My friend has a family history of schizophrenia and yesterday she told me that she felt like everyone was connected and in on something that she didn’t know about. I told her to go straight to ER but she said she was fine. I’m worried though. She has just turned 18 and has just started drinking alcohol and I hope this hasn’t brought out her schizophrenia
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Well you have experience with it, you can probably help her a lot.
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I know. It’s just going to be difficult to get her to see someone about it because I can tell she’s going to be stubborn and say that she’s fine
Does she know that you have schizophrenia?
Yeah
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Well just having someone who’s gone through will help her I think, good luck.
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Are there any more signs than just thinking everybody knows something that she doesn’t? It doesn’t seem enough to warrant a visit to a doctor. Is there anything else?
But…on the other hand, if someone suspected of having schizophrenia gets seen and diagnosed and begins treatment for it, the better their prognosis.
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She told me the other day that she feels dissociated and she’s pretty unmotivated, pretty reclusive. She has been seeing a social worker for her mental health because she suffers anxiety and depression and they thought she might be borderline Aspergers but no official diagnosis. As far as I know though this is the first time she’s experienced real paranoia
The best you can do is try to encourage her to talk to someone. Let her know that you have experienced similar things in your psychosis if you have.
I’ve drank a lot of alcohol, and I think you have to drink prodigiously for alcohol to be a factor in your schizophrenia. I’d start in the morning and drink thirty beers in a day. Sometimes I would go four or five days like this.
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That’s impressive
Alcoholics consume huge amounts of alcohol. This one doctor told me that ten per cent of the drinkers in the U.S. consume ninety per cent of the alcohol.
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She had never had a drop of alcohol and then suddenly she does and she starts feeling like this. Seems to me that the two are linked for her but hey I might be wrong. That’s good that it doesn’t effect your illness it doesn’t effect mine either but when I start drinking I can’t stop so I try to say away from it
Has she been stressed at all?
I know for me, I don’t have a confirmed diagnosis of something like Schizophrenia, but with my Psychosis diagnosis, what really brings it on for me is stress. My hormones shooting up every month also doesn’t help stress, which in turn makes me more paranoid, regardless of being on medicine at the moment.
Alcohol might be a coexisting factor for her way to cope though, but I’m not 100% sure on that, not everyone seeks to kill off stress simply by drinking.
She is pretty stressed. She talks to me a lot about her problems. I saw her yesterday though she seemed alright but it’s hard to tell what’s going on in her head. I told her to at least tell her social worker about those thoughts and feelings. Her family knows now so we’re just going to keep an eye on her
When a person first starts to drink they are a lot more susceptible to it. It could be that the shock of a foreign substance destabilized her. She could probably build up a tolerance for it very quickly if she wanted to drink, but that just leads to a whole other universe of misery.