Robin Fetherston

ABSTRACT

A Fictional Narrative Glimpse of Paranoid Schizophrenia: Excerpts from “Sidekick” 

Robin Fetherston

Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar

“Sidekick,” an original short fiction work, explores the concept of belonging through its two main characters, Birch and Aggie, who struggle to find social acceptance. Birch has paranoid schizophrenia. A common misperception of schizophrenia is that those who suffer from it have split personalities. Psychiatrists label this a myth and point out that people who suffer from schizophrenia are, instead, split off or divided from reality. For those with the subtype paranoia schizophrenia, symptoms may include delusions such as those of persecution or a special mission, along with hallucinations (sometimes visual, but more often auditory). Yet even with these debilitating symptoms, those with paranoid schizophrenia can seem higher functioning than other schizophrenics and with support and treatment can lead full and successful lives. Birch is highly intelligent, but has been unable, especially in recent years, to maintain a successful life. 

The narrator, Aggie, is a retiree who has recently returned to Richmond, Virginia, after working in community development in Cambodia for many years. Her perception and experience are partially based on research and my observations while visiting Cambodia and my conversations with NGO employees there. The greater portion, however, is informed by my observations and experiences over the last eighteen years as a member of the expatriate community in Doha, Qatar, one of the Gulf states. Usually, expatriates are motivated by imagining a better life abroad in status, salary, and/or in opportunities to make a meaningful contribution. Aggie’s desires fit within the latter category, and as is common with the expat life, her dreams met with obstacles, which require adjustment if the expat is to remain abroad. Aggie was unable to find a way to adjust. But her homecoming to the fashionable West End also has been complicated by her discovery that what was once recognized as home has evolved into a place where she now feels disoriented and uneasy. Her first-person account relays her chance encounter at a café with the much younger Birch and their tentative attempts to pursue a possible platonic friendship as two societal outsiders. 

BIO

Robin Fetherston has been teaching academic writing, research methods, and literature to undergraduate students at VCUarts Qatar for nineteen years. Next spring, she will teach “Short-story Masterworks,” a literature course she developed that focuses on contemporary works of fiction. 

Upon arriving in Doha, she founded the VCUQatar School-Wide Reading Program and served as its coordinator for nearly fourteen years. Each semester this program involved all members of the university in a common reading experience and was the first of its kind in Qatar. In August 2008, Robin became VCUarts Qatar’s first recipient of the Distinguished Achievement in Teaching Award and in 2011 was appointed by Her Highness Sheikha Mosa Bint Nasser as a Qatar Foundation Achiever.

The story being presented here was inspired by an early teaching experience in a learning disabilities resource classroom with a middle-schooler who had borderline schizophrenia, as well as a real-life observation many years later of a regular customer with paranoid schizophrenia at Starbuck’s near Robin’s home in Virginia.