Pre-warning this is going to involve a lot of backstory and why I am considering this decision, so if you do not feel like reading much this isn’t the post for you.
Also, I have been diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder.
My mental illness, at least the “Schizo” portion of it, developed when I was a teenager. If I remember clearly I was in middle school so 11-14 range. It manifested in the form of violent and terrifying hallucinations that used to keep me awake all night too scared to fall asleep. Due to the fact that I had no clue what was happening, as you can imagine, I came up with an “explanation” which was basically that I was seeing the dead/demons and was a medium. One of the reasons that I came to this explanation is because when I was a kid (8 or 9) I vividly remember smashing my thumb in a car door. While my finger was hurting I started to see a bunny who I thought to be the easter bunny. One of my clearest memories is the bunny rubbing my thumb to make the pain go away. When I asked my mother about this as a teenager she said she remembered me talking about a bunny often and that she thought it was a guardian angel. (My mother is super religious so her explanations always seemed to worsen my delusion that I was psychic because she believed it herself). She also told me that once as a kid she actually considered calling a priest because I used to walk around the house screaming at things that weren’t there and telling them to leave me alone and her being religious led her to believe it was the ‘devil’. So to summarize, I thought I was a medium. My hallucinations manifested with all of my senses. I would feel “ghosts” moving towards me and feel them wanting to harm me. I would see faces, figures, and people surrounding me. I would hear voices yelling at me and while I did not often get words I would get screams as if someone was screaming in my ear. I would smell awful smells and I would “feel” hands grabbing me. (One of my vivid instances of a tactile hallucination was this dark creature grabbing my wrist and slamming it against the wall which left me with a bruise the next day.) By the way, my episodes did not only happen at night I have quite a few of them in my memory during the day when I am wide awake. Needless to say, these episodes were often and traumatizing to me growing up and led to a suicide attempt.
Almost as if by fate, my family moved from the USA to Germany because my dad is in the army. As soon as we got to Germany my night episodes stopped. I self-explained this immediately as the fact that my old house was haunted and the new one wasn’t. As I finished high school and moved to Paris to go to college I began questioning my previous beliefs of being a medium. I had not hallucinated often and sometimes did not have one for months. That is when I started seeing a Psychiatrist and got diagnosed with a mental illness. I was even able to identify my trigger which is basically if I watch or perceive anything that makes me feel fear or fright; my hallucinations kick up. This is all good and well, however, I fell into a deep depression. I spent most of my growing up believing I was psychic just to find out I was mentally ill. As you can imagine this lead to a split in emotions. Half of me recognized the mental illness and the other half started developing a delusion that I was, in fact, psychic but lost my “powers” due to not being “worthy” of it due to the way I reacted to the "ghosts " when I was a teenager. This led to a second hospitalization where I spent almost two months in a French mental hospital.
After college, I moved to Texas where my parents were and here I am now. However, the problem and the main point of posting this is I still have this split of emotions. Meaning, The delusion is still very present and it is stopping me from moving on. I do not do anything productive for myself or a career because whenever I start getting my life together I tell myself I am “Going against my destiny” and that “I was meant to be a medium”. (Even though as I write this I am aware I have a mental illness.) I have seen doctors for my mental illness since freshman year. I have taken medications, had to deal with mania and have made stupid mistakes but none of the “treatment” helps me. Medicine makes me like a zombie even more unproductive than me off of them and makes me gain weight like crazy. Therapy, as in talking, makes me feel even crazier and as if I am being looked at through a microscope by the doc.
So, I finally thought I had a solution! I was going to purposely put me in a susceptible state of fear to trigger an episode like when I was a teen. The idea was that once they started happening I would face my hallucinations once and for all and it would put my dellusion to bed. Basically, they’re hallucinations so I should be able to prove to myself that they aren’t real as they are happening. I’ve been telling myself that this is the only way I can be free of them; I have to face them. However a couple nights ago I decided I would finally do it and just thinking about doing it got me scared. I cried, I was terrified out of the pure fear of having to deal with them again. Also, just two seconds of thinking about doing it led to two hallucinations that evening. I was going to the bathroom and as I shut the door this man suddenly appeared and tried to grab me. Then I heard whistling downstairs and went downstairs to find nobody there and then heard whistling upstairs.
While I know nobody is a professional here I am curious as to the advice fellow people dealing with mental illness have. Do you think it is too dangerous to try? Or do you think I should; since I truly believe it is the only way for me to move on in life? And if the later any advice? Or perhaps other ideas?
Sorry about the long post and thank you for any advice or comments.