Schizophrenia Diaries

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

Had this book (two 450 page volumes) self-published, but distributed only to a couple of dozen people. People who just glimpse through it find no difficulty. People who get really involved with it find it difficulty, and some won’t comment back.
Hard for me to assess reaction, except a lot of people say it’s all in the head – which is the point. A schizophrenic’s impression of philosophy. Especially Immanuel Kant Categorical Imperative, which augments the psychosis of the main character Penny, when she tries to live up to its principles. Book traces her journey from being ’sexually harassed’ by minor professors, through the penal and psychiatric system; relates schizophrenia to trauma. A journey of self-discovery through mental recall. A lot of philosophy. Character imagines in Chapter 12 she is going to be the New Eve, imitating Christ’s passion through the penal system. etc. Maybe Menippean Satire!! Poetry and Prose.
Discussions of philosophical paradoxes like self-reference – all of these related to the delusion that affects the central character.
Difficult reading, said one gentlemen, but I kept going, and it was worth it!!!!!

Hi! My name is Julia and I’m 20 and I have been struggling with schizophrenia for about a year now. I tripped on Coricidin Cough and Cold last year in February (08) and kept taking it for three days, I didn’t get over it for a week and had been dropped on the street on my head, I didn’t come out all that well, I thought my boyfriend was a serial killer and was going to kill me so I hid knives through out the house. I broke up with him when I thought he was being overbearing and went home to live with my mom. Through out the summer I was doing fine until I felt like people were watching me and talking about me in coded messages in front of me. At first I called them the papanazi’s as a joke, but then it got serious and then I thought I was on some kind of hidden camera show and no one was going to tell me, I thought they hid cameras in my shower and everything and wouldn’t go to the bathroom or take showers for days at a time. Then I went on a vacation with a group of friends
and was listening to people “talk” about me. It seemed like they could hear my thoughts. It was at that moment I knew I was totally screwed, people were going to know every little bad thing I had ever done in my life. When I got home from the trip my mom put me in the hospital, I didn’t want to go. I thought everyone was just lying and they were going to hide my gift under mental illness and treat me like dirt. I fought tooth and nail. They put me on drugs. Then I found out it was my right to go off the drugs, as soon as I did I started hearing voices, the voices of everyone around me so I thought I could communicate with everyone around me. Then one day God spoke to me and told me he hated me and to kill myself. He said God wouldn’t say that to you would he, then he said “Must be the Devil” Then he said I was going to die the next day of a heartattack. They put me back in the hospital and back on the pills. They diagnosed me with Drug Induced Psychosis. This was in
like November (08). Now it’s May (09) and I’ve been living out of the hospital and on meds since, my stays were only about a week long. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 2 weeks ago and it finally shocked me awake. I now think it’s … possible… that people might not be able to hear my thoughts. But I don’t know how to adjust how I think to fully accommodate this new revelation. Last night I wasn’t able to sleep and I started hearing voices. I decided to listen to the voices, because listening to them helps me to fall asleep faster. My fiance talks in his sleep. While I was listening to the voices one said I love you and then another said I love you more and at the same time my fiance said in his sleep I love you more. So I still think that if you’re reading you know exactly who I am and all the world hears my thoughts. But I’m trying to disbelieve that. My goal right now is to get stable enough to someday go off the meds and have a baby, which brings on a whole
slew of new problems. Like it everyone can hear my thoughts I’m never going to be able to have sex, or my kids will know how crazy I am, or when I’m scared too… just a whole slew of things you wouldn’t want your kids knowing. I really hope people can’t hear my thoughts… Thanks for listening, God Bless!

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 brother attempted suicide.

I was sixteen, he was nineteen. He had been on medication for Bi-polar for a few months. For the next few months, I barely ate, slept, spoke, or moved. I began to feel split up, uhwhole and raw. As though there were two people inside me.

I first saw Lucy when I was cleaning out my closet one afternoon in August. She was in the spare room next door to mine, and though I did not see her face, I saw her feet beneath the closet door. She was standing inside it, scratching on the door. She wanted out. I ran.

It was around then that the trees began to move eerily, to catch my eye and make contact with me. They whispered to me in ways that nothing ever had. They wanted me to come with them when they died that fall, to find them on the “other side.” They spoke to my heart, to my soul. I believed them and promised to go along when they did. I began to slip into worlds that were far different from our own. Cosmic, gorgeous worlds that one can hardly imagine. The trees called me to be their own, to be their child. To be one with them.

The people inside me began to multiply rapidly. There was Lucy, who I saw regularly in the mirror. We fought and argued all the time. She poked me and pinched me and screamed at me. Then there was Liam, who was actually a real person. My friend. He could feel my feelings, hear my thoughts, see what I was doing. I had no privacy left. Our minds were connected. There were the sisters: Charlotte, Penelope, and Victoria. They needed my help, they wanted me to save them. There was the scarecrow and his alias, Lord Effiddian. He wanted to kill me, to drink my blood and eat my soul. He wanted my hair, my violin, my life. He would eat away my music and murder what was left. He was a brute.
I went on medication two months ago. My father finally realized something was wrong. I hadn’t been eating, sleeping, doing my school work, or even speaking. I COULDN’T speak. I couldn’t move! It was impossible for me to do either of those without the greatest of pain in my soul, in my mind. Colors were either grey or too intense. My thoughts were so loud that I could hear them and sometimes see them. The worlds were so gorgeous–and so terrifying. There was nothing I could do. I felt nothing. My sister cried and I was repulsed. My mother asked me to talk to her and I couldn’t. I was a monster.

Since going on medication, I have begun to recollect my abilities as a violinist, to remember that I am a human being and that my thoughts are my own. I sometimes feel that I have no privacy of thought, that there are too many people talking inside me…but it’s quieter for the most part. Things aren’t so painful anymore.