After my first psychotic episode I developed problems reading and writing. Has anyone else experienced the same?
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yes to some extend. I ain’t as fast as before psychosis.
Reading long texts or replying to them has become a struggle
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dude, don’t give up. It is trainable.
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Trainable? What do you mean?
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that you can train it.
if you read a piece from a book every day and read more and more. Then you will eventually become good at it
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Great advice but the problem is I have my final exam in a month’s time and I can’t read or recall what I have read
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Oo, that is ■■■■, then I have no advice for you. You can try to force it, but you can be deceived.
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I have this annoying thing now where I mix up, misread, or add words in a sentence. It really slows me down.
Meaning is often not automatic anymore either, and I have to take the extra step of thinking about what something means, if that makes any sense. And if there are several things happening in one sentence, forget it.
It’s a real bummer. I think it’s gotten better since my psychosis, but I seem to have hit a wall with it. My memory is still bad though, which makes it harder to remember things I’ve read, even just after I’ve read them.
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I sort of get you and the whole memory thing is what bums me out
Am ____ed I don’t know what to do
@chemwex The exact same thing happened to me… I could not read more than a few lines, and writing was ambitious. I had to write a speech for an individual who presented on TedTalks… it took me months. (Three months to be exact) Before, I could have completed it within a week. I also had to watch TV shows and films using sub titles as the flow of conversations were too quick for me to comprehend, even then I would always have to pause and read, or rewind and listen. I finally realised that, it was not only the episode that caused this, but also the medication. What is not disclosed is the affect antipsychotics have on the brain. In a study of 202 patients, a decrease in brain tissue was found in all patients. This is not to suggest that you should stop taking medication or abandon it. We are all different. However, from a cognitive perspective, I regained cognitive capacity when I only accepted, non medicinal treatment
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I have been spending about 8 or more hours on weekends reading. It fills a void. Sometimes I am very much interested. But I am a slow reader and I always have been. I never learned how to read without self-vocalizing.
I don’t see that the illness has changed my reading much.
I can still read but my mind wanders so I don’t do it anymore. I used to read books and magazines but I don’t do it anymore.
I did read a bunch of books about schizophrenia when I got diagnosed. That was the last real reading I did. I read a book called “Me, Myself, and Them”. I think that was a perfect name for a book about paranoid schizophrenia. But “Surviving Schizophrenia” was my favorite.
Sadly - yes - I can no longer read as well as I used to after my last psychotic break - so this thread is of interest to me.
I think I may have to give up my dreams of formal study due to my last psychosis.
Has anyone else had to deal with this? It’s just agonizing torment. 
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I find I can read when I’m not feeling stressed or obligated to do so…which is a problem when you have school work to do.
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I love you @Tomasina !
It would be a disaster for you to give up on your plans.
Never do that!
One day schizophrenia may be cured and you may do whatever you like.
And even absent a cure,
never give up and expect much of yourself.
You are a very special person.
Oh, I also suffer from the memory problem. I can’t remember what I’ve read for the life of me after I’ve read it. It takes some pushing and looking at the material again to remember any of what I read, which makes my seminar-style classes a problem since we have to discuss what we read in a small-group setting.
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@Qwerty1 am interested what are these non-medicinal treatment
Therapy. I had therapy for a year