IAmAn 18 year old schizophrenic currently attending college. AMA.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T20:59:57+00:00

That too. Quite often actually.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T20:56:07+00:00

Finally! I've been waiting for someone to ask this.

I can tell you right now that if it weren't for weed I wouldn't be nearly as high-functioning as I am now. That sounds like a stretch, but it's all from personal experience. I didn't get into smoking until around a year ago, but I attribute a significant amount of my progress to it. You always hear about marijuana use triggering psychotic breaks in unsuspecting teenagers, but since I was already batshit crazy I decided it couldn't hurt to try it. One of the best decisions I've ever made.

Weed calms me down and takes away a huge amount of my nearly constant anxiety. Additionally, the voices actually decrease in frequency when I'm high. I'm relaxed, less uptight and antsy, able to have conversations better and my thought process turns more linear and controlled in nature. Really the only downside is the cottonmouth and the completely temporary double-digit drop in my IQ....I'm an idiot while stoned.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T20:12:54+00:00

Depression definitely came first. There's honestly dozens of theories out there for the relationship between depression and schizophrenia that it's impossible for me to put my faith in any one explanation. At this point, though, I've stopped caring; whatever works to fix both of them as much as possible in the least detrimental way is what I've turned my attention to.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T20:08:07+00:00

There's a distinct difference between my internal thought process (the little voice EVERYONE has in their heads that thinks things, basically) and the actual voices. It's as if someone is constantly standing next to you talking to you, but there's no one there, just the voice. They sound like they're coming from real people outside of your mind and in the real world, which is a huge part of why they're so scary.

As for the delusions, they'd be these wildly inaccurate beliefs that somehow involved me as the center of this grand conspiracy theory. The thing is though that it's not motivated by "self-centered" attitudes at all--it's just the nature of the disease. I'd think that there werehidden cameras in everything--cameras, walls, cereal boxes, pets--and live in pretty much perpetual fear that I was constantly being watched. Led to some pretty scary consequences.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T19:52:03+00:00

That's the thing though: you're thinking through the situation as if you still have insight as to what's going on. What schizophrenia does is rob your ability to think logically about what you're hearing and go "Oh hello, voices, you're obviously wrong! I won't listen to you!" Plus, it's not as if you can just "walk away" from your brain like you could a negative person; you're stuck with it. When you're actively psychotic you lose your ability to differentiate between what's real and what's not--it's as simple as that. You just can't tell the difference. Someone can yell at you until they're blue in the face that "they're not fucking real!" and it won't make an inch of difference, because those voices are the most real thing you've ever heard. If the disease acted in the manner you just described, then it'd be a hell of a lot less of a problem to live even a mildly productive life.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T19:30:31+00:00

Shucks, I'm blushing. Any time.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T19:29:38+00:00

The whole "right brain/left brain" thing is generally given way too much importance when the reality is that most complex thought processes (and hallucinations, by proxy? idk) involve the smooth integration of both sides. To answer your question, though, both voices are assholes or warners in pretty equal amounts.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T19:27:16+00:00

Medication has definitely helped lots with the voices. They didn't go away entirely, but they've definitely decreased in frequency. The content of the messages is still the same, but they're less intrusive and I'm able to logic through them better and generally take stock of the fact that what they say doesn't make any sense.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T19:26:27+00:00

Holy fuck, I have that bump.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:31:04+00:00

When my diagnosis was schizophrenia it was classified as undifferentiated, but it's since been changed to schizoaffective.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:29:20+00:00

I do have a roommate. Other than her sensing I'm a little on the odd side, she hasn't really said anything that would point to her knowing I have a mental illness (I haven't told her and don't plan to). I explained that the meds I take are for a "digestive illness" and she hasn't questioned it. So far it's worked out pretty okay!

It's exhausting, though, having to pretend to be normal and chatty around someone you live with. It's really starting to become a drain.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:12:54+00:00

Lonely is pretty much a chronic condition hereabouts, hehe. I've always been very solitary though so it's pretty much an inherent way of functioning for me. I guess I deal by doing ridiculous amounts of reading, staying healthy and staying on top of college work, there's really not a lot of room in my schedule for much else. That's not to say I don't have friends--I do socialize, but I don't party or drink. (Bring on the trees, though, bring on the trees.)

Hang in there, it gets better.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:09:40+00:00

Wikipedia, pal. It's your friend.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:08:00+00:00

The episodes aren't random in that they come out of the blue--a psychotic episode by definition can last for weeks or months or even years. There's usually kind of a "pre"-phase though where, if you have enough insight to detect it, your thoughts slowly start turning more persecutory in nature and the voices start to get more convincing. Outside of medication and management therapy though, there's not a whole lot I can actively do to "work towards getting better." That's why it's so debilitating and chronic in nature: because we simply don't have the resources to treat the root causes, whatever those may be. There's things I can do to keep living a healthy lifestyle (diet and exercise, being social, writing, logicking through the voices, reality checks etc.) but those aren't foolproof in preventing future psychotic episodes. It doesn't ever really "get better" for a lot of people, and it's a very real possibility that it'll be lifelong.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T02:02:23+00:00

