A second reason, it seems to me, for the fractured and scattered love relationships we see among MI people is the aftereffects of the steamroller of stigma. Now you can pretty much forget about forming a mature romance with someone while in the hospital, due to lack of privacy and the constant turnover in the people around you (the screams don't help much). It's an a priori  that you be living in the community before you can build any sort of stability. But Rae Unzicker, a well-known c/s advocate, once said something like, "It's hard to ask someone out on a date when you can't afford cabfare and you don't have a driving licence". Most socially accepted methods of entertaining a woman on a date are financially off-limits to MI men. If you're at college or vocational school, your tattered clothes may mark you as not exactly the Best Catch on Campus.

If I am sounding facetious, I don't mean to be. I am dead serious -- about how the effects of mental illness and poverty, as well as clumsy social skills that you may have to painfully relearn, can stigmatize and mark the recovering c/s in a manner severely limiting most social interaction with the rest of the world.

A third handicap we suffer on the Via Dolorosa to love and romance in recovery is the side-effects of neuroleptic drugs.  Now, there is no doubt in my mind that medications are the foundations of basic mental health for c/s's. Without these things, we'd be confined behind moat and drawbridge for the rest of our mortal lives, and for this fact I am grateful. Ah, but we bear a heavy burden from the bloody things, which nobody can ever understand like we do. Here, I'll spotlight the sexual aspects of all this.

Neuroleptics - and this includes the new generation such as Resperidone  -- can devastate both sexual drive and sexual functioning. This can vary from person to person, but often affects romantic relationships. I know many c/s men who are hesitant to initiate a romance due fears of performance, and women who simply don't care if they have a sex life or not - they seem to have been shut down. (What a grim paradox it is that so many hospitals are rife with AIDS).

These medications, with all their benefits, can sometimes bring about birth defects in the unborn children of pregnant women dependent on them. Some of these drugs can play havoc with women's menstrual cycle, with all the consequences. They are transmitted to babies through breastfeeding, rendering this healthy habit quite unfeasible.

Last on this depressing list are secondary side-effects such as weight gain and general fatigue. It's not good form to be out on the singles market if you weigh 220 pounds and can't hack it on weekend hikes.