Schizophrenia Diaries

I am diagnosed with schizophrenia. I`m going to try and explain my life since that event where I first started showing symptoms.

Everything is a drone of noise, I feel distorted and unplugged from reality. I don`t feel myself. I ask myself what are these limbs I carry, why are they hard in the centre ? I have lost all interest in life and my goals. I feel like a toppled pawn. MY life has no purpose left. The delusional thinking is killing me and I want to know why thinks work the way they do.

Why did my drunk brother beat me up and my parents did nothing.I think maybe this was the cause of my illness,all the stress and the hits to my skull.

I just want to climb out of my skin I fell uncomfortable trapped inside this human body.I tried to commit suicide and I didn`t realize it.I saw my arms like tentacles they were attacking me and I defended myself.People appear smaller and their heads have shrunk.I have lost my social skills.My emotions are confused and my mind is distorted.I self medicated with weed to help me ,but it only helped for a little while.My character changed and the way I mean and do things.I would walk around the house for hours talking and thinking to myself.I became obsessed with a Band called Pig destroyer.I believed they wrote about my life.I foiled my room believing it will protect me from RF links and EMI so that I cant be controlled.I thought I was an alien and my mission was to observe people and make a report.my parents were my tutorial.I believed everyone can copy my mind and hear my thoughts but I cannot do the same even if I was supposed to.I wrote strange things on my foiled walls.weird things
and pig destroyer lyrics.I carved alien like signs in my arms and burned a symbol in my chest .my mind would run into walls and i would talk funny according to witnesses.I cant remember much anymore but it basicly sucked.I`d forget things and my memory was delayed.I couldn`t meet people and talk to strangers.

I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and the professor of psychiatry in south africa.I was put onto respirdal and depramil.I don`t know how things will be from now on but it seems a bit better.

I first came down with schizophrenia when I was 16, but I had no idea what had happened to me. I just knew that I had lost my ability to function like I used to and I couldn’t remember who I was anymore. It happened right as my friend was getting across to my mind that other people were around me that I couldn’t see, and I noticed people around (which later I have realized is an ability known as telepathy) He then said that they could know everything about me. That is when the illness hit, because it was not true that people can know everything about you, even if they could be in our minds.

What I have come to, that has cured me, is that people can not know who you are. Because, Who you believe yourself to be in your heart is who you are (Your Soul) From your soul is where you get regular functioning. You can decide how you want to come across to people and what is important for you to do and get done. If you believe that somebody could know this part of you it would throw you off completely from who you really are, and you would not be able to function the same and also you would begin to think all sorts of different dillusions about who you are and what reality really is!

So regaining a stable concept of what a normal person’s function is has enabled me to reconnect with my actual soul and to be in control of a ‘me’ that I actually recognize. To do this you must know that you heart (feelings) and your soul (who you believe yourself to be in your heart.) are hidden from the world.

I think a functioning in ourselves that we had never known about came over us suddenly and we were unable to distinguish the true boundry lines. This functioning is known as telepathy, being able to connect with other people in our minds. This is a function that we have control over. We can control what we speak in a similar manner to controling what we think. So having your thoughts known isn’t a privacy issue seeing that we choose what we will reveal to people!

My name is Roberta and I am 25 years old. I have schizophrenia and I am coping with it very well. I have been taking  my medication for a year now and I have been functioning normally. A few years ago, I felt my whole world was falling apart. I had just remembered that my father went to prison when i was two years old. I had hallucinations and thought that people were out to get me. I also struggled with voices from my past. However I am living a full life and I am coping well. I always wondered what it was like to live with schizophrenia and when i was diagnosed I did not want to accept it, but the medication made all my symptoms go away. I look forward to living my life.

Positive Symptoms

A patient of society’s asylum
I take time to consider my senses and make decisions
Knowing what I feel and think
And what I can learn from their calling.
Pressure builds subversiveness
As my knowledge is suspect
And so escape to the ward to read myself discipline My beliefs are paranoid and have been challenged
By those subversives around me
And I must be mad, not to heed their warning
And recognise the threat of discontent – should they know its cause
Beyond the pale of the expected
I fear the prospect of change
Should it bring the desire forgiven
Then I propose I toast to mine own recovery.
Though the threat of my adversaries welcome
Strikes due consideration into my learning -
What may be lost to them?
Should my resistance weaken and fail
Then the independence I have gained will surely lay – down
As a martyr to what went before
And revelation will wake me soon

