For me i was living my life but on a late night one day (1 day before my birthday) i suddenly got a burning on the forehead while looking at a picture of jesus and the door to my room shut close that same moment. i was insane for the 6 next months and only started doing better after the next 1,5 years, while still having voices.
What was your experience that made you realize that reality isnt “normal” anymore?
For me it came on so slowly…
first thinking I was getting messages from the universe… seeing patterns in events that no one else seemed to…
A little while later… I was quietly confident in my ability to predict the future. (I can’t do that… but back then I was sure I could)
Then I was developing sonic hearing… (It was the voices in my head… but I was sure at the time… I was hearing the neighbors and reading their minds)… and the ability to heal people by laying on of hands…
After that… I just got the feeling that I was always being watched and followed… since I could predict the future and had sonic hearing… It would make sense that I was being followed…
Then we had a house fire… my kid sis and I ended up in the burn unit and a lot of stuff changed for me then… My head jus sort of opened up…
then I was sure that people were trying to kidnap my younger siblings… I was sure my parents and the docs were in on “It”… what ever “IT” was…
The paranoia… the panic… the delusions… the swings from positive to negative just got bigger and bigger little by little…
I was sure I was still fine… I was the OK one… it was everyone else who had the problem… it was them… all them… and my younger siblings and I were the last normal ones around.
I was in hospital for a huge part of my 17th and 18th year. But I was still convinced… I was the normal one…
It took me a LONG time to come to grips with the fact that I was the one with the Sz not everyone else.
I feel like I live in an alternate universe…
Great question. I was smoking grass very heavily at that period in my life. When my symptoms first started, I remember being elated. Probably manic with joy. Then, a whole new dimension of thought started and I began to believe that everybody knew me, that they could read my thoughts, and that they’d been watching me for the past few years. If I turned on the radio or tv, they’d play songs or say things that had to do with me. If I read a newspaper, the stories were all about me, in code. It was grandiose thinking. I didn’t think I was Jesus Christ, but I did think that I must be some kind of special person. Although, everyone had to keep it a secret, we all had to pretend that it wasn’t happening. So people would cough (sometimes very harshly) to “signal” me to the secret. Then, the coughing turned persecutory. Everywhere I went, people would harass me by coughing. That was really terrible. I stopped going places. I didn’t visit my family at Christmas. I stopped taking phone calls. I went into total isolation. I saw doctors about it, but believed they were in on the “big secret”.
That was years ago, 1995. Bad time. Things are so much better now, and this forum has a lot to do with it. I’ve never been able to tell anyone about any of this. I never realized that other people experience these same kinds of things. Until I came here to this forum. You guys are great, a lifesaver for me.
I couldn’t say - I developed schizophrenia at an age before my memory center of my brain worked fully.
despair is what I felt
The earliest thing I recall was when I just was hitting puberty. Around that time, I started to hear the voices of people I knew and believed they were their thoughts. At this time, I thought I was gifted with something. However, I started to get neglected by my"friends" and became virtually friendless and loner-like. I got voices telling me to do things or they would kill me and my family. Most of these things were school related and my grades actually went up as a result. I did not see this as a problem even though I attempted suicide to get them to shut up and ended up moving schools.
The first time I realized this wasn’t normal was when I was talking with one of my newer and much more logical friends on the bus. I began describing the voices and some of the hallucinations/things that were going on and she informed me that this was not a common experience. I have a pattern of going batshit for about half the year and recovering the second half just to go mad again.
in high school, went to bed one night and had a vision, going thru a jungle super fast and would come out and be on a Ferris wheel going super slow, the Ferris wheel reached to the heavens and the silence was so loud, it was intolerable, close to the top could be heard God and satan arguing over my soul, never saw them, only heard them argue, then descending down down down into the jungle super fast and back on the Ferris wheel super slow and silent until the top where God and satan argued, this repeated all night and when i woke, I ran to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and thought i had lost my mind, shortly after that God started talking to me
Flashbacks to friend’s family sex abuse. Scared silly what they might do to me, they asked me in person if I wanted any and I just ignored her. Lady was from work and introducing around her sex abuser to get him someone else, scared them good and tried to use someone for anything or just keep her quiet & stalk her…Several from work had it happen at different times over the years, most moved on from here as things are just too bad with the cops & this wealthy abuse group. Plus jobs just not good enough to self support here or handle a family okay financially…Abuser comes back sometimes for vandalisms and thefts to remind you to shut your mouth if you think you can complain about this…Attorney general of state is boss to cops, covered up all the police wrong doing like ruining victims by trying to call tons of women a head case and leaving this scam run 30 years. Governor assisted and some of us still deal with the auditory hallucinations still from nervous breaks by this scam 10+ years back, early victims still attacked/beaten and used as trespassers/stalkers of new victims after 30 years, NO RESTRAINING orders scam with court has been perfected and wealthy sex abuser able to use the cops for anything they want to do to victims…
Mental care here KNOWS this scam and still breaks the victim to bits, get her fired and NEVER give her any advice that would help. VERY BLESSED if you had family somewhere else that would get you out of this location & away from this sex abuse group’s territory as they are wealthy & have HUGE territory where cops will just ignore them & even ruin victims to move then on like give repeat trespass victim repeated psych eval at own expense, victim loses jobs and housing and leaves…Cops in my suburb had 30 years deal with this group of sex abusers, NEVER gave new victims any way to keep these away from their property and now rapes are happening of some victims who are in locked-up houses. Nothing is even being investigated here, nothing runs in paper about the sex assaults and stuff just keeps happening to new people who move here…Working on moving from here myself.
