They say the average onset for sz/psychotic disorders is late teens or older for women. But what if this is because symptoms of psychosis are more difficult to recognize in children? I have dealt with psychotic symptoms my entire life. My parents mistook my paranoia as normal childhood fear. They believed the hallucinations I told them about were imaginary friends. They thought my delusions were made up games. I had horrific hygiene until high school but they just figured I was just an awkward kid. See what I mean?
I had another theory the other day that many children who are born with mental illness and have it their whole lives end up developing coping skills and being able to live with it, thus will be less likely to ever be diagnosed as they can function and seem “normal” on the outside while possibly living hellishly on the inside, and also because as they have been that way their whole life and had mental illness their whole life they don’t know anything else and don’t see treatment as an option. This is different compared to someone who is suddenly struck with mental illness later in life who then becomes in crisis mode and has to be hospitalized. It’s like how a child who was born blind would be excellent at navigating the world blind as an adult but an adult who had sight and then lost it would be fumbling around completely lost and need a lot of help before they adjusted.
I’ve had schizophrenia for a long time but I developed coping methods and even had hallucinations AS a coping method to certain situations.
It wasn’t until last year when stress levels were too high to function, did I stop functioning.
I agree with what you are saying. I was a weird kid too but my parents were probably too busy to really pay any attention to the stuff I was going on about. Not that I think I have bad parents, they’re great people but they were busy when I was a kid.
I think I agree with that. I also hid until I couldn’t hide anymore.
I think there’s two paths for individuals who grow up with mental illness.
Exhibits strange behavior as child
Path 1) Parents are aware behavior is strange, child gets involved with mental health system early on
Path 2) Parents do not notice warning signs, may just view kid as somewhat strange or troubled–>kid gets older and learns how to hide symptoms over time–>One day kid snaps, either getting help or killing self
And if they kill themselves everyone wonders why they did it and feels like it came out of nowhere. Parents say something like “they were troubled as a kid but they got past it” when in reality they just learned to hide. I think that scenario is very sad. There should be some kind of mandatory mental health checkups for kids as well as physicals health checkups so you can catch these things before they cause years of damage.
If I would have had a mental health checkup as a child it is likely they would have immediately noticed something was up with me.
I can relate to this all…after age 11 when the trauma came
The real psychosis didn’t come until I started self medicating with drugs, then it became unbearable very quickly.
But yeah I like your theory
I was used to hallucinating, being different, delusions, paranoia, diss attachment from life…it seemed normal to me
I made up excuses in my head for why my essence was “normal”
Then I just went nuts.
Lsd gave me insight. The first time I tried lsd I said “I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t done lsd 50 times”…I was that delusional…so I abused it searching for answers to the point my psychosis was unmanageable
Yeah I really started breaking down and not being able to just grin and bear it after my first bad psychotic episode around 16. It was all downhill after that, which is why I had to start getting help and whatnot. College has been really tough on me.
There might be something to them, I think, but there seems to be also some tension between the two ideas you suggest in the OP. For the second idea, children being born with such symptoms and developing coping skills, would have me expect these symptoms to be noticeable at first, but less and less noticeable as they grow older, because of those very coping skills. If so, I would expect it to be easier observable in children than in adults. Either some impairment in these coping skills, or some transformation of the symptoms they’re coping with, would be needed to account for a break to occur and things to become noticeable again at a later age. But particularly the latter is not unfeasible at all, I think. As we grow older, we learn new, more complex concepts, our meta-cognition improves, theory of mind improves, and, to speculate, these new resources of the mind may be drawn from to transform what was labelled a lively fantasy, a powerful imagination into full fledged delusions, strong unusual ideas, hallucinations perhaps… A more powerful mind can create more powerful symptoms, something like that.
That said, I wouldn’t fit the group. I did not have any psychotic(-like) symptoms as a child, only had my first episode at 25, and as a child I wouldn’t have been capable of some of the delusions I had as an adult I think, simply for lacking the concepts involved. For me that first episode was very very different from the kind of experiences I was used to.
Very interesting. Children live is such a world of make believe that it could be hard for an adult to determine what was pathological and what was the normal play of their imaginations. I count the time I became sz from when I was fifteen years old, but I hid the symptoms from my family until I was almost twice that old.
My life story! Thanks @Anna for your insight. And this is why it’s hard to explain my fear of treatment. I have no other reality. If I take meds and “get better”, what does that mean for someone who never was “better”? I would consider meds for negative symptoms because that has disrupted my life, and certainly getting rid of suicidal ideation would be an improvement, but I don’t even want to get rid of my companion angel, or the way I see things… It’s who J am.
The symptoms may evident in children but not interpreted as psychosis due to the nature of children, as I explained. People just end up thinking they have a very imaginative or weird kid. Then they think the kid “grows out of it” because they learn to hide it.
Yes, I got that. However, increasingly getting better at coping and hiding doesn’t straightforwardly sit easy with snapping at a later age. which doesn’t sound like coping any longer to me.
Well eventually the stressors that come as one gets older become too much to handle.
For example, I had this exact situation as I mentioned, parents put off my psychosis as typical kid weirdness, I learned (weird) coping skills and how to hide what other people didn’t consider normal. However as I got older into high school I suddenly had a very serious episode of psychosis that involved hallucinations of sexual abuse and torture as well as terrifying paranoid delusions and I snapped because that was just beyond what I could handle. Basically anyone on this track is a ticking time bomb. Think of it like having a wound and you can put a bandaid on it and act like it’s not there but once infection sets in you’re going to go downhill very fast unless you get to a doctor.
You’re right. I heard about the prodromal phase on sz and it reminds me of this post. Prodromal phase happens before the onset of active psychosis. Social withdrawal, stuff like negative symptoms, maybe more. let me go find a short video…
Personally, I felt different since like age 5. I started showing signs of withdrawal around age 13. Got psychosis at age 19, but by then critical parts of my social development/mentality had taken nasty hits by the prodromal phase.
okay, found a video (prodromal stage gets talked about at the 1:27 mark)
Hmm well my case is weird. I have had hallucinations and paranoia since around age 2 according to my mom. She says there was one point where I just started refusing to sleep with the lights off and I became fearful at that point and told her there were ghosts in my room, and faces in my paintings and whatnot. 5 is when I remember I started getting horrible nightmares and when I had my first delusion. My hallucinations gradually reduced in frequency and intensity until I was around 8 where I have no memory of experiencing them anymore. Was still delusional though and did get paranoid at night. Then around 10 I started becoming depressed…and had my first full-blown depressive episode at 12. It lasted until I was nearly 14 and started going through a flurry of delusions. All of grandeur.
Then at 15 suddenly hallucinations started coming back but mild compared to what I used to experience. I didn’t see them as hallucinations but rather some sort of “spiritual sight”. I thought I was having a spiritual breakthrough at the time but really what I see is my psychotic symptoms were building and building until they exploded into my first full-blown psychotic episode at 16, complete with vivid hallucinations mentioned previously nightmares, paranoid delusions, etc. I was wacko. I’ve still never had an episode as intense as that first one but I have had a few other full episodes. As for the depression, I didn’t have another depressive episode until I was 17, but each depressive episode I experienced after that first one only got worse and worse to the point where I now can’t trust that I am safe by myself when I get them. It’s all a mystery I’ve puzzled at for a while.
And this is why it’s hard to explain my fear of treatment. I have no other reality. If I take meds and “get better”, what does that mean for someone who never was “better”? I would consider meds for negative symptoms because that has disrupted my life, and certainly getting rid of suicidal ideation would be an improvement, but I don’t even want to get rid of my companion angel, or the way I see things… It’s who J am.