Negative Symptoms

Nothing changes, left alone in solitude
Surrounded by objects of labour and passion
Plenty happens here at home
But all is lost to amusement not gain
My plans for the future I have already known went awry long ago in the past
When I could enjoy life for what it offered
Now it just presents its curse of solitude and long held dreams failed
Letting disappointment and resentment to settle heavy in my heart
Causing me psychoses and other labours of the soul
Whispers, insulting me in silence
Stir me to shout my innocence out loud to the walls
Should they listen
Or anyone else who may hear my protest
Though none will foster and fewer care for my wellbeing
My beliefs are sentiment to my own derision
And failure
To be as good as the next man

It all started around March 2006 when I was attending McGill University in Montreal, majoring in electrical engineering. I was 19 years old at that time. A whole month prior to the onset I had done 5 Grams of magic mushrooms, and my 2 years relationship with a girl was starting to fall apart. a week before the onset, I learn that the girl I was dating was sleeping with someone else. Studies were starting to be unbearable as I was struggling between going to class and coping with the fact that my ex is enjoying her sex life with someone else.

A few days before the onset, I can clearly remember sitting for hours at this coffee shop that was just next to my ex’s place and hoping I would catch a glimpse at her going in to her appartment with her new boyfriend. I completely rejected any of my friends support since it wasn’t the first time this had happened and I had deliberately decided to dwell by myself to get over it this time.

The day the onset started : I was in my room, my friend called me and told me that I have been unusually isolating myself this past week. I still refused to see anyone. I played some very sad music and started writing a letter to my ex, but this time it was evident that I was starting to experience an altered state of consciousness. The letter ended up to be coherent according to my ex, but I wasn’t expecting it, as I have found trouble reading it. I drop it in her letter box.

The next day I cross into her in the library. I had to work for my upcoming midterm. I remember spending 5 hours on 3 lines I was starting to enjoy the visual halluscinations I was experiencing ( green colors). (Note that these hallucinations were somewhat differently experiencing then the later ones when I was in my recovery phase : although the colors were the same, in my pre-schizophrenic state I was deliberately forcing myself to have these hallucinations in the library, whereas in my schizophrenic state I was experiencing them out of the blue and had to work on ignoring them, maybe it had something to do with my consciousness in the first case and my unconsciousness in the second case ? ). My ex noticed that I was very bizarre.

There are other details and odd behavior as well but I won’t talk about them.

The onset lasted 2 days. At that time, I wasn’t aware that the state of mind I was experiencing was going to be a chronic one. I am thankful for that because I would have commited suicide. 2 months later I experienced my first and last psychotic relapse. During the first stages of my relapse, I was having delusions and one of them was that I was schizophrenic. Ironic. I thought at this time that it was what it is not, that is split personnality. I had this habit to google every delusion and as I was searching for schizophrenic I found out that its describtion was compatible with what I was experiencing, thus I automatically rejected it as it was not very amusing since I was seeking to distort my true identity. A few days later my dad took me to a psychiatrist and I told her I have schizophrenia, eventhough I also had delusions on the side and was purely psychotic. She was astonished by that.

A few weeks later I was in Lebanon, and I went to see a psychologist. He insisted that I stay in the country and continue my studies here since I can get family support. I started university barely beeing able to cope with my personal hygiene and going to class. I dropped a few classes but I was still able to hang on there. I made a few friends. My grades were weak but passing courses. This spring I finished my fourth semester in this university in computer science and the Spring semester was my first full-time student semester. I am proud of myself. I am currently taking a summer course and doing well. I have periods of distress but I am always confident that I won’t go downhill since I say to myself that I have been able to cope with previous ones everytime a new prodromal period comes up.

Everyday is a fight for me to go on in my life, there won’t be a day where I would live the life I had, but it is a good life now. I think recovery is not when u don’t have symptoms but when you are able to control your life and live a productive life, hence the dissapearance of symptoms will be a consequence of that, and not the other way around.

The key factors to my recovery were:
- Living by myself without any family caregiver
- Meeting friends and being in social situations
- Playing the guitar which contributed to 40% of my recovery
- Reading books

The key factors to my recovery were not:
- doing drugs or alcohol ( I smoked pot once after the onset and it was a very displeasurable experience and I wouldn’t advise to anyone, I drink from time to time a beer when I am in bars but I try to limit myself to 3 beers per week max)
- Living with my parents ( I think it is important to have your own space and learn to take care of yourself.
Someone who is there to tell you to take a shower or to do the dishes for you is not going to encourage me to do it by myself.
Schizophrenia is a disabling disorder but the person affected by it is well aware of the way they endeavor to live their lives.
To make myself clearer, it was helpful for me to live in the dirt in the begining in order for me to take care of my house and personal hygiene).

As for medication, I am currently on 0.5 mg of risperdal, but I am not a big fan of medication and I cannot contribute any of my recovery on them.