Your illness? What was your very first symptom? I want to see if anyone had the same beginning as me.
Mine started with paranoia. When I was very little. It’s normal for young children to get scared at night however this was different. It was intense fear for my life. I developed a number of rituals to keep myself safe that I’d stay up all night doing. I would hide in different areas of the house because I did not believe my room to be safe. I would get panic attacks from how strong my fear was.
The fear is what lead to everything else I think. Because when you have fear that strong and you’re a little kid you try to rationalize it by saying something like “oh there must be monsters or evil spirits around…” and then I ended up developing beliefs off of that that made me feel safer, like thinking I was a werewolf that could beat up those monsters…
Anyone else here who’s psychosis started out as intense fear as a little kid? High functioning most of their lives and hid their beliefs because they knew others would find them crazy? My therapist says she thinks the reason I’m so stable now is because we’ve processed my psychosis. I don’t think that’s really possible to do with schizophrenics, to just “process” the illness away…my therapist thinks I don’t have schizophrenia at all and that my psychosis was basically born from never establishing a sense of safety as a child. So my fear went out of control and it broke my child brain and to cope and try to make sense of it I ended up delving deeper and deeper into psychosis until I gradually came to understand that my intense fear didn’t mean I was in danger at all but rather it was a biological mishap…then I began to stop using my maladaptive psychotic coping mechanisms…coming up with bizarre reasons to explain it that only ended up with me more scared…only thing it doesn’t explain is my hallucinations.
Does that make sense? I only wish I had a name for my issue. I call it paranoia because it’s what seems most similar to it in that it’s a sudden strong feeling that I am in danger and not safe that can last hours.
paranoia and depression were the first symptoms for me when was a kid into my teenage years. i couldn’t watch shows like america’s most wanted because it made me paranoid and i couldn’t sleep at night after watching it.
I heard some voices as a kid. When I was in the woods on vacation I heard a voice in my head ask, “How would you like to go to hell?”
Then when I as in class in Kindergarten I heard a voice in my head say when I was looking at a particular girl, “That’s how you have kids.”
When I was a teenager I developed the paranoid fear that my brother was going to go missing. I thought that if I didn’t know where he was he was going to go missing or something. It really bothered him because I was barging into his life. Then when I was a teenager too I started being afraid that my parents were poisoning my food. This led to my being hospitalized for the first time. My psychiatrist initially diagnosed me with delusional disorder.
The voices didn’t get really bad until I was in my twenties. I was hospitalized several times in my twenties. Then, because I had voices, my pdoc changed my diagnosis to Schizophrenia.
I suffered from awful panic attacks as a kid.
Everyday, panic and fear and terrible night terrors.
I also suffered with paranoia and delusional or magical thinking.
I felt ghosts around me and sensed a creepy type feeling often.
Later in my teen years, I submerged myself into the supernatural and believed that I had psychic abilities.
I was 46 and trying to figure my life out as I was living in a shelter. I had never heard voices or had psychosis or delusions or anything like that in my life. I had only had depression, anxiety and related things. I suddenly ‘knew’ that people were controlling my brain because they told me in my thoughts. They controlled my behavior and made me do all kinds of bizarre things that landed me in the hospital. That was a year and a half ago. I have had a total of 3 psychotic breaks including that first one. I have delusional disorder. I still believe that scientists are able to control my thoughts, feelings and behavior although sometimes they just let me be myself. I have terrible paranoia related to this. I take meds to prevent psychosis (which I believe is them making me act and think crazy) and for the paranoia. They want me to take meds. It’s part of the deal. I was 46 with no hx of serious mental illness when it started.
47average I had this insidious onset where in hindsight i should have seen a pdoc much earlier than i did. Not just get treatment when i have a big breakdown but earlier to get evaluated when i first had discomfort. I suppose there were many signs that something was coming. Therefore its not possible that anyone is responsible for my breakdown than me who waited and was resisting putting two and two together especially since my mother had this too. Maybe you need to looks coser at your life and personality and trying to see any signs that this is something that did not show up from the blue. You said you were in a shelter at the time…and one does not get to this point if everything was fine previusly to a breakdown. You said you had issued with Depression and anxiety previously, well that may have been first signs…that you did not pick up on. Its really not easy to look for the prodromal stage signs I also ignored them and did not want them to be real. So I am saying even in your case there should be some indicaciones that SZ was developing over time and your brains biochemistry was getting fault. I am quite sure no scientist is responsible for switching on your psychotic symptoms because they are a product of your brain over time developing them.
Well, clearly something happened. It is possible I just snapped from pressure. I did not recognize the prodromal signs although they may have been there. As far as my delusion, I am aware of how completely out of this world it sounds. I wish I didn’t believe it. I take meds and go to therapy. I still believe it though.
Believing and knowing for fact is not the same…people believe a lot of things which cannot be proven empírically, even normals believe some outrageous concpiracy and esoterics stuff. Many of my colleagues at work with no historia of mi do that. I just smile at that. Well you say yourself this idea is really out of this World. Its very improbable and unlikely. People who have SZ Symptome come up with many different but all imaginary explanations for their Symptoms. Only with time and when the Person is doing better, they usually See how improbable the ir explanation was, and accept that it was their own brain.
