I had signs of mental illness years before diagnosis

When I was around four or five I remember it very well, I saw figures on the wall. It looked very real. I saw it once more a day or two later but it went away. Then my aunt died when I was around 14. I saw her face on the wall for a second, not very clear but it was there but it went away. I got diagnosed with schizophrenia many years later though at 25. Can prodrome last that long?

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I had delusions when I was a kid. I thought I accidentally killed my miscarried cousin when I was 11. I also had a delusion that I was some sort of holy person when I was in catholic school, I was 10 at the time. I went in between thinking that catholicism was bs or that it was real and I was a prophet. I had off and on paranoid delusions as a teen, and then they became full-blown when I was 18 1/2. I didnt know I was schizophrenic at the time, I knew very little about it.

earliest memories i was psychoitc.
my brother goes crying “daddy, you know what he said?”
“he said that the sun is where heaven is but
the fire on the outside is hell and you have to swim through that to get to heaven”
i must have been 8, earliest memory of my psychoses bothering other people - my little brother, about 5 at the time.
the dad gathers up the other siblings and tells them,
your brother onderdonk has a very unusual imagination;
don’t let what your brother says bother you.

psychotic throughout my life,
they put me in mental hospital for two months whn i was 12,
battle of will thing, got put in for saying i hate my mom,
had to stay until one day i said ok i don’t hate my mom,
weird games they play have no effect on how i feel about my mom,
st vincents in greenwich village new york city.
got to see naked girls for the first time, in the rubber room, and practice arts and crafts,

now 47, i have been in most of the jails and psychiatric hospitals in new york and california, and a handful in the midwest.
i always get free in a few days.
i’ve never really been into sanity much,
don’t imagine i’m gonna start anytime soon.

The decision, at least for me, to go toward schizophrenia was made early in life, as a decision to
become magical. A little kid hears a bunch of bible stories, then when it’s time to create a
personality for himself, he doggishly goes for the king-of-the-universe model, while the
psychiatrist’s vision is only objective, to be a functioning member of society, keep yourself
presentable, etc, and the only concern at all for our subjectivity is that we are not miserable
enough to get mad and kill everybody, but other than that the construction of mental subjectivity
is left entirely to the spirit world.

I think it’s the wildness of the images presented in the early years,
personal choice based on genetics, on what “reverberates in the soul” when you choose what
you want to like, along with lots of torture, or at least a mom who yells about stuff.

I know I am different. Ever since I was 5 years old, my parents told me I was “crazy”, and an
“idiot”. What they neglected to point out was that that is a GOOD thing, as I realized reading
Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” - the idiot was the pure and mystical minded soul who gave his life as
a sacrifice to his beautiful and simple dream. That’s a role I would like to have in life, and to
some extent, I do.

I was schizo 4 years before I was diagnosed at 15. My earlier childhood seemed to hold no clues. I’m glad I was ‘free’ for that time.

I have always been somewhat out of sync, but what could nowadays be easily called signs of mental illness were present 4-5 years before diagnosis. There were possibly other signs before but these were maybe more behavioural/social. One strange thing was when i was about 7 and told my parents that dogs were barking in my eyes.

According to my parents, I was having problems with lucid when I was 5. I personally remember some of the the hallucinations and very real imaginary friends when I was 7. I really began to hear voices at 10 and went delusional at 11. After my kid sister was born, there was no turning back.

Hmm. I guess from all this writing I just realised that actually I have had more positive symptoms than I thought. Seeing things years before psychosis, and I thought i never heard things but before I took the antipsychtoic I had faint voices which I thought were real but only happened at work every time i was leaving the place.

i had depression and poor relationship skills all my life before i became schizo.

Here the same, i have had hallucinations since early childhood
sometimes in combination with an fever, yet i now have read that is “luckily” normal.
and hearing voices since i was like an teenager, yet not of this magnitude that i have had for some years now.

I also recently stumbled upon the OCD disorder.
and my father fits the bill perfectly
always checking his car locks like 20 times. or tapping on his right leg when he goes outside the house.
my mother, also has something psychological yet i still dont know how to catogorize it.

As long as i can remember is that they both believed in an conspiracy “father still does, my mother is sadly or should i say luckily?
conditioned with dementia, at last she seems too found some peace”
They always have believed people where out to get them, either with an ultra high pitched sound.
Which was targeted at us as an family “both my parents could hear this, at night time”
or with the believe of poisoned tapwater.
so water was taken from the gas station.

so i dont know precisly what within me
is conditioned by environment, by gene pool, or
what my brains have developped purely on its own.

or taking it further… is triggered by the unknown

i certainly wasn’t a normal child. bit of a fantasist but nothing damaging. spent most of my time day dreaming, still do in fact. but then my abuse started young so i was paranoid about being attacked from an early age. although there was nothing in my past that could have prepared me or paved the way for this ■■■■.

I’ve had very short and isolated problems as a kid. Hallucinating a monster’s hand in the doorway of my bedroom when I was around 4 or 5. To hearing someone whisper my name over and over again for a few minutes strait, seemingly trying to get my attention, when nobody was there ( I was probably between 7 and 10 years old.) Mini-delusions were on and off through the years. Generally I’ve always been a bit off.

Just diagnosed SZA early last year at the age of 26. Secretly dealt with depression and hypo-mania since highschool.

I had thoughts and delusions my whole life. It wasn’t until I had a psychotic break when I was 24 that I was diagnosed. It’s still pretty much the same but I’ve been hospitalized a few times.

I was a fantasist as a kid, a daydreamer with obsessive thoughts about idols or certain boys. But my abuse started young so I guess I can lay the blame there. Nothing serious though until I was older. Oh to b normal huh.

I heard the occasional voice way back in third grade even.

And can still remember the wolf in my dream around that time, even though my memory is long gone or damaged i can remember this clearly, had i known it was them at the time i would have ■■■■■■ flipped out entirely.

I also had some sleep walking around this time, i wandered the halls turning on every light repeating “they are coming.”

It didn’t kick into full swing until halloween when i was eighteen.

You knew that all the way back then?

When you were eight you knew that?

You really do have to swim through it to get to the good stuff, how did you know though im wondering, did someone tell you? No way an eight year old could possess such wisdom alone.

Ha! An eight year old getting yelled at for knowing!