At age 25, Renea Mohammed was an ambitious young woman, studying for a master’s in library sciences at UBC. Then people started whispering about her. “At first, it was people who I knew,” she recalled in a phone conversation with the Georgia Straight. Soon, strangers were talking about her too. “People on the bus—I’d think they were looking at me and talking about me, like they’d be spying on me.”¦I started to think I was being followed when I went out.”

Later, she began hearing voices when there was no one around. “They were voices I experienced as being outside of my head”¦the same way I would experience a real person talk,” Mohammed, now 37, explained. And the voices were horrible. “They were very negative and derogatory and critical.”

Searching for an explanation, Mohammed figured microphones had been planted throughout her apartment. “When I heard voices in other settings, I thought they had planted microphones all around the city,” she said. When the voices suggested they were able to see her, Mohammed believed she was also being watched by cameras.

That changed when her husband, Chris, in an attempt to reason with her, took her hiking in a remote area. “He said, ”˜Are people talking about you?’ And I said ”˜Yes,’ ” she remembered. “And he said, ”˜How do you think that’s happening? You really think they planted microphones through the whole forest? How would they even know where we’re going to walk?’ ”

Mohammed said she thought for a moment and realized he was right. So she came up with another explanation: “I was hearing the voices and they sounded so real.”¦I said, ”˜You’re right; there’s no microphones. They’re sending the voices to me with a satellite.’ ”

Mohammed, now a coordinator of a peer-support program with Vancouver Community Mental Health Services, is one of the one in 100 people—40,000 British Columbians—diagnosed with schizophrenia during their lifetime. Although schizophrenia affects one percent of the population, three percent will experience psychosis at some point in their lives.

Often described as a “break with reality”, symptoms of psychosis can include delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, disorganized speech, odd behaviour, confused thinking, dampened emotions, and altered mood. Psychosis can also strike those suffering from postpartum and major depressions and bipolar disorder.

According to the B.C. Schizophrenia Society, eight percent of hospital beds in Canada are presently occupied by people with schizophrenia—more than by sufferers of any other medical condition—which usually strikes men between the ages of 15 to 24 and women between the ages of 25 to 30. Forty to 50 percent of people with schizophrenia attempt suicide, and about 12 to 15 percent of those succeed.

Mohammed had three suicide attempts and numerous hospitalizations in the four years between the onset of her symptoms and successful treatment in 2001.

“After the last [suicide attempt], they decided I had a pattern of being a danger to myself, so they put me on”¦a form of forced treatment in the community,” Mohammed explained. She was allowed to leave the hospital, but only on condition that she take medication and see a psychiatrist and case manager.

“I started to associate the medication with the voices stopping for the first time.”¦Then I started to think if the medication works, then what everybody’s been telling me, that this is a mental illness, I guess it’s true.”

Mohammed had a long journey to recovery—longer than it should have been. Recent research into schizophrenia, for which there is no permanent cure, indicates that the longer someone remains in a psychotic state, the more serious and intractable their condition can become, with permanent effects on their brain’s chemistry and structure.

“There’s some evidence that the more episodes of psychosis somebody has, the more damaging it is on their brain,” Mellisa Fahy, a consulting psychiatrist with the Vancouver/Richmond Early Psychosis Intervention Program, told the Straight by phone. “The earlier you catch it, the earlier you treat it, the less permanent damage.”

In addition, Fahy noted, the longer that psychosis is left untreated, the more it derails the sufferer’s life and the lives of friends and family members. “When somebody is psychotic, when they’re ill, it completely disrupts their life in the sense of school, work, relationships, all that kind of thing,” she said. “You’re talking about people who are getting this illness in their late teens, early 20s.”¦If they get off the normal trajectory for many years, that’s extremely disruptive.”

It’s for those reasons that the B.C. Schizophrenia Society believes that information on mental health should be in every high school in the province. “It [B.C.] is one of the few provinces where it [mental health] is not on the curriculum,” Jane Duval, director of policy development and community support for the BCSS, told the Straight by phone.

“In other provinces, it’s taught as a matter of course. In British Columbia”¦it has no priority.” The BCSS does have teacher resources, including videos and written material geared toward high school students, but it is up to individual teachers or schools to decide whether or not to make use of the material, Duval added.

Even though Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Education has been using the BCSS’s resources as part of its school curriculum, B.C.’s own Education Ministry has yet to follow suit. The society has “tried for years”, Duval said, to get through to the ministry, but with no success. “We’ve made all kinds of effort to try to do this, and it just has never worked for us. It’s a head scratcher.”

(Education Minister Shirley Bond was unavailable for comment. Ministry spokesperson Jeff Rudd called the Straight on July 7 to offer information but refused to allow his name to be used in connection with the material. Because this contravenes its policy on the use of anonymous sources, the Straight declined to print Rudd’s information.)

Alerting youth to the early warning signs of schizophrenia—which include, according to the BCSS, deterioration of personal hygiene, reclusiveness, a flat, unemotional gaze, and inappropriate laughter—could, ideally, help catch the illness before it becomes severe, Fahy explained. “There have been studies where they have had groups of people like that [displaying early warning signs], and they’ll treat them, and they have proven to decrease the conversion rate.”

However, there are lifestyle choices that can help stave off the illness, Fahy noted. “The big one, of course, is drugs and alcohol,” she explained. “Some people believe that marijuana causes psychosis. That’s kind of controversial, but certainly in someone who’s vulnerable, it will trigger it.” In addition to avoiding drugs, someone displaying warning signs for schizophrenia should be cautioned to limit stress, improve nutrition, and get regular and adequate sleep.

When mental health is left out of the classroom, young people glean information from misleading sources such as television shows, movies, and sensationalist news coverage, observed Laura Hansen, team director with the Vancouver/Richmond Early Psychosis Intervention Program.

“I think you can see it, not just in the news stories but also in TV shows,” she observed in a phone conversation. “People say, ”˜Oh, that’s psychotic,’ or the person’s a psychotic killer. The fact of the matter is that most people who have psychosis are not violent.”

Films such as American Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Cell have only amplified the stigma of mental illness, making it difficult for those experiencing psychological and psychiatric problems to come forward—including Mohammed, who said she feared being saddled with the label of schizophrenic.

“There were times when I started to question my delusions during those four years,” she said, “but I had this perception that schizophrenia was this horrible condition. I had ideas that came out of bad movies and negative media coverage, and I didn’t want it to be true.”¦If someone commits a crime and they don’t have a mental illness like schizophrenia, it never says, ”˜Joe Blow, who had no mental illness, did such and such a thing.’ But if it’s known that they do have an illness, they always point it out.”

Had she had better information, Mohammed said, she would not have suffered needlessly as long as she did. “If I had had [mental health] information [in high school], I think it would have made a difference to how soon I would have got treatment and accepted my illness,” she admitted.

Despite remaining ill for four years, Mohammed managed to pull her life back on track. She completed her master’s degree and in 2002 earned a community mental health worker certificate. And, remarkably, her marriage survived. Still, she wishes it could have been different:

“It was a really horrible four years, and I didn’t have to go through all that,” she said, “because there was a medication that works really well for me that I take now. I think the earlier people get treatment, get support, get education, the better. And the less time they spend ill, the less rebuilding they have to do.”