Schizophrenia Diaries

Things started to go wrong on Saturday the 13th of June. I had worked the Friday and every Monday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday since I returned from my 3 month vacation in Europe in the August of last year.
However, this Saturday was different. I started to get a headache around 16:30 thinking it was diet related since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast (Another bad habit). I was craving a nice meal, but since the cook (my mum) had the day off, toast was on the menu.
I waited for my break at 17:30 but became nauseous. Suddenly these voices appeared shouting in the back of my head “They’re coming to get you” and “They are after you”.
At this stage I had no visual hallucinations and I was lucid enough to recognise I could no longer fulfill my working duties in a responsible capacity.
Promptly I spoke to the Nurse-In-Charge; Mary and voiced my concerns that I should go home since “I had just had an epileptic seizure”. Only my Nurse-Unit-Manager knows of my condition and as it was the week-end she was not around. Neither was my colleague, another Nurse-In-Charge who I had confided in. I chose to keep my disorder a bit on the quiet side as I had encountered discrimination from my previous job making working conditions stressful and unbearable.
After speaking to my Mum about my hallucinations at work, we decided that I drive home as I only live 10 minutes away. Terrified, I drove slowly and got home to a frantic mother who wanted to call the Crisis Intervention or CAT team. Stupidly, I took extra Largactil (Chlorpromazine) 200mg which my Psychiatrist had advised me to use under my discression. Fortunately I fell asleep until 04:00 the following morning aggitated and still hallucinating of which many cigarettes and cups of coffee (other bad habits), did nothing for. Clearly I was psychotic.
It wasn’t until the evening that the visual hallucinations started. Hearing repetativly and loud “They’re coming to get you”, “They will kill you”, and “They are after you”, I also had to contend with seeing dark shadows roaming around my room with knives weaving in and out of my doors and windows and around my bed. I was glad when mum offered to sleep with me to try and calm me. I was even more happier when I spoke to my Psychiatrist who felt that the 500mg of Largactil (Chlorpromazine) in addition to my other medication would have some relief on this terrifying nightmare I was experiencing. Whilst my psychiatrst could not admit me that night due to bed capacity, I was admitted the following day. Still hallucinating as severely as the previous night, the nursing staff decided to put me into high dependancy where I would not be in any danger to anyone including myself.
The next couple of days in hospital are a blur. I was so doped up on 300mg Chlorpromazine, 1400mg Quetiapine (Seroquel), 4000mg Sodium Valporate (Epilim), and 40mg Paroxetine that I slept most of the day. I only ventured out to have cigarettes and dinner. The paranoia was still high as I sat alone for dinner thinking everyone was talking about me or plotting to attack and even kill me. I took no action on these thoughts due to my limited but present insight.
Each day I saw my Psychiatrist and expressed my difficulties. By day 4 we decided to change anti-psychotics as I was on the maximum dose of the Quetiapine (Seroquel).
I was devistated. This was going to be the 7th anti-psychotic I had changed to. Whilst the Chlorpromazine works well as a supplement, the high doses I would required would cause the side-effects to be totally debilitating. I had no choice.
My Psychiatrist felt it best that we change the Quetiapine (Seroquel) for Ziprasidone (Zeldox) in one hit rather than weaning and stop/starting dosages. So, I stopped the Quetiapine (Seroquel) straight away and went straight onto the maximum dose of Ziprasidone (Zeldox) which is 160mg which I now take all at night although it recommends you split the dose.
Within 3 days I was feeling my old self again. I had day leave with my Mum and went and saw the Salvador Dali exhibition. The following day I went home.
All was going well until the hallucinations began to reappear in the evenings. Mum was at work and my Nanna has no idea of what is wrong with me so we argue.
Around 4pm every evening since being home my auditory hallucinations flare up again and I am always up and about between 04:00 and 06:00 much to my mother’s disgust.
Hearing repetativly and loud “They’re coming to get you”, “They will kill you”, and “They are after you” I cannot go out anywhere unaccompanied. I cannot drive my car. And I am even scared to walk my dog as I am frightened to leave the house.
These symptoms have all but gone now since seeing my Psychiatrist again last Thursday. She added an extra 40mg of Ziprasidone (Zeldox) to take at 16:00 to stop the hallucinations and started me on som Clonazepam to help with the anxiety and insomnia. Yesterday and today have been the quietest days in a very long time.

