I get taken advantage of in mental health day program bc my kind nature, i dont want to hurt anyones feelings
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I avoid people usually.
I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings either. But it feels too good to get the better of some jerk who’s bugging me. And I do it even without confidence. But yeah, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I pride myself on 39 years of schizophrenia with only one minor incident. (but it almost sent me to court). I feel bad when I hurt someones feelings even if it’s some big as*hole. Sometimes I go off track and forget my credo but then I remember this; it makes me feel a lot better to be nice to someone than to be mean to someone. And I’ve been living this for years and I will continue to live like this. People like you are good to have as friends. I’m sorry if those people are hurting your feelings but don’t change for them. Good luck.
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I used to be a really nice person. Except I couldn’t stand arrogant ppl. There was a player at work who tried to flirt with me (he flirted with everybody). Well when I was fluent in Spanish he asked me to say something in Spanish.
I said,“Tu cabeza es como una calabaza.” He said,“that sounds sexy. What does it mean?” I said, "Your head looks like a squash ". He turned around and walked away.
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I would like to talk more with you. I don’t get into bad problems but I ended up in the hospital bc I was so scared of violence and jealous women. I’m supposed to start fashion design school next year and I don’t want to end up in the hospital again. I won’t take drugs bc of weight gain
I hate to say it to you, but as of now, medication is the front line treatment for schizophrenia. It is the number one treatment for schizophrenia. You are not alone in the weight gain, it’s common to gain weight on certain meds. I believe there might be meds or a med that doesn’t cause weight gain, I’m not positive about that. If you are seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, discuss your options when it comes to medication.
Living with schizophrenia and not taking meds is a hard road to go down in life. I’m sorry, I don’t want to discourage you. One positive note is that it is possible to lose weight by dieting on some meds. I personally lost 50 lbs on Resperidone (a much used medication). I kept it off for a few years but got careless and gained back the weight and more. But I tried a different diet and lost 60 lbs and kept that off for a few years. Now I’m seeing a nutritionist and trying to lose a little weight and eat a healthy well-balanced diet.
I really don’t want to depress you but I just thought I would tell you the facts. Many schizophrenics can function by going to work or school or even both but the disease is going to affect you in some ways no matter what you do. The trick is to try to lesson the impact of the symptoms and you do this with medication.
But there are alternative treatments out there but they unfortunately only work for a minority. Vitamin therapy comes to mind and works for certain people apparently and there’s some others. Once you have schizophrenia, life doesn’t stop, it goes on. But you will have to make sacrifices and compromises to adjust to it. You are probably a good person but we were dealt a bad hand in life. You can still get something out of life though, I’ve seen it many times.
When I was 19 I was put in my first psyche ward. I got diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1980 at age 19. I spent a week and a half there. Then I was released to a group home where I spent a year (group homes are where a number of mentally ill are given rooms in a large house, usually from 7-25 people depending where you live. You are fed and taken care of to a degree and you can live in one and go to school or work still)
But I was unmedicated and I suffered horribly. I was extremely psychotic and pretty non-functional in the sense that I had no job, no school, no money no car, no friends, no girlfriend, very little sanity. I just spent my days hanging out in the kitchen which was the popular spot for everybody to congregate and socialize or walking downtown to a bookstore and browsing for an hour or more or just taking walks to get out of the house. I socialized a little with the counselors and my housemates. I spent months sitting in the backyard by myself, sitting in a chair for hours just fighting to keep my sanity.
I never heard voices or hallucinated visually but I was delusional and paranoid. It was hell. This particular house was set up to help the residents, unlike many others, but it did me no good. So after a year I got asked to leave over a misunderstanding, and I moved back in with my parents. The month I was there was a nightmare of psychosis and constant fighting with my parents. I ended up in another psyche ward and after that I went directly into large psychiatric hospital.
The hospital was a scary place, filled with about 80 people in ages ranging from 18 up to 70 years old. I was 20 when I went in. There were ex-homeless people, people who had been in prison or jail, people who lived on the streets formerly but there were also parents who had families or people who had jobs before they went in, and just people who didn’t want any trouble. There were some troublemakers. It was both women and men. Most of those people frightened me and I was a loner though I did have certain people who liked me and talked to me. I tried to spend as much time as I could sleeping in the room I shared with three other guys. I also walked around the perimeter of the hospital often sometimes multiple times a day. There was a fence around the entire hospital to keep us in and I walked along that.
I was put on medication for the first time. A heavy dose of a drug called prolixen. I never gained weight on it but it turned me into a shuffling zombie for a month before they finally gave me a medication for side-effects. I ended up staying for 8 months. I was suffering still and going out of my mind though I’ve never really been someone who “acts out”. By that I mean I’m not violent and I acted pretty normal for most of my illness(but maybe not so much lately).
So then after 8 months of no improvement my parents found a nice group home to live in. This one was clean and they treated you actively.
I have to skip so much of my story because so much happened to me.
