Schizophrenia Diaries

I am diagnosed with schizophrenia. I`m going to try and explain my life since that event where I first started showing symptoms.

Everything is a drone of noise, I feel distorted and unplugged from reality. I don`t feel myself. I ask myself what are these limbs I carry, why are they hard in the centre ? I have lost all interest in life and my goals. I feel like a toppled pawn. MY life has no purpose left. The delusional thinking is killing me and I want to know why thinks work the way they do.

Why did my drunk brother beat me up and my parents did nothing.I think maybe this was the cause of my illness,all the stress and the hits to my skull.

I just want to climb out of my skin I fell uncomfortable trapped inside this human body.I tried to commit suicide and I didn`t realize it.I saw my arms like tentacles they were attacking me and I defended myself.People appear smaller and their heads have shrunk.I have lost my social skills.My emotions are confused and my mind is distorted.I self medicated with weed to help me ,but it only helped for a little while.My character changed and the way I mean and do things.I would walk around the house for hours talking and thinking to myself.I became obsessed with a Band called Pig destroyer.I believed they wrote about my life.I foiled my room believing it will protect me from RF links and EMI so that I cant be controlled.I thought I was an alien and my mission was to observe people and make a report.my parents were my tutorial.I believed everyone can copy my mind and hear my thoughts but I cannot do the same even if I was supposed to.I wrote strange things on my foiled walls.weird things
and pig destroyer lyrics.I carved alien like signs in my arms and burned a symbol in my chest .my mind would run into walls and i would talk funny according to witnesses.I cant remember much anymore but it basicly sucked.I`d forget things and my memory was delayed.I couldn`t meet people and talk to strangers.

I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and the professor of psychiatry in south africa.I was put onto respirdal and depramil.I don`t know how things will be from now on but it seems a bit better.

I live in Ontario, Canada. I started being sick in the summer of 2005. It was a long process of learning that you’re sick, acceptance that you have the sickness and then getting help.

Sometime in the summer of 2005 I was getting very nervous or I had symptoms of anxiety. I had headache, very nervous, and sweaty and I can easily smell myself even though I just had a shower. One afternoon I went home from work, I thought I was having flu. One thing that I couldn’t understand was I was shaking very much. I was very nervous for no particular reason. I thought something bad is happening to my family back home.

Then finally I have this thought that people have been following me around every where I go, even my work they were there watching me. I didn’t know why: it was driving me crazy. I thought I was a subject of a study and these people following me were students and researchers of Mental illness and they are trying to humiliate me to put me to hospital because somehow they know me and all my personal emails were being hacked. They were humiliating me through broadcasting everything I say in the radio.
I thought I was a fish that they were trying to fish. Everytime I hear radio they sing to me and it’s all about me. Even articles in the newspaper have hidden meaning and the subject were about me. They were humiliating me to drive me crazy so that they can put me to the hospital.

Then I started having these ideas that some articles and comics stories in the newspaper have hidden meaning so that all people can’t understand it. They make fun of you in the radio or newspaper and they hide it. Newspapers are afraid to be racist so they hide it through their comic stories and words.
Everything I read started to have different meanings.

I stopped listening to radio and I stopped watching TV because I felt that everything they talk about is offensive. It was hard for me and making me very angry that people were talking about me and laughing at me and listening to me. I started becoming weak and very depressed. I started calling for God, I asked why are they doing these to me. I stayed in my room a lot.

Finally I moved back home to my parents house and my mom was so worry because of my crazy stories. She ended up calling for help. A social worker and a police officer picked me up in my house to put me to the hospital.

I was diagnosed with schizo-effective disorder. I was even more depressed when they told me I had mental illness. I didn’t believe it, instead I thought it was just a bad events in my life and God is trying to call me or some spiritual calling. I had some spiritual longing in my heart and due to the sickness it became distorted. I started hearing voices and hallucination: I thought I was special.
The voices were telling me what to do, even telling me some stories. I thought I was having telepathy because I can hear my friends’ voice while I’m locked up in the hospital. I didn’t know whose voices I was hearing I thought I was talking to ghosts. At night I was so afraid to sleep because I was afraid the devil will get me.

I’ve been in the hospital 5 times before I realized and accepted that I was really sick. I been in in few medication but because of side effects I didn’t take them properly. It took about 3 years before I’m back to myself again. I feel lucky because I stopped my medication and I am well now, I don’t hear voices anymore. All my paranoia is gone. I feel better now. It’s like a miracle.

