Hi, do you tell others that you have sz , your friends, new people you met, i some how if i start talking to others i cant be myself becouse i want to tell every new person i met that i have sz. But i think its not safe i will be rejected misunderstood as i tell my best frien i have sz he dont understands it tells me you not and so on, and i dont know how to describe my expirience and i dont want but i dont know what to talk to people just how bad itis for me… Every day suffering… One of my friend does understand littlbit other at all nooo. And how do you live i do nothing at home i tried drawing classes but i get stagnant and no power of concentration and will.
Personally I do not tell other people that I have sz until I get to know them really well, and that takes a good deal of time. Truthfully, people who don’t have sz cannot understand the experience of being sz at all because they have never experienced it, so they are likely to deny its existence in me, since I may be presently acting just as normally as they are. They don’t have any knowledge of how the disorder often comes and goes, or gets better and worse at times, and so they are subject to logical fallacies such as believing that since things are mainly stable for them, they must be for everyone.
The truth is, normal folks can only understand us at an academic level. That’s the best they can ever manage, and most fall far short of that mark. That’s why a website like this one is such a good idea. You see, I get it man; its no mystery to me about what you’re going through. I suggest you take great care who you disclose your diagnosis to - not because it’s a bad thing, or because others are bad, but because others have no means to ever truly understand us, except in the most abstract sense. Of course, once you know someone very well, and have established a relationship of trust, disclosure becomes less risky. And we, more than most, are at risk. A study done by Teplin Et. Al. at Northwestern University Illinois in 2005 found that people with severe mental illnesses are at least 11 times more likely to be the victims of violent crime. This is not a reason to be paranoid. It is a reason to be wary about to whom you disclose your personal matters.
Don’t be paranoid, but always be sensible.
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thanks for a comment good idea,
Which is something you can do something about, at least to some extent. Based on 22 years’ experience, I’d suggest letting go of telling others and focusing on your own recovery.
- Get a copy of these books, read them and have your family read them, as well. (Torrey can be a bit totalistic and unwilling to see exceptions to his “rules” at times, but most of his book is really worth the effort to plough through.)
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Schizophrenia-6th-Edition-Family/dp/0062268856
http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Family-Guide-Schizophrenia/dp/1593851804/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=schizophren0c-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=XKLY6NWSWJSQ3VYN&creativeASIN=1593851804 - Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
http://doctor.webmd.com/find-a-doctor/specialty/psychiatry and https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/
. - Work with that “psychiatrist” (or “p-doc”) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking.
. - Psychotherapies for that currently include…
DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
MBSR – Welcome to the Mindful Living Blog
MBCT - Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: theory and practice - PubMed
ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
Vipassana – Samatha-vipassana - Wikipedia
. - the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia
. - or standard CBTs, like…
REBT – Rational emotive behavior therapy - Wikipedia
Schematherapy – Schema therapy - Wikipedia
Learned Optimism – Learned optimism - Wikipedia
Standard CBT – Psychotherapy | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness & scroll down
. - Get two or more of those “down,” and one can use the skills therefrom in this way to combat delusional thinking and emotional reactivity very quickly: 10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
. - If you/she/he needs a professional intervention to get through treatment resistance, I would use those search tools in item 2 above. Look for clinics that include intervention and treatment resistance services.
. - If you or your sz patient suddenly becomes manic: What to do when your depressed patient develops mania | MDedge Psychiatry?
. - Look into the RAISE Project at Google.
. - Look for mental illness clubhouses in your area (which can be hugely helpful… but may also pose risks). Dig through the many articles at Google to locate and investigate them.
Same with me! I got laughed out of a disability evaluators office once for acting too normal. I cried, lol, right there, the first time in a while that I couldn’t act my way out of a social situation. If people could read my mind (and they cannot, I know this now…unless I’m like in an MRI machine…) they’d be pretty convinced I’m sz. I just got tired of stigma from strangers and random disbelief from friends/family.
Now I play normal. I’m careful with physical appearance, the duration of eye contact, and my mannerisms.Nobody knows outside my professional mental health contacts…and I went to university and socialized for both my undergrad and grad degrees…hehehe everybody at school had no idea. I felt like a double agent lol just kidding!
This forum is the only outlet I get for my sz thoughts and emotions.
Thanks @SzAdmin for letting us have this space to be free to vent our thoughts
A flower to you: 
Everyone prefers if I act normal, which is incredibly hard for me to do. My in laws make comments all the time, “you were so normal for a while, what happened?” That hurts.
I don’t think it’s possible for someone to understand or even begin to imagine what schizophrenia is like, who doesn’t have it. Our brains just work in such an alien way, compared to peoples’ without the disease.
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I dont tell anyone i have schizophrenia. Im deeply ashamed of it. I keep it secret. Only my immediate family knows