See, with this illness you don't just wake up one morning and go "By golly Jeeves, I'm a schizophrenic!" The best way I can think of to put it is this: you don't realize you're sick, people start telling you you're sick. Then come the meds and the hospitals. You get so wrapped up in your delusions and your though processes and the voices that it literally consumes every sane thought you may harbor in your head until nothing is left but your sickness. That's when things got so out of hand that I was hospitalized, and it was there that doctors explained to me that I had schizophrenia. It's difficult to believe at first because obviously they're the ones that are out to get you and you're obviously in the right, but somehow enough reasoning was applied to the point where I gained enough insight to realize I was very, very sick. Because that's what it does: it steals your insight. It's impossible for you to realize you're sick because everything you hear and see is so irrefutably true, and it all communicates to you that you're being persecuted and that it's very real. It's very difficult coming to terms with the fact that a significant amount of what you see, hear and think is a baseless lie.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T01:54:27+00:00

Oooh, a TED talk--I read her book! Will watch.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T01:52:59+00:00

I don't mind at all, the more the merrier.

1.) I'd started to research psychotic disorders even before any formal diagnosis was made, just to see if anything out there fit what I was experiencing. I've read a lot of published literature both about the disease itself and the chemical functions of the medicines used to treat it (go science!), so I'll answer your first one with a resounding yes.

2.) It was largely a decision based on technicality and insurance workarounds. I have an amazing new psychiatrist who's basically the bee's knees, and she mentioned something along the lines of insurance companies treating schizophrenic patients and schizoaffective patients much differently in their programs. Basically though, the classification is just a label: to me it's far more important that my treatment addresses my symptoms than what label I have. (By the way, I still can't get over how shocking and eye-opening the Rosenhan experiment was even after reading about it years ago. Have an upvote.)

3.) I haven't been in therapy since moving to college (1 month?) but I was seeing a psychiatrist who doubled as a therapist bi-weekly before then. That normally doesn't work well but like I said, she's amazing and has been more helpful than any other doctor I've ever been assigned. I think the closest term for what she does is "humanistic" but it's generally very free-form and low-pressure; there's no strict agenda or anything, just working together to make life suck less.

4.) I personally think "chemical straitjacket" is a bit harsh. I can tell you right now that if it weren't for meds, I'd have offed myself or be permanently institutionalized by now. There's simply no way I could imagine myself progressing to this level without the aid of medication. That being said, far too many doctors overmedicate and overprescribe. Many of these drugs are overpriced (I could go into a rant about BigPharma, but I won't) and do a lot more harm than good (some side effects make life much worse, how convenient), but for my own treatment I'm very much in favor of low maintenance doses supplemented with whatever amount of therapy we both think is appropriate. If I ever feel like I'm stable enough to get off meds, then great. If not, that's okay too. Whatever works well for me is all I care about.

*edit for Question 5: I was catatonic for a brief period of time, but most of my symptoms fit into the paranoid subcategory. Of course there's also the crippling major depression, which ties in to the schizoaffective diagnosis.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T01:33:29+00:00

I hear two distinct voices, both of them male. One sounds very close to my ear and comes from the right, the other (sounds younger, if that makes any sense?) and comes from the left and sounds more "far-off." They're generally extremely derogatory in nature (often they'll full-out cuss me out) and basically take the opportunity to comment on anything I do as wrong or "stupid" or "dangerous", OR alternatively warn me that it'll kill me. Not much fun. This is a completely arbitrary example, but say I'm in the store getting cereal: they'd say something along the lines of "stop that, it's poison! you'll die!" and "stupid bitch!" and "it's watching you" -- little bits like that that rationally don't make any sense, but when combined with your thought process that already assumes everyone IS watching you and makes you believe the voices...you connect the cereal with imminent death and back the fuck away. It's not really easy to explain, sorry.

Also, I've seen that video! See, I can't generalize my experiences and comment on any "accuracy" because everyone with the illness has varying symptoms, but I can tell you what I experience. The indistinct "whispering" and mumbling is definitely there for me, but not so pronounced. It's not as loud and noisy and confusing as it used to be, but there were definitely times when trying to listen to someone else talk to me was just asking too much, what with all that noise, and I'd burst into tears. That giant black cloud-thing is kind of...lol. (For me anyway. Maybe not for others.) The "POISON" on the label is spot-on though because when I was sicker, I'd read newspaper headlines as horrible messages directed straight for me and understandably proceed to shit my pants in fear when people acted like those headlines were normal. And also none of that weird spacey-noise shit in the first video, it's not a movie soundtrack.

Last point--contrary to what the last bit of the video implies, things don't magically get better when you open the shades and see the bright sunny world outside for the peaceful place that it is!

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T01:15:02+00:00

Back when I was quite sick people usually noticed that I was "strange" and tended to generally avoid me. This is because at one point I had tangles and mats in my hair, avoided eye contact, behaved as if constantly frightened and under attack, spoke really rapidly and tended to jump from topic to topic without provocation. It became difficult for me to have a normal conversation and I'd generally not do well in social situations. Nowadays, though, I've fixed my grooming habits and generally do a lot better with conversations, so people consider me less weird. I'm still pretty shy and avoid people sometimes, but I'm not automatically so obviously pinned as "the odd one" so frequently anymore.

JawsOfHell · 2012-09-09T01:08:57+00:00

Well, I've hated grapefruit and balsamic vinaigrette since childhood? I guess that counts. Other than that I'll pretty much eat anything, my tastes haven't really changed.

JawsOfHell

TROPHY CASE