My doctor recently brought up to me that I may be schizophrenic or schizoaffective. I’ve had weird symptoms since I was a teenager. I started having depression when I was a teenager, but things ramped up when I was 15. I became convinced that there was going to be a zombie apocalypse and that my family had to escape to Alaska in order to survive. I stopped eating because I thought the food might be infected, I stopped showering because I thought the same thing about the water, and I stopped sleeping because I was so anxious all the time. Eventually I was hospitalized and medicated and things started to get better. I was diagnosed with OCD, which made sense to me. I’ve struggled with paranoia-related symptoms since then, but nothing as intense as when I was 15. When I started my sophomore year of college, I had a relapse of the zombie fear and refused to leave my apartment for two days. Eventually a friend was able to talk me down from it, but it took a while.
Recently, I’ve started hearing voices. They’re not very frequent, but I know I hear them. Sometimes it’s like somebody else is inside my head and talking, but occasionally I actually hear them out loud (but when I do it’s usually just my name or something). It started in about July of this year, when I started hearing this female voice. It was telling me I was evil, I should kill myself, I deserved to die, etc. It was really stressful and I heard it for about two days. Then there were a couple times where I heard someone saying my name out loud but no one was there. At one point, I thought I heard my sister laughing behind me, but it was night and my sister was in another city. That same night, I thought I saw a very tall boy with gouged out eyes looking down at me.
Recently, I heard the voices again when I forgot to take my medication. This time, there were lots of them, and they kept telling me to kill my boyfriend. They started going into detail about how I should kill him and it was really upsetting. I also went through this weird phase where I suddenly became really energetic and I couldn’t stop talking and bringing up random topics. I think it was partly because I was nervous, because when I get nervous I talk a lot until I think I’ve brought up something that someone would like, but it just felt weird and different, and my boyfriend seemed to think that something strange was going on. Recently, I was at work, and I saw what looked like the xenomorph from Alien standing a few feet in front of me. It wasn’t there for long, but I know I saw it. I’ve also had this urge to just up and leave and hang out in this forest near my house. I don’t really know why I have it, I just know that I do.
I’m 20, so I’m at the age where it’s definitely a concern. My dad has a cousin with schizophrenia, and he brought this up to me. I didn’t necessarily think that means I could have schizophrenia, because it’s just my dad’s cousin, it’s not like it’s a close family member or anything.
However, I haven’t really had many paranoid thoughts lately. I’m not sure if this may be because I’m on a lot of medication. I have noticed that I have less desire to hang out with my friends, go to class, or put much effort into my appearance. Going to work has become really difficult for me even though right now I only get scheduled about twice a week. I’m not sure if I’m just depressed or if this is something else. I also don’t seem to have the “word salad” symptoms, but again, I don’t know if it’s just because I’m on medication or the symptoms haven’t shown up yet.
It’s just driving me crazy because I wish I could have an answer already, and just sitting here wondering when I’m going to have the next hallucination or the next psychotic period is awful. I’m not really convinced I have schizophrenia, but I’m willing to consider it since my symptoms are so weird.