Schizophrenia Diaries

Well.. as hard as this may be to talk about.. my mother has schizophrenia. She has been diagnosed with this disease since i was about 5 years old. I am now 19 almost 20 years old, and I am still dealing with this.

I do remember one of the first times she started having these voices in her head. When I was about 6 years old she asked me to come to her because she thought someone had put a recorder in my ear.. crazy I know..

Another incident was when we went to visit my nana and grandad and she left me there because she was having another one of her episodes and noone knew where she was for about a week or two.

My moms voice in her head is named Linda.. kinda creepy i know.. but after awhile I just accepted it.. She went to the mental hospital so many times when I was growing up I can’t even tell you how many times its been. She would go into outbreaks of just bawling her eyes out and claiming that people on the tv or the neighbors next door were out to get her and i of course would have to fight her for the keys to the car so that way she wouldn’t kill herself or anyone else. She would think that people from our own family were teaming up with this voice in her head to “get” her.
She would always claim that something bad was going to happen or that “linda” was controlling all of our heads and making us into different people. It was so wild.. and during all of this madness I was trying to be a teenager with friends. But, I hid it all. I held in the pain and the hurt and put on a big smile when i went to school because i didn’t want anyone to know that there was something wrong. I was even a very popular girl in school. I was a cheerleader all throughout high school. I ran track my freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. I was very good at it too. I had many many friends, but none of them knew the secret i held deep inside.
Everytime my friends would ask to come over I would lie and say that they couldn’t because my mom said no or that someone was visiting and they couldnt’ come over. My mom was always an emotional wreck. I would come home and she would be crying on the couch or yelling at her voice. I would escape by sitting in my room with the music loud and the tv up. I can honestly say it made me very depressed because all i wanted was a normal mother like everyone else had. I remember looking up into the stands wishing that my mom could come and be normal to watch me run or cheer. It broke my heart. I remember many nights just clinging to my pillow wishing that things would be different. I did get a boyfriend my sophomore year and i eventually told him, the first person, about my moms disorder. He was of course in shock because yes i looked like the type of girl who was “perfect”. But i wanted to seem that way to people because i didn’t want anyone to look at me differently or feel sorry for me.
Anyways, i remember on several occasions my mom telling me she hated me. However, i knew it was because of her voice.. but for some reason those 3 words hurt. I needed someone to love and care about me. I had a stepdad and my dad lived in dallas. My stepdad didn’t know he would be signing up for this. He really just wanted out and he mainly took it out on me. We never really talked.

As of now I am trying my best to get through college. And not but 3 months ago I got a call from my uncle saying that my mom tried to commit suicide by overdosing on her medication. My stepdads brother however had walked in just as the medication was all hitting her and he called for an ambulance. My stepdad was out of town and I was in another town for college. She did live but as of right now is still not doing well. She likes to call peopel all the time like almost 20 times a day for each person in my family. It gets on their nerves as well as mine because all she wants to talk about is her voice and of course none of us want to her about it or listen to the person she has become. I dont’ know what to do anymore. I feel like she is my responsibility. Noone is my family seems to want to deal with her or care about her, and my stepdad wants to get out of it. I feel since she is my mother that i should help her, but i don’t know how and i don’t think i am emotionally stable enought
to help. THe only thing that has been keeping me going is my friends. But thats it.

So if you have a mother, father, brother or sister that have this horrible disorder i feel your pain and your not the only one. I know how it feels and it hurts.. but you have to keep strong and don’t let that person get you down.. you have to surround yourself with happy people and other family members to get through it.

My son’s journey through madness
Words fail to express my deep sadness
An adorable, young child
Good life, every reason to smile
Madness could only hide for a short while
Until insanity slowly filters inside
My innocent, sweet boy’s mind
Strange voices, fearful images hide
Behind racing thoughts, like rollercoaster ride
Heartbroken mother, prays by his side
As insanity follows like a shadow in the sun
Medication and hospitalization, fuels him to run
As other teens minds are free to have fun
I realize my son’s journey through madness, has just begun.
So I pray, with tears pouring down like rain
For my son to heal from this internal pain.

