I’m trying to figure out mine. Let me know yours and what you think of this. This is kind of my story with mental illness in general.
As a teen I was severely depressed and cried every night and self harmed on occasion . That mostly went away in my later teens and my first two years of college . Then, in 2013, I did lsd for the first time and some pot. After I came down I crashed hard and was depressed yet again. I had to take a year off for my mental health and q bunch of stressors happened, the biggest one was that my dad almost died in a car accident.
2014 I was hospitalized several times for the first time and I was 20 to 21. I was labeled depression with psychotic features. I remembered just being mostly paranoid and having some weird sensory experiences that I thought were hallucinations but was more illusions.
In 2014 I tried to commit suicide for the first real time (other times i did mild overdoses but didnt really try to do it all the way, kind of tested the waters i guess). It was after a big break up, and i went to live with my parents and my mom was very abusive again (alcoholic) and said some sexual things to me about how I’ll never be a true man. So I slept on the floor of my brothers new apartment for a while.
Ever since I’ve been in and out of the hospital but I didnt have psychotic symptoms again until 2015. The er diagnosed me then with a psychotic disorder but my psychiatrist that I saw twice tried to say I had bpd and that diagnosis stuck around for a couple years.
In 2016 I somehow graduated college. My last year was awful and I was constantly suicidal. After a huge fight with a really emotional roommate, I started despising people and wanted nothing to do with them anymore. I went to Arizona to be in the americorps, I had a pretty good job working for the city hall there. Bad pay. Had a bad roommate that took advantage of me money wise and threatened to steal my dog. I started having OCD problems and the hospitals all diagnosed me with that.
Last year I did lsd several times and smoked pot heavily again. I was fine doing pot for 2 years until after I did my last lsd trip in the summer. My mood was all over the place for a while. In December I had another big break up and she started acting like a totally different person (we live together). This freaked me out so bad I started to think she was replaced by a robot, and I went really psychotic. Started to believe i was dead this time.
Now here i am again with this psychosis. I’m on stronger meds so i have insight.
I cant really tell how long I’ve had this because my other psychoses were a lot more brief a d I think were more mood related than sz.
i noticed before my psychotic episode that i would start hearing people talking about me at school when i smoked weed but i thought it was real and it wasnt all the time, also i smoked a bunch of tobacco once and got sick and things got a little crazy but when i was sober i felt mostly normal, than one day it just hit me like a tank and i started having voices yelling at me 24/7
Ugh that’s awful. I dont get many hallucinations, mostly just really weird thoughts and beliefs.
I think for me it was more like gradually immersing myself into a pool than diving head first into it.
I had no prodrome. I went from perfectly fine to floridly ill within a week. I had had periods of mania before, so I wasn’t new to smi, but psychosis hit me like a truck, very fast and hard.
My prodromal phase can be summed up in two words: severe bulimia.
My prodromal phase was several years of panic attacks and some voices and severe mood swings. Then my breakdown happened after I left school in Dec 2002.
Major depression, cyclothymia, confusion, turmoil, visual hallucinations etc
Yeah I had bad bulimia in the few years leading up to MI
Mine started in 2014. I thought the world was coming to a end and spent 3000 dollars on the credits cards stocking up. And when it didn’t end, I thought I was supposed to job hop because certain people needed to hear what I said about God. And they might be waiting for me to give me messages I needed too.
My break was in 2017, I started hallucinating really bad and went screaming to a psychiatrist because it scared me so bad I thought I had acquired demons.
Took I don’t know how many different anti psychotics till I stayed on this one called seroquel. I still see and hear things, but I believe it’s because I have a negative blood type and they test me to see how I react to hallucinations and hearing voices.
I quit my job this month and applied for social security because at my last job my boss told me I walked around like a zombie and the tool maker was constantly asking me if I was ok.
So I guess I wait this out and hope it gets better
I go to a new psychiatrist in the 3rd and hoping he won’t up my meds because I don’t want to walk around tired and sleepy all the time. So anyway that’s my story
I was prodromal for years beforehand. And used to present myself at the A+E only for them to swear thats its Oh God, Roger Robinson’s here again. They even accused me of being an IV user - when they found an injection site in my arm that what was given to me from the Ambulance.
Bunch of tossers. It took 4 months of being crazy, police visits and a formal complaint to the NHS Trust before i was taken seriously. Even then i waited another 2 months for an appointment by a consulstant psychiatrist. Spoke to him for half and hour, before saying i was a schizophrenic in relapse. Basically got weaned onto Risperadone - then given a Depot a month after.
I still blame those bastards for the breakdown with my wife and the loss of my daughter. Its been nearly 6 years now - yet im still resentful that they let me suffer for so many years without proper treatment. They just saw me as a piss artist - and blamed my symptoms of being drunk for years. And it annoys the hell outta me.
No prodromal phase. Went from normal to extremely psychotic in just a few days.
I’m not sure where the prodromal phase began and where it ended…
I started believing in a lot of unusual things, and I acted erratically in a few instances that are obvious in hindsight. I had issues for a couple of years before the hallucinations started. I can’t pinpoint when the negative symptoms started.
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