Schizophrenia Diaries

Hi, my name is Shyanne Powell I was born on september, 29 1990, when I was growing up my mom, grandpa, and I had tooken care and helped my granmother who suffered from schitzophrenia and other problems that were physical, I remember waking up every night to remind her to take off her oxegyn before she started smoking her ciggeretts, then in augest 4, 2004 we laid her to rest I was 13 going on 14.

After, I had started the eighth grade alot of things started to change both me and my so called friends but of course the whole time i was growing up i had no real friends who cared but that year is what kicked started everything after my grandmothers death it seemed like and felt like things had changed over night my sucidle thoughts had become worse and I had become paranoid about everything then, there was a night i whould never forget, i had gone over to a so called friends house me and her where thinking about starting a band so we desided to have a sleep over so i went over and once my mom left she asked me if i wanted to get high i said yes of course only because i was peer pressured, that night i went to sleep and was raped, after that it was nothing but halusanations and paranoia.

when i had tured 15 years old i had been idmitted for the first time, i was in and out of hospitles for 3 or 4 years my exsperiances at those places brought me more harm than good all i got was my thoughts and dreams washed away by telling me i whould not make it to graduate high school and i was indangered to be homeless then finally my finnal time in a hospital to one that i had been to seven or more times they had finnaly found the medacine that worked and its name is “clozerail” and once released i was put in a group home but the real test was when i had started school my senier year i had missed my other three years so i was pretty excited although it wasnt a normal school with sports or what not but it was pretty cool with the art classes i got into it but what made me irratated was when my case worker and team was trying to stop me from graduating on time which i did not listen i kept working then my voc rehab specialist tryed to convince my school princabule to have me stop
school for the rest of the year so i could get funding and graduate late , my princable did not go for it she thought it was crule so i continued my work and graduated high school on time with my class,

class of 2009

A couple of years ago, my older brother was a quiet, shy, not so confident guy. Whenever someone asked me about my brother, I could never quite describe him. I would usually say something along the lines of.. a really nice guy, quiet, smart & a gentle giant. Paul was the quiet angel of our family, whereas I was the moody, screaming teenager.
I don’t mean to talk about him in past tense, like he isn’t here. He well and truly is, at age 24, still living at home with our dad, after my mum made him move out.
In about late 2006, he was diagnosed with Disorganized typed Schizophrenia. A shock to my parents, but not so much to me, as I always knew he was a bit ‘different’.
It all started with him hanging out with a group of friends he was close with since primary school. They had a band and played on weekends, usually at one of their houses. There they drank and I’m assuming smoked a fair bit too from what my brother told me. I never thought my brother would try that stuff, after the way my mother brought us up. She was very disapproving of drugs, I suppose like most parents, and he wasn’t the type to go against what mum had to say, or let her down.
He started becoming very withdrawn from his friends, he was chatting with them on Facebook & Myspace quite a lot, but just stopped, and stopped communicating with them.
This is when it all started.
He started saying really strange things, like ” My friend is plotting things against me” and “Do you think I could take over the world with facebook”, and he would just come out with the strangest things. Mum & I would just get so angry with him because I suppose we didn’t get it.
He started to walk around the house alot. He would just do laps of the house, open every single door and turn the heater up, leave lights on etc. Very very annoying. He also started to have about 5-10 showers a day, all half hour ones too.
He would walk around in a beenie, gloves and jacket on hot days. I knew there was something unnatural going on in his brain to make him act like that, I knew he couldnt help it, but it was just so frustrating. Where did my big brother go?
He would also study maths every day, he said it was because he needed to keep his skills up which he learnt in his Diploma of Engineering. This is definetely a good thing I suppose.
I always thought he was excellent at Math, as he used to teach me. But after recently reading his school reports, he actually had quite low scores in Math. But ask him what 100 minus 23 is and jhe ust wouldnt know, but ask him a really long algebra equation and I bet he would know how to do it. Strange huh?
After about a year of this kind of stuff and seeing counsellors etc, he was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Much to our relief, as I could better understand him, and know it was not his fault, but the illness itself.
Mum thought she understood. I know now that she just couldn’t deal with it anymore, so she asked him to move to my dads place, 5 minutes away. I guess it didn’t help that all of this started when mum had anothe rbaby with her partner or 6 years. She was trying to look after two kids at once I suppose. She still sees him once a week or so, but I wish she would care alot more and show him she loves him. I know she does, but I don’t know if he knows that.
So after two years or so, his condition has dramatically improved. He has finally got a job three days a week as a cleaner, something he knows well after working under my mums business. And he is also studying Literacy & Numeracy. I see him once every two weeks or so, but sometimes it can just be draining trying to make conversation and taking the lead in everything. I love my brother, but I just miss the way he used to be. He isn’t the same person anymore, he was my big brother, now I feel like his big sister.

