Life is quite the journey. For some it’s more interesting then for others. I’ve had quite the journey myself. That is thanks to schizophrenia. Hallucinations, paranoia, delusions all of it is familiar to me. I was sick for a long time before I was diagnosed. On the reflection of that I consider the alternative term for schizophrenia, integration disorder. Not that this term is any more accurate in pertaining to schizophrenia. Each individual case is so extremely different then the next. I came to know this through talking with all the fine folks who use the forum at schizophrenia.com. It’s a wonderful place I’ve spent hundreds of hours by now browsing and posting on those boards. You learn that no two people are alike. In illness or in health. There are just so many variables that define a person. It’s quite astounding.
In any case for me integration disorder is much more suitable although there are some psychotic features that fit into the split brain paradigm. It started as integration disorder anyways. Never feeling at peace with people because I detected I was somehow different. It’s a long story.
To sum it up lets just say I was confused and no one else seemed to be. They fit into the archetypes and paradigm of our age. Seemingly everyone did. Except me, I thought everyone was bisexual. It really seems irrelevant to me after all I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown. I’m not really aroused by men, but, perhaps the first sign of sz was the delusion that I was. It was more based on the introspection that I was open to the possibility of being a homosexual. That is if it were a choice, I’d probably end up somewhere not so straight in the spectrum. As a note, until I was medicated I was always strongly attracted to female, hence why looking back I believe I was just delusional. It was more the fear that people were thinking I was a homosexual than anything else. The precursor to psychosis, being overly concerned with other people’s thoughts or at least that’s one of them. I used to smoke a lot of weed, which only further complicated things. I was drawn to the bisexual philosophy, because it meant I was no different then any body else. The problem was that there was no evidence to support the theory that everyone was bisexual. These people are straight as hell.
So I didn’t integrate properly. This all culminated into a psychotic break. I was bearing the belief that obviously everyone is bisexual and it caused a great deal of conflict in my reality. Disagreed with everyone that there are straight people and gay people. I remember hearing voices, among the first of them, saying “There are straight people and there are gay people and straight people will ■■■■■■■ kill you.” Thank god telepathy isn’t real.
That was the last component of the equation for psychosis. I started to believe that if I worked at it I could read minds. This was before I started hearing voices. All this gay straight ■■■■ made me want to see what people were really thinking about. I wanted to secretly peer into their nature and learn the reality about human sexuality. What started out as “reading minds” turned around pretty quickly. It’s impossible to actually read someone’s mind. My drug filled mind did its best to simulate the experience, but for lack of appropriate data something else began to happen. The scenario flipped on me and suddenly it wasn’t me reading minds but the who were continuously reading my mind, making their judgmental comments. I thought it was real for a stupid amount of time.