The Story of a Schizophrenic

Schizophrenia - a chronic, severe and debilitating mental illness. It is not at all unpopular. Suffering the inability of distinguishing the real from the unreal, hearing multiple voices at the same time when one is alone (otherwise known as auditory hallucinations), and derailment are perhaps just some of the many critical symptoms. With the passage of time, the patient’s condition worsens; the disease will eventually affect his/her thoughts, behaviour and overall social functioning.

Both environmental and genetic factors produce a vulnerability of individuals to this illness. However, sometimes these alarming symptoms tend to take an excessively violent toll on life. At times when it is least expected.


Houston was an inhabitant of Sonoma County, California. He was as healthy looking as any other ordinary person with a normal diet, and so was his amazing vocabulary until without warning, it came to an abrupt halt. It was uncalled for, but it seemed that he was one of those two million schizophrenia patients in the United States.

His symptoms started becoming prominent while he was a student at the Santa Rosa Junior College. His parents were divorced for a long time and he lived with his mum. He had a band and occasionally played guitar with his dad, Mark.

He started to become depressed and mostly kept to himself whenever he wasn’t sleeping, which was almost all the time. Within a few weeks his band had broken up and he was suddenly at a loss for friends.

He was not involved in activities like drinking or smoking, but Houston’s psychiatrist indicated that he might be showing signs of schizophrenic disorders and thus kept him under a series of changing antidepressants for the next eight months. This proved to be the wrong treatment and ultimately resulted in Houston stealing Adderall from his mother’s medicine cupboard. He claimed that it helped make him feel better when he took it.

Mark with Houston at Houston's high school graduation in 2009

Possible environmental factors come into consideration from here-on. The fact that his father, Mark, was a substance abuser in his day (who eventually learned to let go and became part of a recovery facility later), his sister who was engaged in various taboo activities, and to top it all off, he lost multiple jobs and got himself thrown out of his mum’s house.

His aunt Annette commented that Houston was not a sociable and jolly as he used to be before and nowadays he said some very, very strange things. When asked about his treatment sessions, he either wouldn’t respond or be very vague about how he was taking it.

Towards the end of his devolution, he caused incidents like throwing his mother across the room and even breaking furniture. His psychiatrist told his parents to call the police. Panic stricken as his parents were, they didn’t dare to inform the police because of their reputation of shooting and killing more than 2 mentally unstable patients in the previous 6 years. The police had the suit to arrest him/her for 3 days if they considered the person a threat to him/herself or others. Killing them was just too much. And as Mark thought his son was just depressed and not violent, he didn’t bother to inform social security. Mark made the grave mistake of thinking that three days of lockdown in a mental facility would not make Houston any less unstable.

Houston needed help, but he wasn’t getting any.

About 10 days before the really bad things started happening, his aunt Annette came to visit.

"Honey," she said to her nephew, "something's going on with you. Either something's happened to you, or you're not sharing something. I'm really, really worried that something's going on."

She said later that he then turned his head and looked at her eerily and said, "Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime." She said that it didn’t even sound like him.

He told her about it later. He said he got all sorts of delusions. He vaguely talked about telepathic communications, extraterrestrial creatures and other nonsense. He also murmured about how his family turned their backs on him. He said he had an invisible friend called Devon and that he was cutting himself to exorcise the evil.

He did say everything to his aunt though. Only 

it was a little too late.

After Gym late one November night in 2011, he came home and stabbed his father 60 times, with four different knives. When his sister came downstairs to find out what the commotion was all about, she saw that Houston was trying to behead him.

This tragedy was almost predictable. The state could not provide counselling, job training, and social rehabilitation which are crucial to treatment. His family failed to make him understand that they had his best interests at heart.

Medical attention is almost twice as necessary as the above. The first-line psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia is antipsychotic medication, which can reduce the positive symptoms of psychosis in about 7 to 14 days

Some evidence indicates that regular exercise has a positive effect on the physical and mental health of those with schizophrenia as well.

Houston now lives behind the visitor’s glass window of the correctional facility in California.