It all started when I was in fifth grade, and maybe even partially because my mom got her job at the prison. I don’t know. But that’s when I started getting depressed. It was an interesting changing point in my life–the friends that I had known for so long just kind of dumped me, and I had pretty much nowhere to turn. I can’t say I had any real friends when I was in fifth grade.

They didn’t come until sixth grade. For security reasons, we’ll call them Jane and Janis (real original, right?). Sixth grade was…an interesting year. I was consistently in trouble, and rather depressed. But I was frequently hanging out with a boy who we’ll call Jake (another J…?), and I think it was safe to say we liked each other. Being twelve, we were (childishly) flirting left and right.

Janis was the kind of girl who you didn’t know too well, but she had a mean streak in her. I learned that I was quite a fast runner compared to other females due to my constant need to get away from Janis. She liked to pull my hair for some reason. That wasn’t helping my anxiety levels.

Then, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, Jane went right along with it (though less frequently) and as I didn’t know her well at all, I was scared of her.

This was also the year that I began cutting. I didn’t feel depressed when I did it–more or less, my mood was very flat, but sometimes euphoric. One day, I guess I just kind of snapped, because I started really ploughing away at my arm with the metal end of a pencil. Jane and Janis reported it, and I was sent to the counselor’s office.

He started asking me a bunch of weird questions about suicide, and I answered as honestly as I could. The next thing I know, he’s calling my mom and the principal, nurse, and him are telling her that they need to get me down to the emergency floor of the hospital.

So my mom picks me up, and all I remember is that it was a really tense emotional situation. She’s asking me all these questions that I just don’t have answers to. We had to stop at home, first, to tell the people at the hospital I’d be coming.

My dad was really pissed when he found out. I remember him screaming at me, and shoving me, and then the anxiety was too much and I started panicking, crying, even though I knew it wouldn’t help. Then my mom was yelling, too. I couldn’t figure out what the hell I had done to get in so much trouble, though I had a feeling it was the cutting.

At the hospital, we were led into this little white room with a tv, a few chairs, and a bed. I had to sit on the bed, while my mom sat in a chair reading magazines. It was going to be a while until the nurse came in to perform the psyche evaluation, so I was told to get comfortable. But I just couldn’t. I was so keyed up from the excitement of the day, and a bit dissociated, in retrospect, and I just couldn’t relax.

Mostly, I was scared that if they found anything “weird” about me in the evaluation, my mom would get mad and there would be more yelling and things would just get worse and worse–so after a good four or five hours…maybe it was even 10–i lost count…the lady came in with her computer (a little Dell laptop), and asked me 10 questions.

There were some of them that I was able to tell the truth on, some I had trouble answering because I didn’t understand what the question meant and had to have it explained to me, and the last few that I had to lie to keep my mom from being mad and yelling at me. I knew what was considered “normal” and that I wasn’t–but I knew all too well how to fake it.

So, they found that I was mentally sound and fit to go home–they fed me a sandwich and a gatorade, and by the time we got to the Wendy’s drive-thru (mom was hungry) it was half past midnight. I remember I got a frosty, then we went home, and I was out of school for three days on mental health leave or something stupid like that.

I had to see a counselor, but I only saw him for less than a year before the agency was shut down. He liked to play the coping game. It’s a fancy shrink-game that they use to teach kids like me proper coping skills. I’m comfortable in saying that I didn’t learn anything–I was (and still am) very good at telling people what they want to hear (it decreases the tension in any situation, I’ve found), and I had a good grasp of what was considered “normal” and I’ll say it again–I was not. For correct answers, though, this man would give the kids Yu-Gi-Oh cards. It was the ‘in’ thing at the time.

Then I entered my seventh grade year and met Amanda, Katie and Jennifer–little did I know it, but they would become my best friends and actually stick with me during the trying time. About midway through October, I brought my concerns to the counselor at the school, and about a month later, I was prescribed Prozac through a physician at the nearby clinic.