Other ladies are leaving, just too bad a situation with sex harassment scams of low-paid female employees who have been screwed out of unemployment a few times by coworkers trying to get them fired to have a chance at landing a stranded lady, women leaving broke with no retirement, no house to sell, no car and only a suitcase on greyhound bus for trying to hang on when you start to see church people bullying people and screwing people. This good time to move as you may get stuck and no way to get away from it if you don’t bust your butt to move to someplace you know a few other people. Move without knowing someone and some smaller towns are even trying to make prostitutes of new ladies or ruin you and put you with druggy/wife beaters/sex abuser. Cops only help or lock you up in mental hospital to shut you up…Ladies are being ruined for taking job in country even, multiple ladies who answer that job ad got ruined & used for long time before theirs ended up in jail and she could get away.
I had an all-out fight with my father and step-mother. I had a total meltdown and raged like I was on steroids. I proceeded to run out of the house with the intention of running away. As I got a few houses down the block, I heard a voice commanding me to go back and kill them both. The voice never left, and as the next few weeks went on by, I developed 3 or 4 new voices. A month after the fight, I was in the hospital and got diagnosed. I was 12 years old.
The hallucinations snuck up on me… I thought they were hypothetical at first… I’d listen to the hypothetical thoughts I thought other people were having… it was just a reflection of my projection onto them… but the whole system developed with body language in mind…
I was making a sandwich in the shop I was working at… “listening” to this girl who was inappropriately sitting on the other closed down cold table… I wasn’t facing her, but she was watching me… twiddling away lightly swinging her feet.
The “thoughts” I was hearing hit an interesting point regarding me so I turned and looked at her… smiling automatically… She smiled… a second later hoped down the table and asked me something… I answered the question with a question or something… cause she responded “I don’t know I can’t read your mind.”
From there ■■■■ just started going haywire at work… within a couple weeks I was hearing voices alone… which became and obsessive focus… and then the SZ rollercoaster started…
They voices continued to harass and villainize me for two weeks before it really crescendo-ed into a situation which prompted a suicide attempt…
To insane to know it wasn’t real for a long time…
Doing better now… (mostly)
I’m angry. Because of my illness I can’t work or take care of my kids or drive a car. I tried to pray sz away. That doesn’t work.
insanity does not work like that! an insane person does not know they are insane. they think its real.
Yeah I thought I was coming to great insight and realization…I knew I had always been fd up, but I considered my insanity to be “progress”…took years to learn differently.
I can’t remember the exact day, but I remember that I was finally realizing that things weren’t right over a period of a few months when I had to go inpatient, then outpatient, and then inpatient again three years ago. Though I knew that there were things wrong with me before then, this point in my life made me truly realize that there was something else wrong with me other than depression and anxiety.
did you know it was sz before you had your break? undiagnosed?
I have memories of the two months were ■■■■ got out of hand. But for me stuff had been creeping up for years.
I felt fear - really intense fear.
As I started to get more into psychology after finding out that I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, I found out what schizophrenia was and I started getting freaked out because I realized that I had experienced some of the symptoms of it. Eventually the worry of having it started fading out, but I truly came to the conclusion that it’s possible that I have it when I was hospitalized.
As of now, I’m still undiagnosed because my doctors are trying to find out what it is, but they’re guessing that I could have bipolar disorder. My opinion isn’t out of fear or anything, but I personally lean more towards the possibility of having schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.
that’s very similar with how i happened to come to the conclusion to sz - my psychology class. but I haven’t been hospitalized or anything for it at all.
I need to do something before that point