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.
Archive for the ‘Personal Stories’ Category
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.
I don’t know whats going on.
Theres a voice in my head
His name is john
He tells me to commit henious crimes.
I robbed my grandmothers house yesterday and stole all her panties.
John said he needed them to continue living.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy john WHY
Whyyyyyyyy are you doing this to me john?!
I am 16 years old. A diagnosed schizophrenic. I have been to the hospital 3 times already for suicidal thoughts. The second time I went was when i found out that i had the disease. When I ususually have gone, the doctors have all tried hurting me to help me. Pills are gross. I slept a lot there. Everybody laughed at me. Theire help did not help much yet. I wish it had. This stinks being a schizo. Scary.
Sometimes the room im in will turn all red and blood slowly will drip from ceiling and floor. Sometimes I’ll feel crawling centipedes all over me. People will touch me and not be there. The smells are disgusting. Vomit. Burning rubber. Pee. Poop. Sometimes every stinky smell in the world all at once.
I can see the future. Think something and it happens. The voices screech at me trying to wreck me. Make me miserable. I dont know where those demon voices come from. The people voices, either. All kinds of voices at once. Its a nightmare. They tell me everyone hates me. Everyone in the world is coming together and poisoning me.
Thats why i dont take drinks. Because the poision is in there. Somewhere. At the top. At the bottom. People think us schizophrenics are just crazy. We’re not crazy. We just dee things differenly than them. We arre suffering. Suffering. Suffering….
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.