But I lived in the home and their tenet for their treatment was that mentally ill people need structure to get better and recover. My first group home I mentioned had no structure, I could come and go as I please and I had practically no responsibility, I barely had to do any cleaning. I could leave at night without telling anybody,I could sleep in or not eat and no one cared. As long as I didn’t drink or do drugs or hurt anybody I had all the freedom I wanted to there.
But this new home assigned us regular chores that it were very difficult to get out of. If you were going to miss your chore you had to give them notice and have a damn good excuse. We all had to cook dinner once a week for the entire house including counselors. That meant finding a good recipe that would feed 10 or 11 people and writing down the ingredients for the people to shop for. Clients took turns being “House Manager”. No one wanted the job but it was mandatory every 5 or 6 months.
The House Manager made sure everybody did their chores and graded them. He/she also took care of making a weekly shopping list and was responsible for writing some one up if they caused trouble. I’m sorry, I’m getting into this house more than I should, It’s probably very foreign to you and most people with schizophrenia will never experience this but I wanted to show how I got better and how this house tried to help.
I’ll skip more. I started going to a vocational program. !3 or 14 of us mentally ill met at a large house run by by the same agency who ran the house. We had groups and lunch and we did yard work and mailing projects and had breaks and most people except for a few of us would socialize. I was kind of a loner there too but had a few people who I regularly talked to. 9 months later this vocational had a connection with a small hot tub business and they gave me a job there.
The hot tub place rented out private rooms for one or two people to soak in a hot tub peacefully for an hour with music piped in and a shower and plants and skylights. It was a classy, upscale place and pefectly legit. The owners were a thirty-ish something married couple and I think they made a fortune off the place. I ended up working there for four years though I was heavily sedated and psychotic often (but no one could tell).
I eventually got addicted to crack while I was employed there in 1986 after three years there and due to my drug use I ended up getting fired afte the fourth year. (Ill skip ahead; I got clean in 1990). I had my various adventures while being a drug addict. But after that place, a couple of friends found me jobs.
I’m 57 now. I’m looking back on being employed for most of the last 35 years. My jobs aren’t glamorous but I always enjoyed physical work and so unloading trucks at age 33-37 was right up my alley. So was recycling at Hewlett-Packard for three years, a very physical job.
But I was a park ranger from 1999-2001. I was a paranoid schizophrenic (nobody knew though, not even my boss) driving around the company truck in different parks, helping out park goers and enforcing rules. Not bad, right?
But I’ve stocked shelves, worked in restaurants, worked in warehouses, tried construction, worked at Target, Macy’s, Sears, Kohls.
I’m still finishing up getting my AA degree. I attended community college for 5 years taking two classes a semester from 1990-1995. I was living in a board & care at the time. Now I take online classes in the comfort of my own home and I need just 5 more. I’m getting the degree mostly just for my own satisfaction. I won’t get a job in my field but I figure it’s good to be doing something productive and improving myself and using my head for something other than hanging a hat. I lived independently since 1995 to just two years ago. I’ve been driving my own cars since 1997. I now share an apartment with another person who has brain damage and doesn’t work but hey, at least he’s living independently and so am I but we do have a c an ageny who rents this to us and we have counselors on call, in case of an emergency.
I’ve had many good years. While schizophrenic I have flown across the country a few times (in a plane). I went water-skiing for the first time in my life. I was bes man at my dads second wedding. I’ve gone camping. I’ve been to comedy clubs, regulars clubs, too many restaurants to count, movies, plays, rock concerts. I even let my sister drag me to a square dancing class! I’ve been to church, parties, barbecues etc.
I’ve been happy before; and content often. I just wrote all this not to brag but to give you an idea of my life and what is possible with schizophrenia. It hasn’t always been easy. But it hasn’t always been hard. I’ve been through both my biological parents deaths. I mentioned battling drug addiction. I’ve been fired from a dozen jobs. I’ve been kicked out of housing, I’ve been broke and I’ve had periods where I had thousands of dollars to do whatever I wanted with.
I’ve been the best worker at a couple of jobs , I’ve been the worst at a couple of others. I’ve had friends, I’ve dated, I’ve played sports. This is what’s possible. It’s not hopeless, you can go to that school and you may do perfectly fine. You may not do good, but hey, it’s not the end of the world. You rest for while, lick your wounds and try something else. But hopefully it will work out good.
We have schizophrenia but we can still be smart and likable and nice. I hope you get something out of this, I hope it encourages you and maybe inspires you and gives you a healthy dose of hope. You see where I came from and you see what I’ve done. I hope you go to that school and like it. There will always be obstacles and bad people in life but there’s plenty of nice people, just be a nice person for yourself and your family. I wish you good luck and I hope you get what you want. Good night.
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Wow man. I don’t think I can read all that.
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I wrote it mainly for @bluerose . It is pretty long but it has a lot of my life crammed into a relatively small place.
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I only trust those people who will love me for who I am.
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