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.

I have been living with diagnosed schizophrenia for 4 years. Undiagnosed I suspect for quite a bit longer.
I started to become “weird” at 16 years old, I would spend hours on end just listening to music imagining scenarios in my head where I was a hero, or sometimes just being a violent maniac. This was always with me being much better than I really was. I would do this every day to heavy metal music.
Sometimes I would get paranoid and think people were peeping through the cracks in the blinds, and would see what a freak I was.
While I was doing this I was a loner and had no friends, although I would sometimes hang around my sisters friends. This was because I did school from home.

Sometime around 16 and a half, I got bored one day while playing an online game and decided to have a small toke of some low potency marijuana my sister had. I REALLY enjoyed it. This was strange for me because I had used high potency marijuana in the past and absolutely hated it.
After that I started to smoke marijuana regularly. Slowly my tolerance increased and I was smoking about 3 grams a week.

Things were the same when I turned 17, but then I made a friend (B) who also smoked marijuana. We would do stuff together and basically just smoked bongs and got drunk together.
As I was nearing 18 I got a job at the local supermarket and saw this as a hope for the future, I would be able to buy gym equipment and make friends.
With that job came money to buy more pot. I was smoking marijuana every day listening to music, dreaming of all the things I could potentially do, all this while stoned out of my mind.
While at work for a few months I made another friend, (E). We would just smoke bongs together and find stuff to steal so we could get more pot. I seemed pretty normal to my friends at that time.
Then just days before my 18th birthday, I got into a serious physical fight with me and another of my friends (K) (who was much older) against 3 skinheads. I was badly beaten to the point all I saw was white.
After this I slowly stopped seeing my friends all except for (K) who I used to get pot from and do workouts together, I had turned into a loner again, without me even realising it.

Sometime about halfway into 18 years old, I got REALLY paranoid about people, started to split words up in my head and couldn’t stop blurting offensive and embarrassing words out, I used to clench my jaw or do whatever it took to hide these words from people. I was especially scared people would hear “I’m a virgin”. This all came very sudden and I had no idea what the illness was, all I knew is that it was permanent.
I also though people at my work were all conspiring against me and would sometimes walk the streets at night with a knife trying to catch them.
Eventually I stopped even seeing anyone except my family, this was all while working at the supermarket.
I stopped pot use because it started to amplify all my negative thoughts and would make me play offensive tunes in my head.
Things continued like this until I was 19, then I decided maybe I could make myself normal again by smoking pot again and listing to lots of music. So I did it and did start to feel normal, except for the blurting things out. I also decided not to try to hide the things I was trying not to say, BIG MISTAKE. While I was leaving my shift for the day I managed to say “I want to suck (insert name) cock”. A whole room of people heard me, and the next day everyone was laughing. This triggered some kind of psychotic episode in me. I decided I would physically seriously assault someone at work and that would get me the help I needed. I stayed up for about 3 days without drugs, but in the end decided not to do it.
After that everyone pretty much left me alone.

A couple of months later my old friend (B) said hello to me at work, so we started hanging around each other again.
He reintroduced me to the skinheads I had the fight with. I started to shoot up speed with them. Little did I know they were lacing my speed with things like ajax and ratsack. I was in too much of a sub human state from all the pot use that I didn’t even notice. Until I got some high potency speed of my sister one night, and wanted more. She said she was going to get it off the skinheads, I told her not to. I injected the second lot of speed and it was a hot shot, after staying awake for 4 days I was admitted to hospital with damaged lungs from the hotshot.
I later found out from my sister months afterwards that she got the speed from the skinheads.

