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Submitted by Yuna Huishan Angell on 6 June 2018
Image of face of Yuna Angel, young singaporean woman looking at the camera, green design effect

It is often misconstrued that people with schizophrenia are being lazy when they find it hard to continue with a job. Yuna Angell, who has schizophrenia, writes about her work experience at a fast food restaurant and what happened to her there.

If you have schizophrenia, you will probably experience a LOT of delusions, some hallucinations, and you will also hear voices as symptoms of the mental illness. When you say you are “Feeling better”, it does not mean that you are ‘cured’. Honestly, psychiatrists from the public mental health hospital have told me that “there is no cure for schizophrenia, there is only long term treatment available”.

I have schizophrenia. And, hunting for job does not help my depression.

I have some Whatsapp group chats I was invited to join by the peer support specialist from the hospital and a private psychologist. These are group chats that are also mental health peer support groups. Over time, after getting to know the group members, I’ve learned some of them have jobs and some are jobless. Actually, there are more without jobs, more than those who are well enough to hold onto their jobs. And then there are other peers who mentioned they have jobs but find it hard to cope with the stress and side effects of their mental illnesses and medication. They are always worrying about losing their jobs any day.

Employment for Dignity and Rehabilitation 

Hard to hold onto a job

We sometimes get into debates and, even arguments, about joblessness and laziness of our peers, myself included. The common complaints we hear include diarrhea and headaches, severe anxiety that affects motor skills and delusions, etc. that makes it hard to hold onto a job. Getting a job could be easy for some, but quitting or getting fired might be why it is hard to hold onto a job for long. There are those situations when either the employer or a few of your colleagues subtly hint to you to resign from your job out of your own willingness because your slow speed at work is actually making everyone do double work.

Work at fast food restaurant

Lately, I tried out a job at the fast food restaurant. I had to clear trays and clean tables. I thought that should be easy job for me to hold onto. Then I found out that I needed to clean out the trash in the kitchen as well. The assistant manager added at some point that I was also expected to pack French fries and food for customers, whenever I had the time. The trash at all the different points in the fast food restaurant inside and outside of the kitchen is heavy. And the long queues kept coming while I cleaned the tables.

I worked standing 6 hours with only 20 minutes for a meal break with the manager’s meal voucher. Earlier, I had been sleeping most of the day, daily for months due to stress and medication. Now to keep standing for long hours seemed too sudden for my body. My knees hurt after I left from work. I already had a knee injury from last year end in 2017 that was not healing well. I felt my muscles all tensed up all over my body, I was starting to feel delusional. I felt as if my body did not exist, I actually felt like the air was me and I was full of air, moving air. I thought to myself, “Did I just die and become a ghost?” I started freaking out and felt like throwing up my dinner at home. My legs felt heavy like I was going to fall over and faint. I was seeing stars, my eyes were blacking out.

I texted the person in charge at the fast food restaurant and apologized, saying my knees hurt and I’m not used to standing for long hours and that I would like to quit, that I was not feeling well. He said okay.

New avenues, new hope

I told myself, “I know how to write rather well. I should come up with the 2000 minimum word count for short eBooks that can be put up for sale every few weeks. I’ve tried Facebook ads before. I had around 1.9k likes in 1 day. I know where to reach my readers. Surprisingly, the 1.9k likes came from other Asian countries. The world is my oyster.”

So my next frontier will be to self-publish my first short eBook, not first book ever that I wrote, and use Facebook ads to promote my eBook. This experiment will let me know in the next few months how much income conversion the eBook gets from Facebook ad “likes”.

Cosy office jobs are possible because the boss is taking the risk of paying employee salaries from the capital for his or her business even when there are many days that customers didn’t patronize the business. As freelancers and self-employed people will know, there are good days and bad days in business. Some days you earn and some days you don’t.

Being jobless doesn’t mean you’re lazy!!

(Yuna was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2004. Her condition has been stabilized since 2013 and in 2016, she decided to become an independent mental health advocate to share her story and help inspire others towards destigmatisation of mental health stigma.)

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