The scientists are right. Schizophrenia is completely related to dopamine. It started off for me as being in a state of crisis. As you know dopamine is a reward chemical, I am pretty sure if everything running through your mind is not ok, and you find absolutely none of your thoughts rewarding, your brain basically gets backed up with the stuff, and you will start to feel dreadful, and the opposite of the feeling of achievement. I honest don’t think this makes you hallucinate though. It is just you feel so unimaginably bad and your reality gets so hard to take, that at some point you kind of break it to find a way of coping. If you are not admitting to reality at this point, you start to form delusions and hallucinations. And… at this point you are in psychosis.
To me the dsm is pretty flawed, psychosis and schizophrenia are not two different diseases. The only difference is when you get told your reality is not real, you will either find comfort from this or find it too hard to take and go further down the rabbit hole. The definition between the two is very wishy washy, and different symptoms between the definitions could easily be explained by comorbid illnesses. And that gets me to my next point. A lot of people think the reason people end up like this is genetics, but I think that is very marginally true. I think the people that stopped being able to cope often have underlying problems that led them to stop having the ability to cope. For me this was autism.
When I left school, I got dumped into college and a room full of strangers and got told to get to know everyone and since I was undiagnosed at the time, it was basically a nightmare waiting to happen. When you are a kid, life is so easy, you have basically no responsibilities and people judging you is not something you give a second thought to. Now I have turned into an adult and there was actual expectations of me, it was all too much to handle. I had started drug using, mostly as a way to fill my unfulfillment, but once the novelty wore off, going back to reality was even harder than it would have been without them. I turned 18, had a severe car accident and bang! A few seconds after the crash I started hearing voices.
I think abuse plays a massive part. People are quick to judge in any setting, and if you are suffering, people can often be selfish and have little sympathy. For me they were more concerned with how disappointed they were with me not talking a lot than how bad I was feeling at the time. I have coping mechanisms for it now, but everyone knows how verbal confrontation can make you feel.
Over a decade later, I really pulled my life together a lot, even in the hopeless state I was in. I stopped believing my voices were real. It actually happened very fast, it was kind of a realisation moment, and when I realised that, I went from hearing them back to back for years straight to in about a week, absolutely nothing. Although it was a massive relief, I was basically back to square one, and not being able to cope anymore. But… this time it was too late. I knew my reality was not real, and I couldn’t believe in those things anymore, even if I wanted to. So I worked and worked on myself, and actually got to a place where I was finally more comfortable with myself. It pretty much hit me at this point that I was autistic. So I got a diagnosis, made massive strides, and eventually came off medication without a problem.
And now here I am, writing this to you, hoping it could give anyone some insight into why they experience things that, are impossible, but still believe it. Well, I hope you can make a recovery. I hope you can find why you became unstable like I did, and whatever happens, I wish you the best.