After I got out of the hospital. The skinheads sold me some laced marijuana. I smoked the whole bag while listening to music. Then when I went out to the doctor I felt REALLY stupid, almost retarded. I couldn’t remember I single word that went into my head. I immediately freaked out shouting and screaming.
It was then that I had my first and only extreme psychotic episode.
I thought that the Australian federal police had put a camera in my television and I was being broadcast live on every channel of national TV. That every advert was being made for me. That the whole laced drugs thing was a setup from society. If I waved at the people on TV they would wave back.
After the psychotic episode ended, something was really bothering me, words were sounding all muddled up. I couldn’t even watch TV it was that bad. This put me in a state of extreme depression, I took up alcohol, drinking every day. Then I started to just try to sleep my life away. Every day I would just drink and sleep. It got to the stage where I couldn’t even get out of bed to drink.
Then one night my sister and I were having an argument and I threw a beer bottle at her head. It almost killed her.
After that I started to see a psychiatrist, who then put me on Risperdal and Avanza. I figured “what the hell, may as well take them” expecting them to do nothing. After a few days, words started to sound normal again. My depression was getting much better. I knew I could live a happy life.
I stopped sleeping in bed all the time and started to play games instead.
I lived like this for a couple of years. My psychotic symptoms were better but not completely gone, I had also developed severe anxiety, which I drank to stop.

When I turned 22 I moved in with my sister, she did not like me taking medications, so I stopped taking them.
Slowly the jumbled up words all came back, also with my poor outlook on life. I continued like this for 3 months until one day I almost murdered my sister. The police were called and I was taken to hospital where I stayed for 1 night.
I went back home to live with my mum and she was appalled at my psychotic state. I would often say things to her like “I’m going to be remembered for ever” or “I’m going to kill people one day”. For weeks I just fantasized about killing people and the day I would finally be remembered for murder.

I started taking my medication again and improved, but this time something wasn’t right. I felt really dumb and thought my sisters ex partner and father of my niece had injected me with a death pill. This really played on my mind and I was planning various ways to murder him by poison. Then while I was visiting my sister with my mum, I asked “do I seem different to you”? They said yes and I lost it and smashed up her house.
Mum then made me an appointment to see the psychiatrist who then put me on Abilify. This made the “death pill” delusion go away and my mind was clear again. I also started taking Lexapro for anxiety which worked well.

About a year later I got drunk while staying at my sisters friends house. While upstairs I heard lots of laughing and a voice say “he’s lost the plot”. I got angry thinking they were talking about me and laughing at my schizophrenia. I started to punch things in the house and when they came in to calm me down I stabbed one of them in the neck before being restrained by them. The police came and charged me. I was released on bail.
After getting two psychiatrists reports I was found not guilty by mental incompetence.

My antipsychotic has since been changed to geodon and I am doing well. I don’t drink or smoke and am doing great considering what I’ve been through.

I only wish I had gone on medication as soon as it started. Things would have been much better.

I was oficially diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was hospitalized for the second time in 1982.My mom told me later that she had thought something was wrong when i was in high school but didn’t know what it was.I think it was triggered by a combination of stress and drug use.in 1980 i was two years out of high school and living on my own.I ran into money problems so i moved back in with my parents.I was isolating and my parents knew something was wrong and i so they sent me to see a psychiatric social worker.She tried to help me but I was getting worse. I was hiding how I was really feeling and put on a happy face.I guess that was when I wads getting psychotic.I forget what happend but a meeting was set up for me, my parents, my worker and a psychiatrist.The psychiatrist reccomended i go into a psych ward. my worker had no idea i was this bad off and was almost crying.Anyway I went into a short term psychiatric hospital on an open ward.I got there and thats when i really got bad off.I’ve always found however bad off I was when i got in the hospital I always got worse. I was in agony going crazy.i stayed there two weeks then moved into Soteria house a house for schizophrenics. It’s premise was treatment without medication, just peer counselors. people who were interested in helping the mentally ill but had no formal psychiatric training.i lived there for ayear and a half and went through hell 24/7 the whole time.I basically spent the time trying not to go crazy and lose control and start sceaming and crying.I went through some realy crazy thinking and perceptions.I went through the common problem of noyt being able to filter out my envirement. when i went out for walks i saw everything at once.I was aware of everything.I got kicked out of there and then i was in a locked facility for 8 months. thats when i suffered again for 24/7 there was no relief.I got out of there and they put me in a residential treatment program .It was basically a really
nice two story house in a rich neighborhood in palo alto california.it cost $3000.oo a month and this was in 1983.