Paul is unemployed, but is content in his role as an active full-time father. Paul also has schizophrenia, which he was diagnosed with at 22-years-of-age. He recalls going to bed one night and hearing voices threatening to harm him. The next morning, he got into the car and drove for hours, going wherever the voices told him too. He began to believe that he was God and could cure people and that if he stared at traffic lights he could make them change colour.
Paul was eventually hospitalised and for 16 years remained on drugs that made him feel drowsy and slow, gave him the shakes and caused vertigo. Once, he says, he was treated in hospital for convulsions in reaction to an injection in an outpatient clinic.
Any stressful event can trigger a psychotic episode for Paul. The worst was seven years ago, when his mother died and his girlfriend broke it off with him. With voices "screaming" in his ears, Paul also believed that the voices on the radio were specifically addressing him. It was too much for him even to walk to and from a bus-stop alone.
Paul tells friends that he had "a nervous breakdown", rather than using the word "schizophrenia". "If they hear the word `schizophrenia' they think that you are `mad' and that you'll go for them," says Paul, who has a stigma, as well as an illness, to contend with.
Schizophrenia is not a split personality, as is popularly believed, and schizophrenics are less likely to be aggressive than a `normal' person. The illness is actually a difficulty with information processing. A mentally healthy person walks into a room, perceives the situation, analyses those perceptions and acts appropriately. Nine out of 10 schizophrenics cannot understand what is happening around them, including the facial expressions of people they meet, so they don't know how to react, which is terrifying.
For the past six months, Paul has been on the new atypical medication and says he feels "well and strong". He certainly looks happy, smiles naturally and unless you knew that he was schizophrenic, you would never guess. Yet before the new medication, he had strange side-effects and feared being out in public alone. For a man who was once afraid of walking home from a bus-top, looking "normal" is incredibly important.