I had never heard of sz until I ended up in the hospital at 17. At the time my mother got a boyfriend and his 2 best friends who were brothers both had sz. I wish they came into my life earlier so they could of told me the dangers of drugs. Don’t really know anyone else with sz apart from the people I’ve met in the hospital and see at my depot clinic. There is an ex GP who lives round the corner from me with sz, i’ve met him in the hospital, an old indian man, was told it got him late in life by my cpn.
1 Like
I had no idea what it was until I was diagnosed with it either.
1 Like
When I heard the story about my great-grandfather as a kid. He was never diagnosed, and my family interpreted it as him being harassed by Satan (go figure). But he heard menacing voices, and he committed suicide in his late 20s as a result. Then we learned about mental illnesses in middle school health class sometime later in my childhood and I was like, “Ah.”
1 Like
I first learned about it from a medical book, when I was reading about anxiety. Ive heard the name in popular culture also, but that was more in the DID sense, wich is faulty. So Back in 91 it was. I remembered being sure I did not have that. Oh well…
1 Like
I learned about it in college psychology classes and also in searches to understand what was happening to me, they told me I had it in 2003 and that pissed me off because they told me in the hospital, like hedgehog, I never talked about everything, so they kept telling me it was all kinds of things from depression to bipolar to schizoaffective to schizophrenia, that’s why I still don’t believe them, it will always remain spiritual to me, and we artists see the world different anyway, that’s how we are built
2 Likes
I had a Grandfather who’s life story was pretty far out there… but no one said he was Sz. Things like that weren’t talked about back then.
My Uncle has it… but again, he didn’t talk about his diagnosis until I got diagnosed.
I was 17… had been in hospital for a few months… and then diagnosed… and even when I got my diagnosis… I still didn’t know what that really meant. It took a long time for me to understand the situation I was in…
As far as learning about Sz… I don’t think I did that until I was on better meds… and getting my life back on track… for long time… I didn’t believe I had Sz
1 Like
Learned about it? In my early 20’s from stuff I read on the internet after I was diagnosed. The first time it was introduced to me was when I needed someone to buy me a pack of cigarettes and my friend Adam says “I’ll ask the schizo” I knew it was derogetory as soon as I heard it. So we go up to this man with silver hair and a soft deep voice, I later knew him as Russ. He had a very strange form of schizophrenia, one where he would slip into this dissociative state in which he’d go through the motions of mimicing various sports, most of them I could figure out what sport it was, I mean there was shot put, football, tennis, discuss throw, javelin, target shooting…I tapped him on the shoulder once and said his name just to see if he was conscious of what he was doing and he was not. He’d get jarred out of it and look around like he had come out of a trance. Very strange. I could never imagine what would cause that. But then, I now know we live in a far more bizarre world than I thought I was living in back then.
1 Like
yeah practically the same, my p/doc just said she thought i was paranoid and schizophrenic, all the signs were there i was delusional so yeah i think paranoia came later but not sure,
1 Like
I was familiar with the word but I didn’t really know anything about it until it happened to me.
1 Like
I don’t remember when I first learned. I guess I can say that the idea of it made its way to my conscious thoughts around the first time I had a breakdown.
1 Like
I honestly don’t remember. I always suspected it in my father, (he had it), but when I started having symptoms at age 17, sz was the first thing I thought of.
1 Like
My aunt used to work at a mental hospital. My mom and I use to visit her there. I use to see a lot of MI patients but I never knew what was wrong with any of them. The term schizophrenia was introduced to me at a late stage of my life, shortly after my first visit to a psychiatrist. I did not know what to expect from such a diagnosis. The way I felt from psychosis at the time made me to expect the worst about the illness…but I was just so relieved to hear that there was meds to help with the symptoms…although I had zero insight at the time.
I was told I have schizophreniform in hospital. I turned to my guardian angel, Jerek, who told me to look it up on internet. So I did. No need to ask the pdoc about it.
1 Like
first time I heard of it was when my aunt was forced to retire from her factory job, she claimed it was because of her illness and her old boss said it was because her training was obsolete. Then I heard about it again in a movie I watched in high school, “a beautiful mind” then we learned about it a little bit in psychology in high school. I didn’t learn the bulk of my information on the illness until after I was diagnosed with it when I was 22.
1 Like
I took a psychology class at age 18 my freshman year and I learned about schizophrenia…a few months later and I went floridly psychotic. I never made the connection. I read “behold a pale horse” and then I started thinking my relative’s dog’s eyes had been implanted with tiny cameras with wifi. That poor dog must have thought I was scared of him, lol, I was so scared of him (would run out of room if it was just me and him, would avoid him, would stay out of relative’s tv room to avoid dog, would walk around feeling recorded by dog when interactions with dog inevitable)!
The whole time the psychology book was sitting there, all annotated for class, in my little room, all my symptoms listed. I thought my psychosis was real. I thought the dog was really a clever tool of surveillance. My mind never made the connection. True story! I lived in that state of thought/denial/obliviousness for at least 4 years after my break from reality…man…never really thought of this.
The psychotic episode went away when I moved back home with my mother and quit school for a bit, so I didn’t understand my experiences as schizophrenia until somewhere between 23-25 years old.
1 Like