Schizophrenia Diaries

Well.. as hard as this may be to talk about.. my mother has schizophrenia. She has been diagnosed with this disease since i was about 5 years old. I am now 19 almost 20 years old, and I am still dealing with this.

I do remember one of the first times she started having these voices in her head. When I was about 6 years old she asked me to come to her because she thought someone had put a recorder in my ear.. crazy I know..

Another incident was when we went to visit my nana and grandad and she left me there because she was having another one of her episodes and noone knew where she was for about a week or two.

My moms voice in her head is named Linda.. kinda creepy i know.. but after awhile I just accepted it.. She went to the mental hospital so many times when I was growing up I can’t even tell you how many times its been. She would go into outbreaks of just bawling her eyes out and claiming that people on the tv or the neighbors next door were out to get her and i of course would have to fight her for the keys to the car so that way she wouldn’t kill herself or anyone else. She would think that people from our own family were teaming up with this voice in her head to “get” her.
She would always claim that something bad was going to happen or that “linda” was controlling all of our heads and making us into different people. It was so wild.. and during all of this madness I was trying to be a teenager with friends. But, I hid it all. I held in the pain and the hurt and put on a big smile when i went to school because i didn’t want anyone to know that there was something wrong. I was even a very popular girl in school. I was a cheerleader all throughout high school. I ran track my freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. I was very good at it too. I had many many friends, but none of them knew the secret i held deep inside.
Everytime my friends would ask to come over I would lie and say that they couldn’t because my mom said no or that someone was visiting and they couldnt’ come over. My mom was always an emotional wreck. I would come home and she would be crying on the couch or yelling at her voice. I would escape by sitting in my room with the music loud and the tv up. I can honestly say it made me very depressed because all i wanted was a normal mother like everyone else had. I remember looking up into the stands wishing that my mom could come and be normal to watch me run or cheer. It broke my heart. I remember many nights just clinging to my pillow wishing that things would be different. I did get a boyfriend my sophomore year and i eventually told him, the first person, about my moms disorder. He was of course in shock because yes i looked like the type of girl who was “perfect”. But i wanted to seem that way to people because i didn’t want anyone to look at me differently or feel sorry for me.
Anyways, i remember on several occasions my mom telling me she hated me. However, i knew it was because of her voice.. but for some reason those 3 words hurt. I needed someone to love and care about me. I had a stepdad and my dad lived in dallas. My stepdad didn’t know he would be signing up for this. He really just wanted out and he mainly took it out on me. We never really talked.

As of now I am trying my best to get through college. And not but 3 months ago I got a call from my uncle saying that my mom tried to commit suicide by overdosing on her medication. My stepdads brother however had walked in just as the medication was all hitting her and he called for an ambulance. My stepdad was out of town and I was in another town for college. She did live but as of right now is still not doing well. She likes to call peopel all the time like almost 20 times a day for each person in my family. It gets on their nerves as well as mine because all she wants to talk about is her voice and of course none of us want to her about it or listen to the person she has become. I dont’ know what to do anymore. I feel like she is my responsibility. Noone is my family seems to want to deal with her or care about her, and my stepdad wants to get out of it. I feel since she is my mother that i should help her, but i don’t know how and i don’t think i am emotionally stable enought
to help. THe only thing that has been keeping me going is my friends. But thats it.

So if you have a mother, father, brother or sister that have this horrible disorder i feel your pain and your not the only one. I know how it feels and it hurts.. but you have to keep strong and don’t let that person get you down.. you have to surround yourself with happy people and other family members to get through it.

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

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 was diagnosed officially when I was 19 years old. For many years I had suspected…something…I come from a family of mental illness so I knew it was there possibly. When I was younger, round 8 or 9, teachers in my school suspected something was askew. I seen therapist and doctors because of this suspicion but something inside me told me to, “put the mask on” to say. I almost always had this other side that guided me through a lot of things…at first I thought it was just really good instincts.

Over the years I had began to identify certain aspects of my disorder. I learned to identify the sounds, and hallucinations I had. I never have been medicated nor do I want to be. I think that if I medicate myself I will lose a part of my own self control…even though it seems to me I am trying to control that which cannot be controlled. The sounds I hear are usually one word commands or short phrases, and most the time they are being screamed at me. At night, before I try to sleep, they tend to be worse. Usually I hear voices yelling, “NO!” or “STOP!” or I will hear someone yelling for me or a familiar voice it seems saying something to me but I never can make it out. When I try to sleep I hear this whispering sound, like a room full of people, sometimes seeming like 20-30 voices all whispering, and I can never make it out, other than a couple of words here and there. This makes it almost impossible for me to sleep, and sometimes I go days without sleeping. I am
currently advised to see a doctor because my blood pressure is so high because my body does not sleep. Not only that my appearance has changed from lack of sleep, my eyes always give me away.

I see things, but they are almost always quick and sudden. I see something in front me and when it registers in my head of what I saw, when I turn to look again, it’s gone. Sometimes I see things though that don’t go away so easily. I was once in Tampa, and I was at a party that I was dragged to and this neighborhood was backed next to a swamp. I had decided to take a walk out by the swamp just to get away from the people mainly because they were not the kind of people I wanted to even try to associate with. I was standing next to this small pond, it was dark, and very little light, but I could see pretty well. I stood looking at the water, and then I noticed a face in the water, looking at me. Then I noticed another one, and another one. Then about 10 or so faces were slowly rising out of the water and coming towards me. I was gripped with fear to be honest, and I do not fear many things. I began to notice these faces were not alive. They had frozen eyes staring at
me, and their faces were drawn tight. Their skin was decayed and I began to notice a smell in the air. They rose their heads only about half way out of the water and stared at me. I began to back away and then they went back under very slowly. I took a few moments to calm myself down and collect what I had seen. I later went home and realized I was hallucinating in a very bad way.

Many times I fight with a voice in my head that tells me stupid shit. I get this overwhelming urge to act on what is being thought or said and it’s like I am there for a ride that I can not control. Most the time this voice leads me in a right direction, but sometimes when I get to the point of no going back and that voice has lead me to look, or say, or do something completely fucking stupid, it’s like that voice just bails on me and I am left there confused and stunned trying to figure out a way to back out of what I did, or said. In this I am I think of myself as never truly alone…even though I am…no relationship has ever worked positive for me. My friends have bailed on me, or I have pushed them away. I am truly alone, but its like when I am sitting at home, in the dark, all alone…I feel a hand on my shoulder and sometimes if I look to see the person who is there, I get a quick glimpse of a familiar face that almost looks like me, but it’s not…the eyes are
different and the face is weathered…it’s not me, but I feel connected…then it’s gone.

Hi All

This story is about my eldest son. He is No1 between 6 boys and 3 girls. He is 24 years of age. I blame myself for his sickness. I pushed him to the edge, I did not know what zchesophrenia is. I thought he is using drugs. He was very tense I was very opressive. He started showing strange signs, like always scilent, deep thinking, loud laughing for no reason.. Suddnly, unexpectedly our relation was 360 degreed changed. He jumped to me asking for help. He expressed his fear of some “others” who will do harm to him. I took him to a scychiatric who prescribed his condition.
I wanted to die because I feelt that I am part of his problem. Life is not joyfull anymore. Whenever I steal happy sometimes and remember him these sometime resprocate suddenly. Is he going to be as before? is he going to be unbalanced for good? Is this possable? My beloved cute son is fealthy with long nails and very long hair and beared.
it is very strange how life can be decieving and unpredictable. I am turning to the one who never sleep, The one who change things by verbal order ALLAH ALMIGHTY.