About 8 years ago there was a thread here asking folk to try and write down all the psych meds they have tried over their career.
I could remember all my meds with pinpoint clarity. I remembered the order of the meds, their dosage and their effects.
I tried to recall my psych meds yesterday and failed utterly. Really hit the point home that I am nowhere near as sharp as I used to be
Yeah, I am well aware that I am not as sharp as I was in my youth. Some of it is likely age and long term medications. Even antidepressants, like Zoloft, which I took for years and years for anxiety, are associated with risk of cognitive decline. So I donāt think itās all the sz. Itās likely a combination of factors.
Iām going downhill too. I need to assess my life and decide how to best handle my old age.
I used to have a website. I had it since the 90s. It was quite complex. Just after I was hospitalised, when I got out, it coincidentally had an issue. This was back in 2010.
I struggled to fix it. It would normally have been easy for me to fix it. I had to give up the website as my previous self had built something my current self could no longer cognitively manage.
yes. 17 years ago i was helping people with algebra 2 in class and my teacher would regularly ask me to teach the other kids and now i cant remember how to do long division by hand. and while trying to figure out how many years ago it was i forgot what year this was and then struggled a bit to subrtact 7 from 24. i feel like ive lost 30 IQ points.
I forgot how to cut my toenails because they wouldnt cut and my brother told me to soak them in water.
I would have eventually, but i was puzzled as to why.
My cognition got really bad after the first episode. It has gradually improved ever since. My memory is worse now than pre-illness and my thought processes have gotten slower, but I can still hold my own. I blame stress and lack of discipline (erratic sleep, working overtime, spending too much time on mindless activities etc) for throwing me into that pit, however it can be climbed back up.
I had no cognitive decline post diagnosis, why would a diagnosis cause cognitive decline? No, Iāve had a cognitive decline much prior when I first developed psychosis. I didnāt need to wait long to realize that my brain was shot, when I was still psychotic on my very first psychosis all I wanted was to complete a group project but I just couldnāt. Nothing made sense to me, I didnāt know what to do, how to proceed, where to start, nothing. I was literally drawing a blank.
Over the years every psychosis worsened the situation and each AP introduced new challenges but at the same time I grew more accustomed with working with a shot brain and both out of and during psychosis Iāve been spending most of my time training synesthesias or other similar cognitive frameworks in order to passively recover over time my cognitive abilities to a point where I feel more comfortable. Iāve made significant progress in many areas and although having to deal with less serotonin definitely impacts significantly my cognitive speed and focus and the reduced dopamine introduces delays that would otherwise be much shorter Iāve learned to make do with what Iāve got. Lately Iāve also managed to regain enough working memory and familiarity with emotions to reintroduce emotional thought after gaining the brilliant idea to start training my affective empathy, which skyrocketed my sense of clarity and depth of understanding after years of much more marginal gains, which had even started to peter off.
I used to be much more worried about my cognitive decline. Iāll give you another example, this one much more recent. Not the last Christmas but the one before it I was so mentally impaired that I couldnāt count to 1023 without losing count or messing up skipping numbers even while giving it my full concentration, it was near the end of my latest psychosis btw, I wasnāt necessarily fully psychotic but I was so close to it everyone could tell I was hanging on by a thread, it showed. It took me significant effort but I slowly managed to improve at that and it helped me significantly in relearning to stay on task, along with forcing myself to listen to audiobooks instead of reading.
All in all my cognitive decline has been a journey of understanding the various components that made up my intelligence and inner experience and finding ways to stabilize them, repair them and sometimes rebuild them from scratch over time from memory. I was never proud of my intelligence because it felt like something I was granted and never had to move a finger for, nowadays despite not being as smart as I used to be I have a much deeper understanding and appreciation for all the various aspects and tools that make it up since they feel much more earned. I am nowhere near where I used to be in a host of metrics and Iām still working on lots of stuff, but I feel like Iāve come a long way.
i had to count something to 35 yesterday and had to use a tally app and still not sure i got it right. 
it has affected my mind severely.
how long have u had schizophrenia? cause i was still doing ok in intelegence 14 years after starting antipsychotics. i have now been diagnosed with schizophrenia for 20 years. and the decline in my mind started hard about probably 5 years ago and really really showed worse in the last 3 years. i was started on antipsychotics in 1998. and by 2007 all i had really lost was my short term memory. but the worst hit more recently.
Mental math, especially arithmetic, is intricately related to language. Just try to add or subtract 2 numbers in a foreign language, in your head. Itās hard.
Math on paper breaks this and is therefore easier to do. You can train yourself to reclaim some brain networks, you just need pen and paper.
Schizophrenia might have something to do with deranged language patterns. This theory is not prevalent but Iāve seen a couple articles about it.
6 years and a half since my first psychotic break. As far as I know research shows that cognitive decline in patients with Schizophrenia is directly linked to the number of psychotic breaks as thatās the main link theyāve found with the reduction in brain tissue. Have you been going in and out of psychosis over the years?
yes many times. i have quit medicine many times too. i have been hospitalized prob 10 times in severe psychosis (first hospitalization was age 11) ā¦ now it is more mild but constant. if i could only count times when i was 100 percent fine that would maybe only make up 3% of the last 28 yearsā¦maybeā¦idk i cant hardly tell whats what anymore. i have never been able to judge how severe of symptoms i am having in the present only when i look back on the past can i see themā¦im really not sure where that āpsychosisā line is. i usually classify it as only severe. like when u are extremely confused.
I get it quite often because of my studies
I have issues with short term memory
Literally itās like being a gold fish swimming around and forgetting what I saw a few seconds later
Meh. 
I can usually tell from habit and how large of motivation it takes to remember
I got told I canāt have a powerful mind because Iām old, and that if high IQ societies included the likes of me theyād be full of āstupid peopleā. I have things Iāve always been not too good at, rather than an illness related decline in cognition. EF NB Organising and planning has always been crap. I find high range IQ tests much easier than everyday practical tasks most people take in their stride Typical autistic adaptive functioning <IQ.
Thatās not a significantly large difference for someone in the 3rd grade.
Haha, oh. Yes I think age would probably factor into it somewhat (maybe like attention span, etc.).
Thanks for your reply 
No processing speed or working memory indexes.
In addition to this, Clark et al. (2010) found that executive function was a better predictor of academic achievement than IQ in school-age children.