband. A homeowner. A man who drove a car. I wanted and felt entitled to all the adult responsibilities that my father had. That was my dream.
Through a certain set of circumstances, predetermined, governed by God, or what have you—I ended up with a mental health diagnosis and loads of time to read and write. My mental health condition is the only reason that I’m writing this now and the only reason that you’re reading it.
If you are like me, you read a while back about the homicide of Rob Reiner and his wife. Regardless of what you think happened, you have seen how mental health and addiction have come back into focus.
To tell you the truth, and this is nothing new, the 24-hour news cycle has a few topics they like to cover. In no particular order they are: mass shootings, celebrity suicides, plane crashes, politics (from every conceivable angle), abuse in all its forms, overdose deaths, etc. Certain topics keep cropping up week after week and year after year.
I’m not a big news watcher, but I read it most every day. I know full well that news is bad. It’s suffering. It’s pain. It’s death and it’s graphic. As a human being who feels and cares about life and culture, it pains me (somewhat) to see what I see every day. In truth, I have become mostly numb to all of the bad events that are reported. I find it harder and harder to feel joy. I find it harder still to feel pain.
Years ago, when I got injected and decided to stay on the medication, I gave away certain rights to my humanity. I had no idea I would become numbed to such a high degree. I had no concept of what reading thousands of novels would do to my mind.
I used to feel that my thoughts were being broadcast to others. Then I read so many books and wrote so many pieces that I was able to silence the voices in my head. When people talk about being present and in the moment, that’s me. I can do that now, most all the time, without really trying.
I still think. I still look at art for prolonged periods of time.
I do what I do, but I’m, mostly, alone.
It used to cause me great and intense loneliness. It was pain and suffering. I would wish for a companion. Then I would tell myself, what woman wants a man like me? I have no money. I have no this or that. What had happened to me was that I’d become some sort of non-paid workaholic. I wrote more than any sane person should. I slept either too much or too little. On and on it goes.
I don’t know what the future holds in store for you and me. I know that I spend time in various well-defined and established ways. I may simply be a creature of habit. I may have dreams and pursue them. I may capture them or not. I will continue to age. I will have good conversations and bad. I will eat and eliminate and continue to live my mammalian existence.
I am a human being. I have been marked medically with a condition that is supposed to last my whole life long. I do what I am told to do and convince myself that it is all done of my own free will. At the same time, I no longer have a way to distinguish my thoughts from simply thoughts that appear in my head. I don’t know if they arrive there because of the medication, the obesity, the latest novel I finished reading or writing. The more I go on with life the more I realize that I just don’t know. I don’t know whether or not I will wake up tomorrow. I don’t know if this year will be the last Christmas that I spend with either of my grandmothers.
What I do know is that I’m medicated, unfeeling, most of the time, tired beyond salvation and in desperate need of someone to share my life with. I’m a coward, truly. I live as I live and want to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can. Because I’m a creature of habit.
I am what I am.
I am a fan of Gore Vidal and have come to see the value of the following quote commonly attributed to him, which I saw on a Charlie Rose interview. “It is of no consequence to you what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.”
About the Author
Sean Ryan is a writer living in San Diego, California. He enjoys spending time with his nephews and attending Padres games. This essay reflects his experiences living with a mental health diagnosis.
Writing By: Sean Ryan | Editing by Robbie Robertson
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