Sometimes, well not sometimes but a lot of the time I wonder if I really have schizophrenia. I only had one psychotic break which may have been due to smoking a lot of weed which led me to having psychosis for months from 2022-2023 until I got hospitalised in June of 2023. I stayed in the hospital for three months and I felt awful there. The doctor I saw said that he “Thought” I had schizophrenia one time, and then confirmed it to me in the next appointment. I think back on that initial thought he had sometimes and wonder if he was sure it really was schizophrenia. He kept asking me if I heard voices from time to time which I did but it was during the last month of my psychosis.
Prior to that, I was communicating with an entity that was conveying messages to me by possessing my body and pointing my head to different objects in the room, kind of like a ghost sending messages from the beyond, this went on for months. The voices came in the last month before I was hospitalised.
After I came out of the hospital, I was put on paliperiodone (invega) injections, because they were afraid I wouldn’t take my meds. But I complied. Later I wanted I switched to aripiprazole tablets and when that happened, my care co-ordinator at the time remarked that because I didn’t have any relapse in symptoms from the med change, it showed that the conditions of my illness aren’t as bad as it was before when I got really sick.
So I’m kind of tempted to speak to my doctor about taking off the meds