Well at 16 I didn’t quiet understand what it was I was being diagnosed with. I knew something wasn’t right, part of me felt like my parents were trying to put me up for adoption with all the tests I was being given and people I was seeing. I was terrified when they told me I had to pack a bag and I was going to the hospital, I thought that meant I wasn’t coming back home. I remember very specifically one interview with a nurse in the hospital she told me, “If you don’t know if it’s real…reach out and touch it…if you can’t touch it it’s not real.” However at times I believed I was feeling some things like tactile hallucination. So I pretty much spent my time in the hospital isolating myself and learning what was in my head and what was really around me. Took six months to get released back to my parents and I was so drugged up on countless different medications (Had no clue what all they gave me back then) I was pretty numb to everything.
I’d go to the library and study everything I could back then on Schizophrenia to better get a grasp on my situation, and I think that helped me the most…learning what it was.