What were your early signs that something was wrong

Continuing the discussion from Doing well or not?:

For me the early signs i was tipping over into mental illness were depression/(social) anxiety/marked deterioration in my ability to study

One day out of nowhere i just started having the worst anxiety imaginable. Still trying to figure out what started it, gone through that day 100000 times in my mind and cant really figure it out.

Then i realized people where trying to read my mind, and thats around the time i started hearing things.

My case is a strange one,I started to care/worry a lot about my appearance and till I got depress and psychotic,now that I grow up,I don’t worry or care as much anymore

1 Like

I was so hyper as a kid. I could never sit down for long. I was ADHD when I was a little guy. I had to take meds at school. I was out of control hyper and really couldn’t control myself when I was a little guy.

I was scared for 5 months of people reading my mind, and then the rest came along the way, the voices and other hallucinations being last

I’m sorry i dont really understand you’re question.

can you maybe reword it or something for me?

My prodrome was all about paranoia, thinking my classmates were reporting my behavior to the school administrators, auditory hallucinations at night, thinking that people in the distance were spying on me, ect. It gradually got worse until I was completely paranoid, hallucinating all day, ect. It took 6 months from the start of the prodrome until I reached the active phase.

My early signs were paranoia. I though my husband or son would stab me while sleeping. Thinking ppl at work and my shrink were afraid of me. After that the voices dropped by. Later I thought I could walk on water, had an imaginary dog, I saw colors when drawing char coal. I stopped eating. Then I ended up in hospital.

I had severe panic disorder and a lot of fears/night terrors too

earliest signs being insecue not unnderstandiing how to get on with other kids fear oof humilliation. i was firsst depressed at 12 i think.

I’ve battled depression throughout my life. It started when my older sister died when she was nine and I was seven. Then we moved to the Detroit suburbs from California, and I was severely bullied there. That just made my depression worse. I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen, because I had problems at home and at school, and was majorly depressed. My depression lifted a little bit during my early-mid twenties. Then I got in trouble with my credit cards, and I tried to commit suicide. About a year after that, I went to a therapist and a psychiatrist for help with my depression. I stayed with them for about eight years. Then I started to have delusional thinking and extreme paranoia. My psychiatrist wanted to start me on an antipsychotic, but I refused, as I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my thinking. Then I was eventually involuntarily committed to a mental hospital where they forced me to take an antipsychotic, along with anti-depressants. After being released from the hospital, I continued to take my medications. I wanted to do whatever it took for that not to happen again.

2 Likes

My early signs were paranoia that my boss had given me the company microwave just days after he was robbed at home because the microwave was “bugged” to see if I would “tip them off” that I was in on the robbery. I pleaded and begged my boss talking to the microwave about 2 years before I became full blown paranoia and was admitted to a mental ward.

I had that from an early age and still do in terms of getting on/interacting with other adults but it required additional things for me to see myself as tipping over into mental illness.

my parents visited a psychologist about me when i was about 7 or 8 because i was emotionally independent which they considered was unusual for a child so young but that was about it. at 15 i got raped 3 times and was paranoid about being attacked after that. it didn’t stop me going out or doing things but if i saw a man walking down the street i would cross to the other side of the road. i didn’t have any social anxiety at all/ was very confident in fact. i used to sing, dance, ride horses. i was an extrovert. the only times i remember being anxious was being in a room full of men or driving on the motorway but i’d already started smoking pot by then (aged 18) that made me paranoid. then when i was 24 or 25 i was paranoid about being attacked in my house, which had already happened in reality and it just sort of spiraled from there. once i got too 27 the tv started talking to me and it was like a bomb went off in my mind and i just lost all sense of reality. i thought that if i ran away from home then at least my children would b safe because whoever was hurting me wouldn’t hurt the kids. i was wrong. about 6 months after leaving hospital i started hearing voices. it started with images and beliefs and then voices. just a few voices at first and not all the time. they would b there for a few months then gone for a few months. then i heard more voices and they stayed all year round. they tended to work in pairs. then in 2007 my mind just exploded again with more voices to add to the ones i already had. then in 2009 i started earing the voice of patrick swayze who had cancer at the time and i continued to hear it after he died then i heard other dead stars over the next couple of years. obviously i don’t believe they’re really talking to me but i hear their voices anyway. i know where most of my ■■■■ comes from so it doesn’t get to me like it used to, which is good. now all it does is piss me off when i can’t sleep because of it. i don’t know of there’ll b another psychosis, if it would actually work again because i don’t buy into the voices ■■■■■■■■ anymore. the erotomania programming works to a certain extent but i don’t believe in it. it just makes me smile innapropiately. so there gonna have to get a lot tougher if they want to keep me down these days. they threaten to give me a stroke, heart attack, break my neck, push me around. sleep deprivation,u name it they threaten it but i know i come out of it ok because i’ve already seen the programming for the year 2032 when i’m 58. they threatened a stroke in the wernickes area and broccas area which controls language perception and speech. well if that happened i wouldn’t b able to understand the voices so either it happens and i fully recover or it doesn’t happen at all. if it dies happen then i’ll have predicted it and that’s attempted murder so i’m quite relaxed at the moment.

At the time I was getting sick, I didn’t realize that I was getting sick. But looking back now I see all the signs. But at the time I did not think anything was wrong with trying to drive as close as possible to ongoing traffic in my car. I didn’t think that catching buses at night to places where I didn’t even know where I was was out of the ordinary. I didn’t think that panicking at work and being EXTREMELY anxious was a sign of anything. Or acting completely out of character and hanging out by myself at night in our huge city amongst the hookers and homeless and street people. Isolating. It was just my existence back then. I almost accepted it as normal. It was my “new normal” at the time.

1 Like

That was me at age 14. Appropriate enough behavior for the situation at the time, but I regressed back to a lot younger thinking, which helped me survive my childhood, but was not considered normal when still living in that mindset after age 30. My normal all my life was considered not normal.

yeah firemonkey that was the firsdt sign for me i felt very sad at the age of 12 but tehn later i got into smoking cannabis a lot of drama happened around me including my parents ndivorce and lots of moving house and i withdrew and started thinking ther were cameras in my room i heard a voice that said shes on to us shes tuned in and it was very scary and they havent really ever stopped. also i took an acid trip on my own and thought it was going to be like hash it wasnt.

Began doing unwell in school.

Moved out west because my father kicked me into the streets after making me quit my job.

The first day i was there i looked into my brother’s old things to see where he has been, i looked at his diploma and something inside of me thought he had graduated from the school of death, that was my first symptom i think.

And the beings appearing to me in my dreams as a child was probably not a good sign as well, and the sleepwalking, i walked about turning on every light saying “they are coming. they are coming. they are coming.”

I also heard a giant walking toward me, crashing rythmic footsteps coming through the neighborhood. And in walmart shopping for halloween costumes i was surrounded by something within my mind, they were like wolves and were going to attack soon, i freaked out about it for a second but it subsided, they were sizing me up pretty good right there in the store.

■■■■ hit the fan on halloween that year, i’ve been ■■■■■■ ever since.

I was diagnosed with asperger’s as a child. I was not given proper therapy so I grew up hating myself, went to severe depression and anxiety, became mute, sleeping a lot, watching tv all day after school, as a teenager. In university I dormed alone, was to afraid to meet new people, and that’s what really broke me…

I always had social impairment even as a child as I never blended in with people well. I also had some childhood delusions saying that I would be God if I did certain things. I’m not sure which happened to me first the social impairment or delusions, but I guess they go hand in hand.