You are correct. I believe it but can’t prove it. That’s why I have delusional disorder. It’s quite a strange thing to really believe something so bizarre.
I had horrible paranoia at a very young age 5,6,7as well as nightmares. The same one every night for years. I used to boobytrap my bedroom stairs (i was in the attic room) every night with toys and things that made loud noises, trip wires with bells, all sorts of things to let me know when “they” were coming to get me. Then at about 12 or 13 i started hearing things but always just brushed it off as just, “oh im hearing someone in the neighborhood” or “somebodys tv is too loud”. Little did i know they were my first audible hallucinations. Then saw a gremlin at about 14 running around the alley and yard. That had to be my first vivid visual hallucination. Or it was real. Still dont know. Didnt realize all of this until therepy this past year.
47average, you asked the right question in your Initial Post, how did it Start? Knowing the answer might help you overcome the influence of this delusion of yours that scientists gave you this illness. I think you are on the right track with this question. I hope we have more replies coming in of people here which can strengthen the point that SZ develops over time in your brain giving many signs that there is something going faulty sometimes years and decades before a fullblown psychosis shows. Its not binary you have it or you dont for most persons. Its developmental. A process. It can get better though, there is hope, especially on the right meds for you.
Sorry i just realised the initial post was from Anna. Anyway, the question is very good and the answer is helpful to dispelling ideas that people have they got Symptoms by external third Party líke scientists, cía, enemies, god, aliens, or what not.
It started when i was about 14 and started having panic attacks and voices in my head, but i didn’t know what the voices were at the time, I called them ‘thought-voices’ The panic attacks worsened over my teens and i started feeling paranoid. then the depression set in and the self harm. That was when i had my breakdown and started treatment and hospitalisation.
How did what start? I don’t have any idea of anything ever being different as far as what I thought, just pdocs came into my life suddenly and they were the ones telling me what I believed wasn’t “okay” to believe.
I used to be afraid of the boogyman when little, but my dad helped put things in perspective when he told me, "Don’t worry about the boogyman, he don’t want you guy’s, you’re all to ugly and bratty, and he’d make ME pay him to take you back."
That worked.
CSummers, not sure how to take your coment. Are you making fun or being serious? Its very ambiguos. I find it hard to believe you dont have zero insight that some of your believe may have been delusions. I wish people on here would always say streightout what they mean.
I was a real worrier as a child, my symptoms definitely started when I was about 4, I used to hallucinate from a very young age, although my parents understandably put it down to childhood imagination. I also used to get depressed, I would feel really sad and cry for no reason, or have so much energy I used to run up and down the stairs over and over again screaming and shouting nonsense. I used to do rituals too, mostly around counting, I would promise myself something would happen at a certain number, and if it didn’t I would get horribly anxious and have to repeat them until it was right. I always knew I was different, from a really young age, I always felt like an outsider, always felt like I wasn’t real and people didn’t see me as one of them.
I’m diagnosed schizoaffective, looking back I can see the onset clearly, from my childhood into my teens, but no one noticed because like you said, I hid the strangest beliefs and experiences until my late teens when I became too ill to control it. I wasn’t diagnosed until 25 because I refused to believe there was anything wrong and would not see a doctor until then, but I would say that I was scz from about 4 years old. I attempted suicide at 17 for the first time, a psychiatrist came to see my in the hospital ward, asked if I would try again, I said no, he said fine, and that was it. I still resent the fact that no one tried harder to help me back then, I think my life could have been very different if someone had bothered to just try and help me. I think it must have been obvious to teachers in school that there was something not right, I trashed a classroom once, got into fights in class, would walk out in tears or disturb the class by giggling and talking nonsense, but either no one noticed, or just didn’t make the connection and realise there was something wrong and I wasn’t just a weird kid.
Sometimes it almost feels like I had ptsd as a kid with how constantly fearful for my life I was/bad nightmares/etc…ptsd with nothing in particular to be traumatized about. Psychosis is a strange thing.
What I came to believe through my experience happened over time, not overnight. Through all the things That happened to me, others who were there, just shook their heads and said nothing. Those that weren’t there, sat back in their chair behind their desk and wrote notes about my 'delusions.'
How many things can people(?)Do to another if there were no one to believe them, or if they all denied said incidents never occurred?
I find it humorous that when I do say it ‘straightforward,’ it just gives others less time and trouble to make it all seem like it couldn’t have happened, like now.
Then what’s the favorite ‘put me down?’ Are you taking your meds?
Well, I did for …mmmmm fom 1996 to 2013…nothing changed in my environment, nor did it stop the delusions. It made me sleepy so I didn’t have the capacity to challenge anyone/thing. Right where I was needed to be, but not for me.
Take this however you will, but I have to have 3 bones in this world to survive, a wishbone, a backbone, and a funnybone (thanks Reba!)
I remember going through psychosis as young as three. Really it’s a grey area as have been doing repressed memory therapy as when it all started. Without the memories I was still very withdrawn and going through psychosis suffering depression at nine the school intervened to a point was a whole self esteem program I was involved with. Not that helped much.