The schizophrenia diagnosis went sometime around 1983. I was then diagnosed schizoaffective mixed type for 22 years. Then for reasons which I think were more to do with a) the pdoc at the time having an interest in personality disorders (2) Bad blood between me and the psychiatric team the dx was changed to personality disorder NOS. In 2013 I found out it had changed to paranoid PD.
The treatment I receive is the same as if I had schizophrenia ie fortnightly depot and not the talk therapy usually seen as a first line treatment for PDs.
Have you seen a religious person inspire a cripple to try to walk when they canât and they fall hard to the ground when reality disagrees with their belief. In order to succeed in my dreams I have to recognize my limitations, I want to give presentations and pitch my business ideas, if I do not recognize that I have problems more than average then reality will disagree and I will fall hard. On the other hand, it just means that I have to try harder than average to accomplish the same things. So recognizing my problems allows me to work with them and not ignore them. You can not correct a problem you do not know you have. Ignoring problems will catch up to you eventually. My biggest inspriation and metaphor for my life is this guy with no legs who conquers the appalachain trail. My trail to conquer is my social enterprise dreams and my no legs is more of a mental impairment challenge rather than physical disability of no legs. I asked my self why does this guy try to do something that takes so much more effort to accomplish than everyone else. His story is meant to show people that what ever problem or skill you lack you can overcome it by your own will. So my disability is percieving reality correctly, it will take more work to percieve it correctly and I can document the challenge for others to see and be inspired by, its is a philosophical quest unique to my being. Nietzsche was inspiring by his overcoming of his intense pain problem and this caused him to heighten his will power and can explain it well to the world. My story is similar, the universe has set me up in a way where I must develop an extreme amount of will to succeed in realizing dreams. Eventually I hope that my overgrowth of will power will help others grow in this respect.
1 Like
In a sense, I grieve for people who are never experience a pain or discontentment of some sort, to me they seem to lack a fundamental component of human nature, which is a desire for a world that is better than the current state of things. The pain/discontentment is your understanding of what is not ideal and your desire to make it ideal. Pain is who you are. Pain and the acts it inspires is the becoming of the change you want to see in the world. (Gandi said become the change you want to see in the world). You are what you do and you are the eternal changes you make in this universe. Whatâs worse is when people are numb to the pain inside them, their being officially cut off from what they do with their lives.
Practice practice practice.
Your limitations are a wall. Hit it often enough, hard enough, and it will move. Just not enough that you will notice the change immediately. You will spend a couple frustrating months before you suddenly realize you are doing things you didnât think you could do, or that everyone else told you was beyond you. My experience is that 99% give up well before they see this positive change. Once you understand that this improvement is real and consistent, hitting the wall becomes a source of pleasure (mostly).
My 2 cents.
10-96
1 Like
I have a combination of fastness and slowness. Iâm slow to figure out whatâs happening in real life, but whatâs happening in my own head is fast and chaoticâŚand not in sync with whatâs really going on. Iâm truly in my own world.
1 Like
I canât. I have really scaled up the number of people I can handle and the period I can handled them for, but I am nowhere near being able to do it on a daily basis. I can take a large crowd at two 8-10 hours bursts for up to two days in a row, but this costs me two days of higher functioning immediately afterward. I will have voices leaking in, delusions, paranoia, aliens. My ability to work properly is always diminished. A regular classroom is not on my menu now, or, I suspect, in the future.
Iâm just happy to be able to DJ or photograph a wedding. Thatâs good enough for me for now. 
10-96
1 Like
Speaking for myself and strictly myself, there are some limitations that I have not been able to completely get around. My crowd tolerance is mostly a hard limit that I have not been able to push much in the last five years. My short-term memory is still el-crapola and requires a LOT of note taking.
A lot of the fears I had, particularly public speaking, public interaction, and agoraphobia, boiled down to this:
Probably 75% of the problems I have had to face down because of my schizophrenia were more the result of bad habits I developed while symptomatic and then found myself either afraid to or unwilling to try and break once I was healthier.
10-96
1 Like
Fitting neatly or not neatly is not necessarily down to whether someone is cognitively impaired or not. There are lots of other reasons why a diagnosis may be an inexact/partial fit.
Some people will be very impaired,some people mildly impaired and some people not at all. At no point have I said that being terribly impaired is applicable to all.
Maybe we need to distinguish Cognitive Impaired SZ from no impairment SZ. Or make CI distinct from the diagnosis? This would help identify our needs, problems, and solutions better.
This site can help measure impairments: http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/
I have noticed steady improvements in planning and reasoning, but focus is bad.
