I know I had a lot of dumb “stigmas” about sz before I realized I have psychosis/sz. For instance, I thought you couldn’t have anxiety if you had sz, or that they were crazy killers. I had a friend who told me she had schizo and I stopped hanging out with her because I was scared. It’s changed now obviously, and I chuckle at it. Because in the past I hated gay people. Given a few years later and now I have a boyfriend haha
3 Likes
I feared having schizophrenia from about age 12, which was the first time I heard it from my therapist.
I did some library research, because that’s how we did it in the 90s, and was terrified.
It seemed that people with schizophrenia were mostly institutionalized.
The few exceptions were musicians and absolute geniuses.
So I figured if I studied enough, I could stay out of the asylum…
4 Likes
I was under the impression that if you had scizophrenia you had to hear voices, which isn’t necessarily true. I also thought that all delusions/hallucinations would be religious centred. (Also not true)
1 Like
I thought my grandiose delusion that I was Florence Nightingale meant that I was sz. Boy, was I wrong. I also thought that my disassociations meant that I was sz. Wrong on that count too.
1 Like
Before I realised and accepted I myself had it, I only in my head thought those who had such s mental illness where those who walked down the street talking to themselves.
Was very young and really knew nothing else of it. Thought I was just alone that was my perception of it and one that left me by myself.
2 Likes
I didn’t ever really have stigma I don’t think, I’ve always been a very nonjudgemental person. Any time I met someone with diagnosed mental illness I just accepted it as something they dealt with like any other condition. To me as a child everyone was weird, I didn’t consider myself human thus all humans felt very odd in their own ways to me. It also helps that I was very interested in psychology, and thus educated in it, since I was in middle school.
However since all I’d learned about mental illness was from books I’d read and informative documentaries and whatnot I’d watched I feel I had a very textbook definition of what each mental illness was, and thought that if you didn’t fit that textbook definition you weren’t ill. But that’s not true at all, over time and even more study and having access to peoples’ personal stories as well as my own I’ve learned that no one person experiences mental illness in the same way, not just sz but any mental illness.
Also as I came to terms with my own mental illness similarly I felt that I HAD to share my coping mechanisms with everyone and that THEY were the true answer to living with mental illness. I learned that that’s not the case at all either and that different coping mechanisms work best depending on the person, some things that worked amazingly well for me could actually make another person’s symptoms much worse.
2 Likes
I had no idea what SZ was. It was only after my first psychosis that I heard the word Schizophrenia. That is probably the reason my first psychosis was so terrible. I had no idea that it could be mental illness.
3 Likes
Hurley from Lost?
I watched a documentary on it in which a guy had severe thought disorder and was speaking word salad. I thought this and doing impulsive violent actions were the main features of the disorder. I watched a simulation of psychosis on youtube which featured mainly auditory hallucinations. I concluded from all this that this disease is marked by all these features.
1 Like
Pretty much sums up human nature and life on this planet.
2 Likes
I thought schizophrenics were absolutely insane and I thought they all ended up in Looney bins. Then I found out I was one and I panicked but as I learned more about it I realized that that’s simply untrue. It makes me extra scared about how normal people view us though.
1 Like
I was real stupid and had romantic notions about it. I thought it was ‘interesting’. I knew it was scary but I had absolutely no idea just how scary and horrible it could be until I had my first few episodes.
2 Likes
I thought it was multiple personalities and framed all my symptoms with that context. Ended up finding this website and learned pretty quickly what was what. Strange Days.
1 Like
When I was 17 I thought schizophrenia was hearing voices and just that. Then I read up about other symptoms and just did not understand it. Then after I experienced psychosis and had a breakthrough, I Realized that I have been schizophrenic my entire life. This realization literally took 25 years to happen.
1 Like
I didn’t think I had sz because I didn’t see dragons or act like Robin Williams did in Fisher King. Also didn’t think hallucinating could be anything that appeared to be normal to us. Thought it had to be something so bizarre that It would be obvious that it was a hallucination. At one point I even thought sz should be locked up for the safety of the public.
3 Likes
I had not even heard about scz nor psychology for that matter.
I was on the streets homeless, and I’d call my mother on the payphone. Finally she suggests I go to the library, and look up both scz and bp. Bp didn’t fit, but scz did.
I knew it, but I really didn’t know it know it until I was regularly attending a psych outpatient wing of a hospital. Those were some morbid days, but by that time I was already in college, working, and getting clothes dry cleaned from on the streets before getting on the Dean’s List that year.
Crazy. It’s not as fun as I thought’d be. SMH
2 Likes
I thought there was no way you could have it and be high-functioning.
3 Likes
Me too! I never thought I hallucinated because I thought I wasn’t seeing anything bizarre enough. My hallucinations started to turn scary when a dead cat kept haunting me, meowing at me and touching me. I saw her running and walking in the corner of my eye. And then I started hallucinating ghosts and dead bodies 
2 Likes
I didn’t know anything about mental disorders even if my mother has sz, they only told me that she had ‘problems’. 
Just three years ago my aunt told me that ‘she was crazy and diagnosed with schizophrenia’ (yeah the stigma…).
2 Likes
To be honest, or never thought about sz until I had it. I never would have thought I’d end up sz either
1 Like