How did your sz/sza start?

DX'd - Other
1

How old were you?

Me, its hard to pinpoint when mine started because it crept up on me in stages. When i was a kid i had some mild hallucinations and delusions. I believed at one point that my mom was replaced by a robot, for example. Those largely went away in my teens but i had major mood issues. Then when i was in college, around age 21, i dropped lsd and when i came off of it i felt extremely depressed and started dissociating bad. Then a year or so later i had my first episode. Then i started getting negatives a fewbyears after that really bad.
How about you?

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2

I was 26 or 27.
So sad times looking back to all the alertness and energy I had during that first episode

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3

i think mine started around age 20. paranoia my girlfriend was cheating on me, paranoia about the patriot act and being spied on by the government, extreme anxiety, disorganized thoughts, racing thoughts, dropped out of school because of lack of motivation, quit lots of jobs. i hallucinated at age 20 on mushrooms, but the hallucinations went away for 6 or 7 years after that and started up again when i was sober at 27.

i wasn’t diagnosed until i was 26.

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4

My symptoms started at 16 y.o., I was diagnosed sz at age 21 after a suicide attempt.

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5

Mine I had some when my mom died. They called it acute schizophrenia. Then it went away for a while until I was 34(?) after my son was born. After my son was born it started back up.

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6

I got into trouble when I was 16 and sent to young offenders institute where they put me straight in the hospital wing.

I got out on appeal as the judge thought I should have been sectioned.

I ended up going to the local Mental Hospital and they sent me to a forensic ward due to my behaviour.

To be honest I blanked out and lost time. I don’t remember any of the things they said I did.

This all ended at 18 and I had aftercare till 19.

I was fine until 22/23 when it all happened again, this time without drugs being the problem. So they dx me with sz then

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7

I was 15, started with depression after my parents divorced, then I started hearing voices, then I believed the FBI was after me. I was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar, would be another 3 years before I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder which is my diagnosis to this day.

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8

Started when I was 5 years old and slowly got worse over the years.
The icing on the cake was when I did some Mescaline in college and this tipped me over to full blown psychosis land.

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9

It began for me when I was 20. I was living in London with my brother and began feeling strange. Later I went off to a relatives house where I ended up falling out of the window and hitting the ground. I was rushed off to hospital, then to a psychiatric hospital. The medication has been a big problem for me, because of the side effects. Even now I make a humming noise while I eat which is horrible and I put it down largely to the drugs [medication]. I am 31 and currently trying to learn how to code via edX’s CS50 but finding it very difficult. One of the problem sets you have to solve includes printing a Pyramid using the hash [#] symbol and it is incredibly complex. Even now I’m not sure I understand it. Anyway, looking forward to getting my medication lowered, I previously tried lowering Amisulpride yet that didn’t work, so hopefully with Clopixol it will. I take Niacin in addition to the medication and while I don’t notice a lot of difference at the moment, you need to give these things time.

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10

I’m also 31 and live in London. Good luck with the med lowering. I hope it works out well.

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11

My first major breakdown I guess I was having a complete emotional breakdown and the sza symptoms took over. I was allready very isolated before that and dissociated entirely.

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12

Mine started when my head began hurting then I had a psychotic break ( or something bad happened to me) severe head pain ended up in er and started hearing voices after that my head still hurts from the break to this day

13

I remember that too, it started when I was 21 y.o. in my gf’s house, it was night. It was a severe throbbing headache in the frontal parts of the brain.

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14

I was 20, and began having obsessive religious thoughts, or what a psychiatrist would call o.c.d, such as trying to be perfect, then it drove me crazy, things are starting to get back to normal, it has been about 2 years now

15

I voted for Ronald Reagan and watched Prince Charles marry Princess Di.

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16

It started when I was 7 years old. Suddenly I became a reserved person and I started to hear voices and my life wasn’t the same anymore.

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17

I’ve been like this as long as I can remember.

Delusions, hallucinations, imaginary friends that wouldn’t go away.

Everything really came to a head when I was about 19,

That was the first time I was hospitalized and put on APs.

18

Mine seems to be different from all your stories. I developed really bad psychosis when was 32. It came on all of a sudden. Prior to that never had these problems.

19

Age 16 I got a palmistry psychic reading and for some reason it stuck with me and thought the psychic reader was playing head games with me…
Like witchcraft — I lost my mind seeing her inside my head…

20

e tablets…cannibis…alcohol…solvent abuse…insomaia…lead me to being psychotic on the island tenerife in 2000, i was 20 years old…awful experince …all together i had 3 psychotic episodes , but since 2010 i am in full remission of sza…i am getting discharged from the psycharict clinic , which is awesome