By Zenko Paul Sakomizu

Since he last left the Hawai'i State Hospital in Kane'ohe, Sakomizu has been writing about his experiences, and also about his efforts to bring his illness under control.

He has shared those experiences and recovery efforts with patients who remain at the hospital in hopes that what he learned will be helpful to them.

This is an excerpt from a book in progress, as well as a sampling of what he shared with other patients:

I was born in Kyoto, Japan, and lived with my family in a variety of places in Japan, on the Mainland and here in Hawai'i.

The family moved back to Hawai'i in 1966 and lived in Kailua.

I was about 16 at the time that I underwent a horrifying experience. My parents had built an addition to our house, and I had a bedroom with two doors, one leading to the living quarters and the other leading to the yard.

One late morning, I began hearing sounds of evil chaos emanating from the upper right of the door leading to the rest of the house. The sounds were not voices, just indistinguishable chaotic sounds.

The chaos may have been coming from demons or from my mind. I do not know. The only reason I think of demons is because there was no mistaking that the chaotic sounds were evil.

I called for my mother to come to my room and I asked her if she heard the sounds, too. She said no and told me to go to sleep.

I slept for a while, but when I awoke I felt something in my ear. I pulled it out and it was a furry black spider. In utter repulsion, I threw it on the cinder block of the doorway leading to the yard and killed it with one of my boots.

The sounds of chaos have left me but I will never forget that experience.

Around that time, I was starting to take drugs, and maybe it was God's message to abstain. However, I took an overdose of belladonna and spent three days in the psychiatric ward of Tripler Army Medical Center, tied down with four-point restraints and undergoing convulsions.

Belladonna is the same drug that Vincent van Gogh took, and history books make mention of the fact that he became a schizophrenic.

His impressionist paintings such as "Starry Night" are so different from other impressionists, and perhaps it had to do with his mental illness.

I was discharged into my mother's care, but I continued to have hallucinations. When my mother and I were entering Kailua, I said to her: "Everything is different now."

Somehow, my perception of the environment had changed after my hospitalization.

My last vision was when I was homeless between November 1994 and August 1995.

I was crossing the Ala Wai Canal bridge that connects shoppers at Ala Moana Center to Waikiki when I looked up at the night sky and saw an omega symbol or a Chinese moongate hundreds of miles across.

With this vision was the moon with two stars on each side. When I looked up again, the vision had turned into a perfect circle, vast across the expanse of the sky, with a trailing tail flowing hundreds of miles across the night.

I thought at the time that a new universe was soon to be born.

I have been hospitalized 17 times, but I have not been hospitalized since I left the Hawai'i State Hospital in January 1996.

Now, at the age of 52, I have survived with the grace of God. I had been giving presentations to the patients of my old ward at the state hospital for about six years, but that ended after a misunderstanding between the nurse who was coordinating my presentation and myself.

I plan to continue writing and sharing with my peers who are also mentally ill. This is not altruism. I just love to be of help to people, because it makes me feel good.

What follows is a sampling of what I shared with the patients at the hospital:

"All of us have a chemical imbalance in our brains. This is the cause of our mental handicap. It shows itself in people like us as schizophrenia, being bipolar and so forth.

"The symptoms of this chemical imbalance produce visual and audio hallucinations in those of us who are schizophrenic.

"For those of us who are bipolar, we find our mood swings, from being at peace with ourselves, to sadness to anger very quickly.

"This is where symptom management comes in.

"If we can detect that our symptoms are getting worse, we can consult with our nurses or psychiatrists about the decompensation of ourselves; in other words, if there is an increase in the 'voices' that we hear or, if we are bipolar, if we are experiencing mood swings more. ...

"Try and make friends with the nurses and do not see them as a barrier to you.

"To be quite honest, this is what I did. I found out they were of great help when I needed it most.

"Although you may want to resist an increase in the dosage of your meds, just try to go with the flow and you will find that it is for your own benefit.

"The bottom line is: Symptom management is something you yourself can do to get out of the Hawai'i State Hospital.

"Do yourself a favor and take symptom management seriously and leave the Hawai'i State Hospital.

"And when you are finally out of here, practice symptom management when you are in the community once again.

"This will keep you from returning to the hospital. You will be helping yourself and also the government.