The rest of the time on the drug is a blur, but I know I was off it by the end of the school year, because what I do remember of it was that it made me jittery and impulsive, a bit aggressive, and my thoughts didn’t make much sense when I got overstimulated. The depression was gone, but that was about it. I ended up yelling at a teacher (who was a sexist and deserved it) because he asked what my problem was–why I didn’t like him. My answer did not please him–all I managed to say was that he was the problem, a bit of stuttering, and some gibberish because my thoughts were running together incoherently and I couldn’t stop my mouth from talking. I left the room, not sure where I was going to go, but with the mental unloading I felt sort of sane.

I do remember being followed by one of the many people who agreed with what little insight I had given into my agitation, and we were going to complain a bit to the office about this particular teacher being such a tool. I don’t recall if we ever got around to it, though.

I was seeing a counselor at the time, but she never found out about this. No one did–except my mother, who received a phone call but didn’t mention it to me until I was having one particularly bad day. And for the incident? I received three days of lunch detention and a strange sort of respect and even a bit of fear among my fellow classmates.

While in counseling, I got a full psychiatric evaluation…that’s what I’d call it, at least. They found that my IQ was 123 (at age 13), but that I also had a bit of ADHD, depression, anxiety, formal thought disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and paranoid ideation.

I ended seventh grade by getting off of Prozac, and failing every class.

Like all summers in the suburbs, mine was uneventful, but I did somehow manage to gain thirty pounds. It was shocking, but I went through my eighth grade year self-conscious.

I wore the same thing every day, doing whatever it took to conceal my body. I was picked last in every sport for gym (until it came to floor hockey, in which I dominated when on a team with Jane–we’d somehow become friends).

I didn’t talk much in eighth grade. Couldn’t even walk confidently. My favorite teacher was my math teacher, because she knew me better than she knew most other students, but still didn’t know much. Everyone thought I was stupid until it came to one particular math problem. I’d never been good with numbers, but when they were presented with shapes, I was genius. I was the only one in the class who knew right off the top of my head how to find the answer. Simply take the whole circle, find that volume, and then the volume of the smaller inner circle, and subtract it from the volume of the full circle. Then you get the volume to the outer ring. It was so simple.

On top of that, I only had to take 2 or 3 spelling tests at the end of the week the whole year because I knew how to spell practically everything. People were asking me how the hell I got so smart. And, I was still talking to Jake.

Eighth grade was also hard, because I started drinking. Vodka. On school grounds. I didn’t care. I was getting in weird moods, doing drugs, and making things worse. Then, I got caught.

I remember being drunk in a tiny room with cops, paranoid, not sure of who I was or if any of it was real, and panicking, while all the while (this is the funny part) thinking I was doing a good job of talking myself out of trouble. They called my mom, she took me home, I was suspended for two weeks (with a packet of homework to do–got it all done!), and had to attend a class about not doing drugs, and was given a second chance by the state.

I ended up getting charged as a felon, but since the state had a new law for kids under 18, they would dismiss the charges as long as I didn’t get in trouble again before I turned 18. After that, all charges would be erased. That meeting ended with the probation officer telling me she hoped she never saw me again.

I passed all my classes in eighth grade, and we moved out of our house on the last day of school.

That summer was spent cleaning our new house out. It’d been a bargain for a 20 acre farm–120,000. I was happy, but the depression didn’t sink in till later. I realized that yes, I could have horses, but I didn’t have all my old friends.

The only reason I allowed myself to get close to them was because my parents promised me we would never move. We’d lived in a lot of places growing up–an apartment, an auto body shop, a trailer park, an actual house, and then a farm. I’d moved so many schools that I just didn’t get attached to people anymore, and I’d made the mistake of allowing myself that luxury.

Ninth grade was full of near-failure, and one actual failure. I sucked at spanish, got bored with algebra. I was so paranoid and anxious all the time that I ended up getting put on celexa, 40 mg, once a day, because I had started having panic attacks getting called to run errands, and I was losing my hair.

I was also very self-conscious and paranoid that people were scrutinizing every bit of my flesh, and throughout the year I dropped from 170 pounds to 138 by starving myself. I’m five foot six.

