Name the one diagnosis that threw you off and made you think, “no way try again” . That’s what i actually thought when i was diagnosed with psychotic nos and borderline personality disorder. I thought that there was a mistake and i thought the same thing when diagnosed the first time with shizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. In fact i think i’ve questioned every diagnosis they’ve ever thrown at me. Is that the illnesses talking or am i sane during those few minutes and think i’m normal?
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OOOOOOhhh. SHT!! other people ACTUALLY exIST???
lol
life. a diagnosis
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SZA, threw me off. I was originally DXd major depression w/ psychotic features.
I guess its better than what I thought I have. I attributed every symptom to its own disorder. So I figured I had: bipolar, social anxiety, schizotypal, ocd, adhd, and maybe generalized anxiety disorder (apparently getting anxiety from thinking people are watching you counts as paranoia and not general anxiety.) So yea…I guess my pdoc found a single word/disorder to describe all my symptoms: SZA.
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never had a diagnosis before, was always good socially, had a lot of friends, a couple of girlfriends, just your normal teen boy…suddenly ■■■■■■■■■■■■■ BOOM! “we have decided you’re a PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC, we’re gonna “test” you, take you away from friends and familiy, put you on heavy medication and treat you like a petty criminal/idiot for the rest of your life, MUAHAHAHA!!!”
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i was shocked when diagnosed with schizophrenia, & still am from it all.
i don’t know what the reasons are for what i have experienced - i don’t know why i suffer in the ways that i do. i don’t have answers to certain questions.
It’s seems easier to just accept the diagnosis & medication - that i have a severe mental illness, however caused & whatever the exact ins & outs of it all. There is a mystery to it all - life & the condition.
Currently i keep getting a lot of anxiety & fear - i don’t know exactly why?
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It was my first diagnosis that threw me off…I questioned it and because I did that I was told it was denial, a symptom of schiz. Really made me feel like I was not being listened to. But she was wrong. I got re-diagnosed with schizoaffective later.
I know what you mean. It’s there, overpowering, and unexplainable.
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Glad to know I’m not alone. I took the meds without question. But every diagnosis feels like a strange concept.
I am always questioning my diagnoses - I do think that its natural to have questions or doubts.
According to my current pdoc, she told me that my OCD was complicating my bipolar disorder diagnosis, this was a bit of a surprise to me.
same here! I was hospitalized a month back & the hospital Pdocs said depression w/ psychosis but my primary Pdoc says it leans towards schizophrenia or bipolar, especially since the psychosis is what caused the mood problem for me. still waiting to get an official diagnosis from my Pdoc but I have to get brain scans & stuff. -___-
I’ve only done that a thousand times. Hey! It’s what the schizophreniform disorders do. I have to recognize the emotion-loaded BS, question it in light of the evidence, and move on.
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I was 20 when I was first hospitalized for psychosis. They tell me I’m schizoaffective. I’m like what the hell does that mean??? Never heard of it, and don’t know anything about mental illness other than social anxiety (which is what I told myself was what I had until the 4th hospitalization) I get hospitalized 5x more after the first. Diagnosed Bipolar once, schizophrenic once and schizoaffective 3 more times. Now that I’ve done my research though and have more clarity thanks to meds and time I can accept that once strange diagnosis.
I think they threw the word “borderline” at me when I was 10. Having read and heard about it in recent years, I don’t feel that I’m borderline at all. Borderlines are manipulative, consider themselves victims, and have an unclear sense of identity. None of those things fit me. I did have similar emotional dysregulation. Now I consider myself as having been schizotypal- everything fits except I don’t think I dress oddly, though I do not follow trends. I wear what I like.
Also, I have dismissed my first formal diagnosis of Bipolar 1 with Psychotic Features in favor of schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. (I get pretty arrogant sometimes.) (Due to the manifestation of psychotic symptoms in the absence of any mood symptoms.) I was in denial for a long time, refusing to accept that I am bipolar, but no doubt I am! I have terrible manias.
Another thing is that a b**** nurse practitioner butchered my original diagnosis to “Bipolar 1 with Psychotic Behavior”. I conned another doctor to remove the “Psychotic” altogether, to reduce stigma. Tee-hee! On paper, it stood as just Bipolar 1, so that I would be treated with more respect and given equitable treatment.
I accepted the diagnoses eventually it’s just hard sometimes to get it through my head that i’m mentally ill because i hate it so much. I despise being different.
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The whole SZ DX threw me off. Was hoping for something less … permanent. Things like Psychotic NOS aren’t so bad because they can clear up in a short time. SZ is generally lifelong. That did NOT make me happy. Turns out to have not been so bad over the long run, but what a shock to the system!
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I had been sick since I was 20 but I didn’t get a diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia until I was 38. I waited until my sixties to get a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenic on my own. Now in my seventies, I have a DX of undifferentiated SZ. I figure I now have a mild form of SZ.
At first I just started hearing voices. For a long time I thought I was reasonably sane beside that, I was holding everything to quite a high standard of evidence, and ended up discarding large chunks of what I was thinking as untrue or unlikely. So I don’t consider myself to have been delusional.
Nevertheless I was spending a lot of time thinking about things like telepathy, alien invasions, conspiracies, gods, all kinds of things which I would try to prove or disprove while I was hearing voices 12 hrs a day for three months solid. I may not have believed them fully, but I was thinking about them. And I did experience a number of very strange phenomena, like jumping out of the top of my skull and being super energised for a few days afterwards, and getting trapped in my body while it went off and did its own thing for half an hour.
So perhaps calling it psychosis rather than just hearing voices might have been justified. Dx psychosis nos, they still can’t fit me into any of the other pigeon holes.
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I am pretty confident those qualify as delusional experiences.
Perhaps. They were weird though. The jumping out of my skull was bizarre, I was sitting in my chair by the window and had a sudden realisation, I jumped up and it was like all my consciousness focussed to a point at the top of my skull. I had a short vision of a plain and a city, and wandering cloud like pairs of beings. Then suddenly I was back, but it was like I was more me than I had ever been, a hundred or a thousand times, fully incarnate, and totally suffused with energy. Everything felt effortless and blissful. It stayed like that for maybe three days. But I was fully in control, and not suffering from strange ideas.
The not being in control of my body happened when I was at home. Suddenly I noticed that I had no control over what I was doing. My body got up and walked to the hallway, put on shoes, tied shoelaces, and left the house, walking down the street and a path. Then when it approached a busy road and showed no signs of stopping for the traffic it was like I tapped myself on the shoulder and asked for control back, and suddenly I had it, standing at the side of the road and about to walk into traffic. Very odd, like being a passenger in my own body.
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