V.K.A.

My life ended and began on the day my older brother attempted suicide. He called me, crying, saying goodbye. I was across the country, unable to do anything but beg him to change his mind. He hung up on me and left me to crumble in confusion and agony.

I do not know what people with schizophrenia actually go through. Around the attack of 9/11 my dad (a lonely truck driver) started to act strange. He told me the terriosts were out to get him. He said they knew him. I was scared, then again I thought maybe just maybe he was joking. Around thanksgiving I went to his house. He did not want to turn on the lights, He just sat in the dark. He said they were after him. I again thought he was joking or hoped so. He also claimed to have a chip implanted in his head and said he heard a ringing. He said the television was sending him messages. At this time I did not know of schizophrenia. My grandmother wanted me (because I am the oldest child) to have him sent away to a mental health center, she then told me of an aunt I never knew who suffered from schizophrenia. She is now in a mental health center to this day. I never could put away my dad. I have cried many nights. I know this has to be what he is suffering from. He seems to have better
days now. sometimes he slips when we are in a conversation and I have to leave. I have talked with him once about it. He said he is not crazy that everything is true that happens to him. I am now in college in a psychology class. I have chose the topic of schizophrenia to do a research paper on hoping I can get a better understanding. This website is wonderful I have some insight on the daily struggles of this disease. I wish I knew how to help my father, that is kind of what I hope to gain from this research paper. If anyone has any answers that can help me that would be wonderful thank you.

Everyone’s experience of mental illness is different: from the person cursed with it to the person who brought them into the world to the person who might have unknowingly tipped them over the edge at some point. So my experience may only be helpful to comfort someone, as it will be comforting to feel like my experience is being shared. My brother has what we call schizophrenia, a mental illness which he developed apparently when he was 13, and had for ten years before it was recognised. I believe a lot of the difficulty in understanding and dealing with a disease is related to the environment you live in. Obviously a healthy body is a healthy mind, so we may say an environment where there is ganja, pills, coke, heroin, mushrooms, LSD, crack, ether, ketamin, excessive amounts of alchohol and cigarettes is not the kind of place you would expect to find a healthy mind. These things were there in my life and in my brother’s, and were not used sparingly. Another healthy bodily
requirement is space, freedom, the freedom to exercise, the freedom to scream and run free, and to not care what happens when you do. We live in a school where there are many facilities, many fields, many reasons to smile if only we werent cut down and judged when we did. An institution is a dangerous thing when its leaders or founders dont understand human nature, and so my leaders frowned on me when i went for a swim, shouted at me when i picked apples on the roof of a shed, and still couldnt let it go when i’d left the school. Results, results, results. When we care for results, we do not care for people. And so the teachers who got bullied by the headmaster, then bullied the boys who went to the school, and a lot of them could hack it having come from afar to the school, and where they would return every holiday. But for Will and I this was not the case, we would walk across the road, and into our house to meet our father, a teacher at the school, and spend the holiday in the
midst of the teachers, finding occasional solice in smoking a joint with someone else who was unlucky enough to be trapped there, but rarely feeling free.

When you mix this with a complete lack of women (another healthy element to any man’s life, in whatever capacity) and a complete lack of money, and an invented social heirarchy which meant that you really felt you were above the people in macdonalds although deep down you knew you werent, there is no doubt that it is completely understandable that my brother is schizophrenic, and completely confusing why i am not. So when i asked myself last night why i cower away from emotional reactions to things people have said to me, i know it is simple. Where i have learnt my life, good human values do not exist. This “blog” is not enough to do justice to the vast world of one person’s life, let alone two. But i hope in reading this that someone may find some hope or comfort in the fact that we are not alone down here in the depths of thought and distress and that there are so many paths back up to the surface, although some are booby trapped, and some are just bloody difficult.