It was also the year I started having hallucinations. It started with just tasting different flavors, and even different words. Some of them were pleasant, like blue raspberry, and others were horrible, like the way Vicks Vapo-Rub smells–that’s what I was tasting. This was happening almost every day.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I was so scared of people and so paranoid that I was constantly being judged that I couldn’t do group work. I was always allowed to work alone, and proved to be a very efficient worker. I impressed my English teacher, especially, with an essay I had written on the proper use of the ‘n word.’ He said it was written at least at a junior level, if not higher.

The first auditory hallucination I’d heard, I was in the library, and someone whispered my name. I looked back, and there was a bookshelf behind me (about 4 inches away), and behind the bookshelf, a thick brick wall.

It was also the year I noticed the shadows. I’d see them in school, everywhere, and was beginning to get paranoid about them, too, and panicked every time I saw one, or ten, or a hundred.

I passed ninth grade slightly behind on credits, but doing a decent job for my mental status.

During the summer, working with my horse that I’d recieved for my birthday proved to be more helpful than the medication. If I had any hallucinations, I must have forgot about them.

I dropped 5 more pounds over the summer, starting out my sophomore year at 132–the thinnest I’d ever been. My ribs were showing and I was only eating every other day–the things we women do for vanity.

That year, I had a complete mental breakdown. I became very confused one day, a bit unsure of where I was. I could name the place, but it felt like a higher power was telling me I wasn’t really there, that it was all in my head, that I was dreaming and I needed to wake up. I was generally confused, anxious, almost panicky, and called a hotline. They asked about history of schizophrenia in the family, and while everything’s going on around me, I’m trying to answer their questions and just can’t.

By the end of that day, I was so distraught and so confused that I had to leave school, using the old “I feel so violent right now I don’t know what I’ll do” excuse. I was sent home to face my old man, who was PISSED and almost hit me (sending me into a panic attack…I wouldn’t stop hyperventilating for about an hour), and that was when I got into counseling and everything else.

I started out in counseling as very cold towards other people, hating them because I saw them as nothing more than idiots who only believed in material possessions. I never really saw them as true people.

After a few months, things in my mind started to change. It was gradual, but when I stopped and thought about it, none of it made sense, and somehow, it was all true.

I was hearing voices more often, sometimes commenting on the way I walked (because I have a six inch stride).

I could never really tell what was real and what wasn’t. I got massively confused whenever I lost something. One day, it happened to be a water bottle. I looked for two whole blocks. A couple of people helped me look. I was so confused that I would feel around in obviously empty spaces because hey, maybe I just couldn’t see the damned thing. Maybe it was invisible, but I’d be able to touch it. I never did find it, and I refused to be bought a water from the vending machine. After all, it wasn’t the fact that I just needed water. I needed MY water.

This happened a couple more times with different objects. I’d be left searching the school only to come up fruitless. It would still bother me, even after I’d given up. The water bottle still bothers me, for example…

If that wasn’t bad enough, dealing with confusion and hallucinations (I sometimes felt bugs crawling over my skin–not pleasant), the shadows had become much more prevalent in my life. Suddenly, they could speak to me using telepathy. Though they spoke a different laguage (some of which I can speak), the words came into my mind totally translated. They were angry because a kid down the street from me had killed the brother of one of the shadows about seven hundred something years ago, and they wanted revenge. They can’t exact their revenge, though, because they can’t physically touch the human world. So they wated me to kill him instead.

I always said no, but they would pester me and pester me until I almost gave in, but decided I didn’t feel like braving temperatures of negative sixty-five to walk two miles down the road, kill him, and hide out in the river valley. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble. I wasn’t going to be rewarded anyway for committing such an obvious misdeed. It was still annoying, though.

And a few months after that, I began hearing stranger things–beeps and electronic noises in place of voices (which, when heard, were worse, and would scream at me in foreign languages, leaving me positively petrified), and I came to believe it was cyborgs making those sounds.

Cyborgs were everywhere–teaching at the school, crowd control at the art museum, the cops on the streets, and even my own psychiatrist. I realized that this might seem bizarre to other people, but I didn’t care, because that was (and still is) my reality.