Having mental illness have many stages:
First stage– not knowing you’re sick, getting the symptoms
Second– sickness getting worst so you ended up in the hospital for treatment
Third– getting diagnosed
Fourth– YOu don’t accept that you have mental illness because of stigma so you don’t want to get proper help so you have relapses or you get sicker
Fifth– Acceptance that you’re sick
Sixth– Getting theraphy and and taking your treatment seriously
Seventh– relapses because you stop taking your medication
Eigth– Being sick again
Nineth– some people have to stay in medication a lifetime to stay well, some get lucky and be well after few years of taking medication

I first came down with schizophrenia when I was 16, but I had no idea what had happened to me. I just knew that I had lost my ability to function like I used to and I couldn’t remember who I was anymore. It happened right as my friend was getting across to my mind that other people were around me that I couldn’t see, and I noticed people around (which later I have realized is an ability known as telepathy) He then said that they could know everything about me. That is when the illness hit, because it was not true that people can know everything about you, even if they could be in our minds.

What I have come to, that has cured me, is that people can not know who you are. Because, Who you believe yourself to be in your heart is who you are (Your Soul) From your soul is where you get regular functioning. You can decide how you want to come across to people and what is important for you to do and get done. If you believe that somebody could know this part of you it would throw you off completely from who you really are, and you would not be able to function the same and also you would begin to think all sorts of different dillusions about who you are and what reality really is!

So regaining a stable concept of what a normal person’s function is has enabled me to reconnect with my actual soul and to be in control of a ‘me’ that I actually recognize. To do this you must know that you heart (feelings) and your soul (who you believe yourself to be in your heart.) are hidden from the world.

I think a functioning in ourselves that we had never known about came over us suddenly and we were unable to distinguish the true boundry lines. This functioning is known as telepathy, being able to connect with other people in our minds. This is a function that we have control over. We can control what we speak in a similar manner to controling what we think. So having your thoughts known isn’t a privacy issue seeing that we choose what we will reveal to people!

In my teenage years and early 20’s I used drugs quite frequently. Then I was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia in 2004. For the first four years, It was absolutely terrifying. The Voices were the worst part, praising me one minute then degrading me the next. Then the ideas of reference. I couldn’t read a book, or watch TV, or listen to music without hearing some message specifically meant for me. Every conceivable situation resulted in me being set up for murder, or killed, or at the centre of some vast conspiracy, or the subject of some bizarre experiment. I lived in total fear. There just seemed to be no escape from this paranoid World. I still used Cannabis and was in denial about my illness until 2007. Now, in 2009, things are better. I have stabilised on risperdal, the voices are distant and mostly inaudible, and sometimes I can even indulge in Media without being too affected. I don’t take any drugs other than the prescribed ones. I turned 30 last year, I was 24 when I was
diagnosed, and feel I have lost some years to this illness. But I have started back at university, and live on my own in the city on a pension. It is still hard to hold down a job. But I feel that a year or two ago I reached a turning point, where I could continue to live in fear or be brave and see through the delusions, see the reality that was mine to make. I use cognitive exercises, the medication, vitamins ( I have still yet to try Zophitin and liquid white mono-atomic gold powder, though I still might one day) prayer mantras, and when the voices start to crowd around, I concentrate as hard as I can on external sounds, even the hum of a refrigerator if I have to. With me, when I do this, the voices tend to fade away. I have plans for the future, and a full recovery from schizophrenia is part of those plans, though I would never have thought that in the beginning, when I was too full of despair over what I considered the ruination of my life. Positive thinking is a must. I look
forward to a future of happiness and security, despite having one of the most debilitating mental illness that can be had. I have also been blessed with a very supportive family. The darkest hour is passed. My person applauds my joyous comeback, and my full recovery, I am sure, is only a short time away. The Upward Spiral has begun.

There are a number of pharmacological and psychotherapeutic techniques used for Bipolar Disorder. Individuals may use self-help and pursue a personal recovery journey.
Hospitalization may occur, especially with manic episodes. This can be voluntary or (if mental health legislation allows it) involuntary (called civil or involuntary commitment). Long-term inpatient stays are now less common due to deinstitutionalization, although can still occur.[83] Following (or in lieu of) a hospital admission, support services available can include drop-in centers, visits from members of a community mental health team or Assertive Community Treatment team, supported employment and patient-led support groups.

Tom

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