I denied having sz even though I was diagnosed when I was 19. I recall years when people would refer to “your past difficulties” and I would say something like, “It was all just immaturity, I’m done with that stuff now.” I wonder what they thought when a short time later I would be hospitalized…and It was ALWAYS a short time later as I had many hospitalizations back then. How did you explain away your SZ? Or did you believe you had it from the beginning?
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I know something was wrong with me way back when I was a little kid, but I wasn’t diagnosed with SZ until I was 17. I had 100’s of different labels.
I didn’t explain it away, I buried it by heavy drug use and drinking. So the manic wasn’t Sz… it was the amphetamines, the hallucinations weren’t SZ it was Acid, the paranoia wasn’t SZ, it was pot, the numbness wasn’t SZ, it was alcohol, and on and on and on… until the facade came crumbling down and after detoxing and rehab and hospitalization, the diagnosis came.
Then there was no option but to accept it. I’ve mentally crumbling since I was 5.
That is sad…to overcome all the substance abuse only to find a horrible diagnosis waiting there for you.
I’m very sorry but it took a lot of courage to detox and then pursue recovery.
I was in denial for nearly 10 years. Like J, I self-medicated with drugs for years. Then, one day, the money just ran out and I had no choice but to be sober.
It was only then that I started acknowledging my symptoms. It took a few more years to get an accurate diagnosis. But once I got it, and accepted it, I put all of my energy into my treatment.
And it really paid off. I only wish I would’ve been able to accept it earlier, so that I wouldn’t have hurt myself and my loved ones. But I’ve mended those hurts and moved forward with love and positivity.
Blessings,
Anthony
I was VERY stubborn. I demanded a military grade evaluation before I even considered taking the drugs they wanted me to take. I did in fact take a formal evaluation, a few meetings with an evaluator and the MMPI-2, a computer program that is 550 questions. I then felt some relief at knowing I was insane, but I was still insane for a while. I began to think that I was being watched for research purposes because I was schizophrenic but high functioning. Later, during the summer after my evaluation, i got sick of drinking to go to sleep and began medication. I slowly improved, and just lately i have entered remission.
I came up with tons of theories as to why i was being watched and who was watching me, but i realized that these people and reasons kept changing, and that was when i realized that I was just imagining it. I remember the strange feeling of realizing that it had all been a sort of nightmare (or more accurately, the same experience as a year and a half of having a bad LSD trip). I just sat and cried. I dont know if they were tears of joy at regaining sanity or sadness at realizing that I had been really sick and had needed help, but it was a peak experience of my 20 years. I felt like I had woken up.
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When i was diagnosed with sz and then sz-a i never really denied it as much as i didn’t always agree with all they attributed to me. Had claims varying from good insight to poor insight over the years i had the diagnoses. In the end after 30 years they decided to switch from the sz then sz-a dx to saying i was personality disordered. Less than 2 years before they had me down as knowing a lot about sz-a , but not having much insight as i didn’t always see things the way they wanted me to.
My excuse was that I was just copying my mother. Sometimes I think it’s a reason rather than an excuse. It is obvious to me and I’m don’t always know what to do about it.
If i have a disease of the mind then why do i get up and look at the same times on the clock over and over again, so much that it’s rediculous actually.
I began doing this during psychosis at three, it slowly became 3, 333, 111, 222, 444, 555, 616, 911, 1111. Always in sets like that on the clock, thats not a symptom of anything at all, and it started during psychosis after seeing an alien.
I swear im going to start levitating any moment, my head will begin to spin and im gonna start levitating.
Whats even stranger is that i began playing with the angles of a pentagram the other day, the numbers of the angles that is, and these sets of numbers began to come up quite often.
So, what in the hell kind of symptom is that exactly?
Not to mention being shocked once while a face made of light appeared, it had fangs and was grinning. And another time being burned on my hand and then another face appearing during that.
No wonder schizophrenics begin trying to come up with explanations desperately right?!
Im not in denial at all, to many strange things have happened over the course of this thing.
I’ve been wondering about the clock thing myself. To me, it seems like something good, like God saying hi or something. I personally like it.
I still deny that i have schzo. But i acknowledge that i have some type of mental illness. Few yrs. ago except my state provided psychiatrist, i went to see another psychiatrist who was only accepting cash (350$) he told me that he doesn’t think i have schizo. But he thinks that it can be something that we have no clue about it. I have had delusions and 4 hallucinations ( visual) before i started med and its been 8 yrs. i am taking med and never had a hallucinations wile on 2mg. Risperdal and had one delusion during that time i was drinking heavily and i was under heavy stress.
I have noticed that my personality started to change at age 10 then two years later I hit rock bottom in SZ, then I got reading psychology books despite the hopeless tries of the school’s librarian to stop me from reading them, that those books are not suitable for my age, I learned then that I had schizophrenia…three years later I had a huge improvement that I thought I got fully cured, but it was the sleeping or night rituals that I did which reduced the symptoms to almost zero, because my psychosis happens when everybody goes to sleep…lately my life was a long nightmare, it was a really a bad year so I relapced, I’m trying to do my best not to fully relapse, although the nightmare continues!
Pansdisease I know that the human body had a biological clock and I think that your brain is so good in pointing those certain periods of time to your conscious, you can do a research on that, there is an organ that specializes in such thing… Maybe in the future science will be able to figure out what is really going on in our heads…I hope so
Funny you should say 11:11 because this is the one number that keeps appearing in numerology.
You can read it here - -11:11 phenomenon
my mother said i had an over imaginative mind, yeah, like everyone in my kindergarten thought they were persecuted and could see things ! !
take care
I was like your mom. I thought my son just was high strung with an active imagination – like me. When he was six, we were walking home from the store and he thought the man walking several yards behind us was following us with ill intent. He always refused to take a bath without the dog in the bathroom. I knew he didn’t like being alone, but it wasn’t until later that I learned he felt people were watching him and that he always felt someone was going to break in. When he was three, he had a speech therapy eval and all he talked about for 45 minutes were the bats he saw everywhere. I think it has always been happening, but shoot, what parent thinks “paranoid schizophrenia??”
My older son had the imaginary friends and all. They were bee friends from outer space. I thought that was imagination too, until a couple of years ago.
i remember being that young and thinking people were following me or my family ,you seem like a very caring person , your kids are lucky to have you.
take care