I am now on my summer vacation, and the shadows do not bother me with their words as often, but they still lurk everywhere. Now and then, I get the one that wanted me to kill the kid down the street leering at me and telling me to touch myself, but I hide under the covers.

Almost every other night I’m hearing cyborg noises, and sometimes I can even feel them staring at me through my window, scratching at the wood siding. I hide under my covers and tell myself it’s not really happening.

Some nights, I can’t sleep. I’ve stayed up days at a time. Then I crash and sleep 18 hour days.

My moods have been very flat for the past couple of months, and though my “people skills” have gotten “better,” I don’t care anything for people…the only people I’d jump in front of a train to save are Rick, Jane, and Dad–on a good day, if I wasn’t too distracted by something else to do it.

Occasionally, I do have an elevated day, but it’s not in a good way. I feel manic, almost happy-psychotic, like I can take on the world and do anything. It’s during these moods that I also tend to get hurt…like bitten by a horse, or getting sunburned so I blister, or once in a while, cracking a bone.

Sometimes the “manic” state will last a week, sometimes a few hours, but it usually proves to hurt just a little bit.

Just today I got a little excited over some green milkweed growing in our back pasture. We found 17 plants, which is a big deal because I live in northwestern wisconsin, where these things aren’t even supposed to be found. The excitement wore off, and turned right to anxiety. I’d been jittery all day, unable to do anything about it or think straight, and then I just sort of went into a dead mode after the excitement.

I’ve been told that I’ve made a lot of progress, that things can get a lot worse, but even so, I really don’t think I need worse. I’m not on any medicine right now (thank god, the celexa was fucking with my head) and I passed most of my classes (except french–fail) with B’s.

I haven’t been to counseling for almost a month. I’m supposed to go every two weeks, and my mom thinks that she can stretch the appointments out like this and I won’t get grouchy. Every little bad mood is blamed on my lack of medication, when really, (and no one gets this) it’s because I feel overstimulated and need to be left completely alone for an hour or two. She wants me back on my meds, but I don’t get confused as bad as I did when I was on them, and I don’t want them ever again, even though…i got distracted and can’t remember what I was going to write…

I do have my days when I feel like I’m on drugs (and I’m not), and those are the days I hunker down on the couch and slip away into television land, so hopefully, if I do hallucinate, I’ll be distracted enough not to notice it. That all ends as soon as I’m in bed, though, because I can only listen to music for so long before I have to try to fall asleep (right now I’m tasting nacho cheese–haven’t had that for months). I stay awake because I get anxious, and a little bit scared, though with minor stuff, I can fall asleep. But the cyborgs won’t let me sleep, and neither will the shadows. If it’s just voices and static in my head, I can usually get past it and sleep a few hours.

That’s all I really have to write. If you didn’t want to read someone’s full life story, you should have read the title better.

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!!!!!

The desolate feeling of not knowing what to feel or say in any given situation. The stress of feeling like I lose a piece of myself daily. Then having flashbacks that are so terrifying that I tremble uncontrolably. When asked what’s wrong I can honestly say that I have no idea.

I am high functioning and am going to school, but the stress causes some paranoia. I feel judged and I wish to be able to be free of this blasted feeling inadequate.

How do you explain the hopelessness that occurs sporadically causing withdrawal and frustration. At times I feel cold and emotionless, but other times I alsmost feel normal. My past experiences taught me to fight the uncontrolable urges that over take my reason. I’ve learned to control those urges, because of them I hitched hiked to florida.

During times of duress I suffer hallucinations that scare me to death and hear voices that aren’t truely there.

My brother is schizophrenic. This is so difficult to understand or explain. Anyone who has had to deal with a schizophrenic knows that it is a huge, unexpected hurtle- and often it feels like something that will never be overcome. My brother was always one of my best friends growing up… It’s been so hard to accept that he will always struggle with this. That I will probably never know that person again. He can’t understand his illness, he can’t even accept that he has an illness. He is currently committed to a local institution, so he is close by, but he’s further away mentally than he has ever been. I miss my brother more that I let on- I miss everything about him. I have so many thoughts and emotions about this whole ordeal, but It’s useless to try to explain them all- it’s all wasted breath because nothing will change the fact of the matter. I don’t know what else to say, it sucks?!