Was your schizophrenia caused by drugs?

If it was, how much of a idiot do you feel like? Mine was caused by drugs and I was living a spectacular life before I did drugs. Now I’m some damn loser who has no friends and sits around the house and smokes all day. I ruined my life and don’t have any insight at all of reality. I feel like a complete idiot for the mistakes I made.

Hey man your not alone. My first diagnosis was stimulant psychosis I was spamming energy drinks and 5 hour energy shots and smoking marijuana constantly. I took some acid last may which kind of finalized the whole psychosis thing. I’ve been clean for months and the symptoms just dont let up. I just switched to ecigs but I feel ya. I didn’t do anything but smoke cigs for about 8 months. Finally started working again. Live and learn drugs are bad mmmkay. I didn’t even really take all that much just dabbled in hallucinogens on a very infrequent basis and it turned my life into hell for a while. Things are better now. It feels good to be clean I’ve got nothing to hide. I have smoked weed once a week but that just makes things worse so im cutting that out too. I know what your saying feeling like an idiot I was pretty down on myself for a while too. Just clean up your act and try to be positive things will get better.

I did not use drugs prior to getting my diagnosis. I believe my schizophrenia was caused by enormous stress.

Mine was TRIGGERED by Drugs, specifically LSD and marijuana. But from reading many articles online about schizophrenia and what causes it I always believed that I would have become schizophrenic whether I ever used drugs or not. In other words, I believe the propensity to get schizophrenia was always there, the drugs just made it happen sooner and more suddenly. Looking back, The slow insidious decline began when I was in high school, the bad trips on LSD just shoved me over the edge when I was 19. I think the jury is still out according to researchers whether drugs alone can cause schizophrenia. I’m not too sure about that. Your life is not over, you’ve got a long way to go, you’ve just got to find something you can do. Like maybe a day program with other disabled people. Or a support group. You made mistakes.Your mistakes don’t have to run the rest of your life. Plenty of people have made mistakes with drugs besides us. They move on and do what they can do. My case of paranoid schizophrenia was severe but I’ve had some good times and I plan on having more.

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No prior drug use before my Dx.

I used to think that it was highly likely that an experimental medication that I had ordered via the Internet is what caused my delusions, hallucinatory phenomena, and ideas of reference. As far as I was able to remember, I took the experimental medication shortly before the onset of my “positive” psychotic symptoms, and so, it made some sense that given the timing of things and the cognitive impairment I experienced right after taking the medication that the experimental medication might have caused my psychosis. Since then, two things have happened that have led me to question the likelihood that the experimental medication that I took caused my psychosis: 1) I read through some old e-mails of mine and found out that I took the experimental medication a month before the onset of my psychosis, instead of a few days before the onset of my psychotic symptoms like I had thought, and 2) I’ve been found to have an insufficient level of vitamin D.

Now, the vitamin D insufficiency might seem to be beside the point of my psychosis, and I’ll admit that there’s a possibility that it is, but the more I learn about vitamin D and mental illness, the more likely I think it is that is plays some role in the development of at least some cases of mental illness. Why do I think this? For one thing, several studies now have found lower vitamin D blood levels in patients with schizophrenia than in controls. Another thing is that some of the epidemiological factors associated with schizophrenia, such as its tendency to occur disproportionately in those living in urban areas and its tendency to occur disproportionately in those born in the winter and spring, might be explained by low vitamin D. Finally, a lot of the biomarkers that have been found to be associated with schizophrenia are biological abnormalities that also tend to come up when vitamin D is deficient. It’s even my understanding that an animal study found the same enlargements in brain ventricles in animals depleted of vitamin D that tend to occur in individuals with schizophrenia. Now, as far as I know, a cause-and-effect relationship between low vitamin D and schizophrenia hasn’t been established, but I do think that there are several lines of evidence that at least implicate low levels of the vitamin in schizophrenia. Knowing this and knowing that I have an insufficiency of vitamin D, I at least have another factor to look at in the development of my psychotic disorder that has nothing to do with the experimental medication that I previously thought caused my psychosis.

So, my bottom line is this: I once thought that it was highly likely that my psychosis was caused by a drug, but I now think that the possibility of this is less likely. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that drugs might play a role in the development of schizophrenia, and I’m definitely not saying that I know for sure that you’re wrong, but I also wouldn’t assume that just because your drug use preceded the onset of your symptoms of schizophrenia that it’s 100-percent clear that the drugs caused the disorder.

shadow

Got high of anything i could get my hands on for 7 years strait.

Overdosed a couple of times. sinced all this started i have been completly clean for a year…so in a way sz could have saved my life.

yes drugs and drink burnt me out and lead me on the path to develop psychosis

Schizophrenia is never caused by drugs - One is born with the predisposed SZ genes and the drugs sometimes will trigger or trip one into full SZ mode. My SZ/SZA was triggered by a powerful strain of mescaline, I suspect it could have been LSD, I was too drunk to fully understand my environment. I smoked enough weed that year - so this also contributed to my predicament

Nah, they were always there, as far back as i can remember, walking the hallways at night sometimes, coming into the room where i could feel them come in, they even told me i was a schizophrenic in third grade looooonnnngggggg before anything happened.

Yeah, that happened, i was on the playground and smelled something and they told me that “schizophrenics smell things that aren’t there you know”, hinting that i was one of course.

Gotta watch the drugs people, they are smart, they will trick you into thinking things happened a certain way sometimes, drugs make us look like a filet mignon to them.

They do it all the time, people never know the difference either it seems.

Consider the case Syd Barrett. I don’t think often that drug cause sz, but I don’t think it can be ruled out. It is impossible to say if LSD taken in large doses can damage the brain to point in which there are feelings of flashbacks. Usually the person can get off drugs and recover, but sometimes I think damage occurs to the brain.

drugs can cause a chemical imbalance in the brain

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