My manager was telling me that she hired a woman with schizophrenia. The woman called her and told her she didn’t want to start working at my company because she doesn’t know what she’ll do to the manager because she has schizophrenia.
The manager then told me her perception of schizophrenia is it is having multiple personalities. I’ve heard this before. I said, I think it’s having hallucinations. I forgot about paranoia. No one knows, but my family, that I have schizophrenia. It’s a secret. Anyway, that was annoying.
Was diagnosed DID (multiple personality) in 1993, and sza in January 2015.
Very few people know about my DID, but I have talked about it here before.
In my case, my sexual abuse started when I was only 2. Professionals have always told me that my mind split because I did not have a developed personality, being so young. It was a primal coping mechanism, to pretend it was happening to someone else, and I never knew any different that I am abnormal.
I literally fought my diagnosis passionately, and then my mental health professionals in the hospital gave me proof after proof.
I still can’t accept it all these years later. I’ve made desperate pleas to my current pnurse to take my diagnosis away…that it’s just a delusion, not true DID…but yeah…nope.
One misconception about DID is that the stereotype is someone violent, and someone who has blatantly obvious switches between selves.
There’s a ton of sensationalized YouTube channels by people claiming to have DID. All I can say about that is that contrary to popular belief, DID is all about secrets. I don’t go around broadcasting when an alter is out…and the only violence I show is toward myself.
I’m sure my switches are obvious sometimes here, though I try not to let that happen. I’m not always in control though.
I don’t know why people get the two confused. But I can tell you, it’s possible, and profoundly unfair, to have both diagnoses.
Because the name “schizophrenia” stems from the Greek words for “splitting” (“schizo”) and “mind” (“phren”), people may mistakenly believe it has a connection to DID, which mental health experts previously called “split personality disorder.”
To add: SZ was also described in the very terms of a splitting of the personality some 100 years ago. To be fair, as it was used there ‘personality’ did not mean so much as ‘identity’ as it does now but more something like ‘psychological function’.
They think that because they never bothered to read anything about mental illnesses.
Years ago, I was on a diabetes forum and another woman asked if other diabetics felt discriminated against, on the dating scene, because of their health. She was having trouble getting a getting more than a few dates from men. I told her that I was discriminated for having schizophrenia (before I had the diabetes), back when I tried online dating.
Anyways, someone else replied to my post and he said, “Well, you can’t blame a guy for wanting to date only one woman at a time.” He though SZ was Dissociative Disorder (which is the new name for multiple personality disorder). I wrote a reply telling him to read more about the two conditions, that they weren’t the same. But some mod deleted his post, probably hoping I wouldn’t see it and be hurt by it. I complained about that too, because now that guy will continue to think SZ is DD…
Sad as it may seem, we have to do a lot of educating other people.
I really think all it would take is one super successful show starring… doesn’t even have to be a main character… a cast member with realistically portrayed schizophrenia, treated, under control. Just so it gets addressed now and then. Everyone IRL just might get all haughty and self important proudly telling each other how “schizophrenia is NOT multiple personalities!” if a show like that existed.
We’re rare, I know, but I feel like we’re underrepresented in media.
@agent101g I agree with everything you’ve said. There was a lot of light shed on Bipolar Disorder starting in the early 2000’s. Why not schizophrenia? I think schizophrenia is more rare than Bipolar Disorder though.
From my psychoanalysm
It’s the death and birth of neurons
I don’t know the progress
But your letting go of yourself
So your dreams and whises gets dumped in a cycle of the death and birth of neurons
It’s just your past self being rebirthed and their death
I don’t know why it’s like that for schizophrenics
I think it says something about id
I know what it feels like to have schizophrenia. There is a feeling/of non-mind. Its an indescribable sense of —there should be something here. I feel this sense that when I was six or seven and eight up until fourteen I did not have signs of bipolar, autism, or schizophrenia. Even when its mis-labeled, the treatment and approach/situations still seem to arrive at the same conclusion.
I was thinking so deeply about this. I was a very deep thinker as a child. Situations placed before people, conversations, life experiences, memories. Sometimes it feels random, sometimes it feels part of a rational universe/science of cosmos. It helps me to remain neutral and also to remember the past. Im thinking, like when I used to draw these cardinals and robins. I dont like to get too deep on these theories.
Nothing related to personalities, I wasnt born with a personality/schizophrenia. Or my life basically = my personality. Maybe. Its like having something there that no one sees and you have to tear away recreate or whatever and bad thoughts you cant think away is also kind of like an insane trial to be put thru—basically saying its not multiple personalities but i think it does probably affect the growth of your individuality.
