People always say that people with schizophrenia don’t realize they are getting it. Maybe so. But I have hypochondria which is a symptom of shizophrenia and psychotic depression more than anything else. That is why I am here worried about this.
I saw your other thread. People say that, but it doesn’t mean its true. I myself suspected schizophrenia because I had a family history. It started with me leaving the house at night for no reason and walking around, stuporous, not responding to people on the street when they asked me if I was okay. After I had my first hallucination in an abandoned graveyard, which was a doppelganger of myself, I thought I might be developing schizophrenia. Unfortunately, that insight disappeared after that until I went on antipsychotics.
Yeah, you sound quite a bit like me. I often don’t respond when people ask if I am ok either. I think it is usually either extreme. I could be wrong, but it seems like usually, schizophrenic people are “obsessed” (a term which I hate when describing mental disorders) with the idea of schizophrenia like me, or they have no idea they are developing it. Has this been your experience?
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I thought i had depression until a major suicide attempt and rambling paranoid delusions to my friends like “u don’t care ur just using me” then a girl from school said her sister had sz and thought i had it. It didn’t help hearing it and i didn’t think anything of it until i kept going down hill and my doctor had to send me to the hospital for another smaller attempt and said i was schizoaffective. It really broke my heart hearing that at the time
It never occurred to me - but there was this one girl who was talking to me about my depression and I was POSITIVE she was using me or didn’t care. That actually turned out to be true because we haven’t spoken since I told her about my drinking problem, but I just now realized that those thoughts started as delusional.
Well thats the problem with delusions sometimes they are just delusion sometimes its ur smart intuition. I stay away from people like that and u get better with age recognizing those types of people
I never thought I had SZ, but I knew it was something. I had been diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I had never been honest with my mental health care team about the delusions or hallucinations; I was afraid something more serious was wrong. When I finally told the doctor the entire story, the diagnosis came very quickly. I lived a lie for over 20 years, just because I was afraid.
I don’t know if Hypochondria is a symptom or not, but I definitely am a Hypochondriac. I am always afraid that I have some horrible illness. I have calluses on my fingers from all the symptom Googling I do. My doctor has been trying to work with me.
Hypochondria is one symptom of sz I don’t have. People were telling me I was sick long before I thought I was sick. They were sending me to see an oncologist for a while. They just took blood and sent me on my way when I arrived. I asked them if there was any reason they were doing this, and they stopped sending me there. I figure that if I am sick I will know soon enough.
I knew right away what I had. I started hearing voices and getting paranoid and I remembered all the medical text books I’d read said those were hallmark signs of SZ. I then proceeded to hide my symptoms from everyone for several years out of fear of their reactions
My sz came slowly. Creeping up on me so I would not notice the changes. But I’m no hypocondric. I don’t believe I have anything at all until doctors show evidence to me.
I am a big Hypochondriac, have been this way for years.
I was Delusional, and I thought that I was dying from Lupus, years ago.
I had a little insight in the beginning but I lost it when I got delusional.
I think you find a lot of useful information about sz and its manifestations in the book listed below. And a lot you can do about managing the emotions and the thinking problems in the therapies listed after the book.
-
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Schizophrenia-6th-Edition-Family/dp/0062268856
. - Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
http://doctor.webmd.com/find-a-doctor/specialty/psychiatry and https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/
. - Work with that “psychiatrist” (or “p-doc”) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking.
. - The best of the psychotherapies for that currently include…
DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
MBSR – http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php
MBCT - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22340145
ACT – https://contextualscience.org/act
10 StEP – http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-10-steps-of-emotion-processing.html
. - the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
MBBT – https://www.newharbinger.com/blog/introduction-mind-body-bridging-i-system
SEPT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_Experiencing
SMPT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorimotor_psychotherapy
. - or standard CBTs, like…
REBT – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_emotive_behavior_therapy
Schematherapy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_Therapy
Learned Optimism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism
Standard CBT – http://www.beckinstitute.org/what-is-cognitive-behavioral-therapy/About-CBT/252/
. - If you/she/he needs a professional intervention to get through treatment resistance, tell me where you live, and I will get back to you with leads to those services.
. - Look into the RAISE Project at https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=raise%20program%20schizophrenia.
I had absolutely no insight. Actually people told me I had it but I just thought it was the conspiracy against me. I don’t have hypocondria.
I’d had five years of post-grad in psych by 1999 and still relatively limited insight compared to now. I understood many of the psychotherapies and could administer them, but I have way more experience with them as a user of them now. Psychodynamics was great, but only for helping me to see Jules Henry’s Pathways to Madness and Don Jackson’s The Etiology of Schizophrenia in family and larger cultural dynamics; not so much how my own mind had built “institutions” of reactive defense mechanisms and personality disorders. Likewise the CBTs to see how my family and the culture had made me so irrational.
But the following “mindfulness” therapies and Eastern “religious” practices were what really turned the insight trick for me:
MBCT - Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: theory and practice - PubMed
ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia
I have had a very similar experience. I am definitely a Hypochondriac.
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Yeah, I’m pretty much the opposite. Luckily, I am seeing someone who can help me figure out exactly what it is.
Thanks for all the info!! I’ll check it out ASAP.
If you lose insight you’ll get it back on meds. But anxiety can make you feel like you are losing your mind. That is normal anxiety.