At the time of his interview, Bill MacPhee was 55 years old and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 24 years old. He is an accomplished businessman in Canada, has a wife and three children, and says he likes his life. However, it took him quite a lot of time to get to that point – over thirty years. In the beginning of his fight with schizophrenia, Bill dealt with a lot of the positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, paranoia) and struggled for a lot of his early years. As he calls it, “youth’s greatest disabler”. Bill believed he had a fairly normal childhood, even though his mother suffered from bipolar disorder. He still said he had a “normal growing up”, during which he dated, had friends, and had jobs, just like any other teenager would at the time.
In his early twenties, Bill said he was trying to figure out which kind of medication worked best for him, and after many years of this, Bill finally discovered a medication that worked well for him. All of his positive symptoms started to dissipate. Unfortunately, Bill said this was the time when the negative symptoms began to show up in his life, which he described as the real battle. Bill said he got so low to the point of attempting suicide. He remembered being in and out of the hospital, desperately hoping for something to change, something he could do to go back to his old life. Bill described having discussions with social workers where he asked questions like, “Why am I like this?” and ending with “There’s gotta be a better life out there”.
Listen to Bill talk about the switch from positive to negative symptoms here:
Bill said that he wasn’t happy with a lot in his life during this time, but he was most afraid that “five years was gonna turn to seven years, and seven years was gonna turn to ten years”. He had seen the same thing happen to many people before and he thought he needed to do something to create the “spark” that would help him get his life back on track. So, Bill started thinking about what to do, and this led to him remembering a moment in his past.
“What happened with me is, I remember what a grade seven teacher said to me. This grade seven teacher said to me, she said, ‘Bill if you don’t learn how to write properly in life, you‘re never gonna amount to anything.’ What she meant about writing was that my penmanship—my penmanship was very poor. I wrote like chicken scratch. It was just very poor. So remembering what that grade seven teacher said, that negative thing, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know what, I’m gonna prove to somebody that I can do something.’ And that was an important step. It was a very important step because it wasn’t my psychiatrist telling me this, it wasn’t my family members telling me this, it wasn’t my friends telling me this if I had any. It was just me.”
Building on this need to change, Bill called his local literacy foundation and asked to have somebody sent over to his home to help him improve his penmanship skills. A few weeks later, a volunteer and college student named Martha was sent over to work with him. They worked together regularly, but Bill said she helped with other things as well. Every time that Martha would come over, Bill thought, “That means I gotta wash my hair and brush my teeth and shave – all these things that are difficult to do with negative symptoms”. This caused Bill to start to care for himself more and he began to build up the motivation that had escaped him for so long. After some time working with Martha, she asked Bill if he was willing to take a college course, and that she would drive him. Bill wasn’t too keen on it, but he signed up for a photography course. He didn’t enjoy it, but Bill kept up with it and now had a bit more of a routine. More time passed and Martha asked if he wanted to become the treasurer of an organization Martha was a chairperson of, known as the Fort Erie Beavers, Cubs and Scouts. Once again, Bill was reluctant but agreed nonetheless. Looking back on this moment, Bill said this was the turning point in his fight with schizophrenia.
Listen to Bill describe his turning point here:
Bill then decided to start his own business. After taking some business courses at the same college Martha attended, Bill created a company called Magpipe Publishing Inc. and started publishing a magazine on mental health. For the next twenty years, Bill would continue to help his company grow and publish more issues. He said it eventually ran its course, as print magazines have started to go out of business, but through his magazine, Bill was able to brand himself as a recovery expert. He’s gone to countless conferences and was a keynote speaker at several as he traveled throughout North America. Bill says his idea of recovery is “when you wouldn’t want to be anyone else than who you are today”, something he also describes in his book, “To Cry a Dry Tear: Bill MacPhee’s Journey of Hope and Recovery with Schizophrenia”, as well as his YouTube channel, “Life After Mental Illness”.
Bill describes all of this as a big change and remembers how long it took to get him there, and he’s incredibly thankful that he is no longer stuck on his couch. Even though Bill was able to recover, he believes that many obstacles need to be changed to help others accomplish the same thing he did. Bill says that when people are faced with a mental illness, they tend to have a very narrow view of life and that they need to be taught that there is a whole world out there that can expand their mindset, and experiences, and enhance their life. One of the things that helped Bill find his road to recovery was his discovery of faith. As Bill struggled with schizophrenia, he became a Christian. He joined a church, and the people there helped him socialize and participate in various activities.
However, Bill says the secret to recovery is “filling up your calendar with activities and things to do and things to look forward to that you want to enjoy”. For him, another big factor was staying compliant with his medication. During his younger years with schizophrenia, Bill stopped taking his medication, which caused him to relapse. When his health professionals didn’t trust him to take his medication anymore, they started him on injections, another thing he could put on his calendar. Other than those two factors, Bill says those diagnosed with a mental illness should first understand it and what it means for them, obtain quality sleep, and get stable on meds. Along with these “secrets”, Bill says he has six pillars to recovery.
Learn more about Bill’s six pillars here:
When it comes to success, the best parts of Bill’s life include not having a nine-to-five job and taking up his childhood hobby again – scuba diving. When Bill started dealing with schizophrenia, he quit scuba diving and his job as a commercial diver. Recently, however, he began to go scuba diving again, along with his children. Bill has been to many places all around the globe, including Singapore, where he used to live at nineteen years old. He says that many things were striking to him when first visited Singapore. When he went to looked at the mental health system they had in place, he was shocked to find that Singapore didn’t have a homeless problem, unlike where he lives in Canada and the entirety of North America. In addition Singapore, Bill also wants to visit Nashville, Tennessee and Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the United States.
Now, Bill says he has a wonderful life. Sometimes he can’t sleep because of how excited he is for the next day to arrive. He likes setting up travel bookings and speaking engagements, and is trying to set up a few things for his kids to do during the summer, like snorkeling and swimming. He enjoys shooting vlogs in his backyard, writing bits for a book, meeting friends for coffee and socialization, and going to church. Bill says he works hard and loves what he does. His true passion, however, is speaking. He has done hundreds of speaking engagements and the biggest audience he has ever had was roughly five thousand people. It may seem a bit scary to some, but Bill enjoys interacting with his audience, making them laugh, and informing them about mental illness and recovery.
Bill says he wants people to know that it’s best to stay positive and to try and be thankful for everything within your life, but the most important thing Bill wants people to know is that there is always a way. As he describes it, “Sometimes we don’t know the way right now, or we need help finding that way, but if we can put it in our mind that no matter whatever the problem there is, there is always a way”.
