What do you think is the cause of your illness? Is it caused by the genetic or by bad experiences in your early life? What do you believe and what have you been told?
Personally, I think this is caused by the fact that I had bad parents, violents and cruels. In all my family (both mother side and father side) there are only two persons you had a mental sickness. My two parents were never mentally sick. So I don’t believe in the genetic theory in my case. But we are 4 children in my family, and 3 of us (including me) are taking an antipsychotic and other medications and have a psychiatric condition. Also, it would be really a coincidence that the only one of us who is mentaly healthy is also the only one who was treated well and loved by my parents. They used to treat him differently because he used to have severe asthma. He was the only one to not been beaten by my father and to receive love from my mother.
Mine is genetic, from my mother’s side. My mom and older sister are both SZA. Sexual trauma is what really triggered my delusions to develop, though, and that is what my illness revolves around.
Growing up in an alcoholic home. Bullying in school. Combo of rampant depression and such on both sides. Living in a place where the herd mentality reigned supreme. Being physically and emotionally abused by a playmate who was far too old for me at the time.
Well, from what I’ve read and been told, bad parenting is generally not the cause of schizophrenia per se. And people can become schizophrenic even if there’s no family history of it. But traumatic incidents in childhood in conjunction with environment and being born with a propensity to get it anyways can certainly contribute to becoming schizophrenic. There’s a lot about schizophrenia that even scientists, researchers, or people who spend their whole life studying it do not understand. In fact I believe that the leading theories on what causes it are still just theories and I do not believe that anyone knows for sure exactly what causes it.
I had a very normal childhood, entered a prodromal phase around age 18. After that it was chemical assaults which triggered this mess. First marijuana, then St. John’s wort. I think St. John’s Wort was the catalyst which set off my first psychosis. It was very abrupt, like turning on the light switch. I remember reading on the bottle that it could provoke mania and psychosis, I thought I needed it because something I took earlier which is metabolized by a certain liver enzyme (which this activates) was lingering in my body.
I think I was reading alot of dystopian fiction, conspiracy theories, Bible prophecy in combination with isolation and bam, active psychosis. I’m not sure it is a biological brain disease. We have personal agency and responsibility and biological reductionism seems to diminish that.
Genetics played a huge role in that their are schizophrenics in my fathers family on both his mother and father’s sides and scattered around my mother’s family. The thing that made me ultimately crack was a combo of that and chemicals. Not undermining anyone who cites emotional struggles early or later, I just never had them.
I stopped thinking about what’d caused my illness a few years ago. It didn’t bring me happiness. The more I think about it, the more depressed I feel. The answer is no one knows for sure. This is similar to a question “why do we humans live?”. Stop thinking about it and just enjoy your life.
Mixture, there is no doubth in my mind there was a vulnerability. Basically I had problems controlling my mind from as young as 4, negative things would be repeated in my mind. I had a stressful upbringing too. I would say it was probably inevitable…