#pseriouslymentallyill

[troubledpastels]

Long ish update for the last 6 months

It's now 5-6 months since I started on clozapine and I'm not kidding when I say it saved my life. I'm able to socialise and get out from my flat and do more normal stuff. My psychosis is gone, I stil have some symptoms but not in the slightest as it used to be. I have a relationship with my dad, which my psychosis absolutely ruined by making me belive he was a spy sent from the cops. We are able to laugh about it now but it still hurts a bit. I mourned my dad who I thought was dead for over a year. Its bittersweet that I now know what's real but it hurts when I think about how much time I have wasted being scared and angry and just lost in my own world. I also got my permanent disability, so I don't have to stress over money. I'm also trying a new type of therapy that works really well on psychosis/schizophrenia patients, I'm a bit nervous but it'll hopefully work well.

If you told me 8 months ago how I've been doing since my med change I would not have believed it. It hurts to think about how scared and lost/disconnected I was from the real world. Schizophrenia almost made me end my life. I'm so extremely thankful for the people around me in my team who believed in me and sat with me while I ranted about my delusions and more.

I'm not saying everything magically changed just because of the clozapine, I worked a lot and still do to fight my symptoms. But the medication made it so much easier.

I still get to live in my home with 24/7 staff and both them and my therapy team agrees that I can stay as long as I need, which is a relief.

I know it's not rainbow and roses and I'll probably struggle with this illness for years to come, but right now I'm able to deal with it and enjoy life again

[ghostlyschizophrenic]

Why being forced to hide psychotic symptoms is detrimental to recovery:

Hi! it’s your friendly neighborhood schizoaffective and i have a story to tell, a story that’s backed by research.

my psychotic symptoms were early onset. my earliest memory of psychotic symptoms was 6 years old, when my parents were changing the locks on the house and i had an intense belief that changing them would mean someone had broken into our house and hadn’t left. i believed my toys had human emotions and felt sad if i played with another toy, so i refused to buy new toys because i was so scared of making my toys sad.

i had a very flattened emotional response (which i would later learn is a symptom of schizophrenia), and in kindergarten and first grade when we learned about emotions, i learned to fake the look of emotional response. i learned how to put a smile on my face when i felt happy and to put a frown on my face when i felt sad. when i was alone, i would practice, but some days i was too tired to do it and i kept my face in the natural way: flat. it wasn’t that i wasn’t feeling emotions, i just couldn’t express them the way people wanted me to

during my elementary school years, i made up words constantly to communicate. i couldn’t form proper sentences, something was blocked in my brain and everything felt scattered and scrambled (disorganized thoughts and speech). my teachers broke that habit in me, not by helping me learn to organize my thoughts, but by teaching me not to speak unless i knew exactly what i was trying to say.

then came middle school and i started hallucinating and my delusions got worse. but everything i had learned from teachers and tv was that hallucinations are scary to people, and i didn’t want to be scary. i would be laughed at if i told anyone about my strong beliefs (delusions) so i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t tell anyone that i believed that the characters in my tv show were real and the government was hiding their existence and if they knew that i knew they’re real, they’d put me on a watch list. i didn’t tell anyone i was hearing sounds that came straight out of a horror movie. i hid that.

i hid it so well that i avoided treatment. i had an acute psychotic episode, and all i said was that i was having panic attacks. i didn’t tell anyone about the delusion that school was going to literally kill me, or that i heard blood curdling screams in the hallways and when i was trying to sleep at night. i avoided early intervention.

for other reasons that i won’t get into, i was put on seroquel as a mood stabilizer, but as many of you know, it’s also an antipsychotic. this was the first time in my life i felt some kind of relief from my symptoms. i didn’t connect the dots because my psychiatrist called it a mood stabilizer, not an antipsychotic, so i didn’t know why i was feeling better in those areas.

it wasn’t until 10th grade when i was taking a psychology class from a teacher i trusted that i connected the dots. by this time i knew i had psychosis. i had access to the internet and i had googled what was wrong with me, but it wasn’t until a class where he emphasized getting help that i thought ok, now i should bring it up.

by this point, i had had 2 more acute psychotic episodes that kept me out of school, but because i was taught to hide everything, i still didn’t tell anyone the real reason why i couldn’t function. “paralyzing panic attacks” became code for “whatever the real reason is that’s keeping him out of school”. but my teacher made me think i needed help, especially because we were learning about schizophrenia in class and i had a sneaking suspicion that i, someone with a family history of schizophrenia, had it.

i brought it up to my doctors and i was started on antipsychotics, this time with the official name of antipsychotics. but it was a bit too late. my psychiatrist told me that if we had caught it earlier, i may have reacted to treatment better.

i’ve been in treatment for years and the longest i’ve gone without an acute psychotic episode is 5 months. i’ve done my research and in patients with psychosis, the first few months after psychotic symptoms are present are vital to the treatment and recovery of the patient.

it’s not just, oh you won’t suffer as long, it’s literally you will have a better chance at recovery. if you catch psychosis in the prodromal stage, it can greatly reduce the chances of another psychotic episode happening.

by being taught to hide my illness from a young age, i lost the chance at having an easier recovery. yes i learned to confine myself to societal expectations and appear “normal”, but i caused myself more pain in the long run.

early intervention is key to an easier recovery, and i’m going to leave a few links to show you what i mean.

ted talk about early psychotic intervention

psychosis prodromal phase

talking with a psychiatrist about early psychosis intervention

early intervention of psychosis

benefits of early intervention

[enby-onceler]

i seriously hate when nonpsychotics use the phrase "voices in my head" like those are called thoughts. what you're doing is thinking. shut up.

[cinnamonsticktea]

Non-psychotic people make paranoia and delusions out to be a joke so often that I cant talk about my own because it causes paranoia and delusions 😐 Like how do I know you arent gonna turn around and laugh at me with your friends? "Oh I know this crazy person who believes ----". Its so damaging. I refuse to get help because of it. I cant stand the thought of telling someone something so personal and harmful and they are just waiting to get home and laugh about it like its some silly work story.

If you do this then fuck you. Our suffering isn't your comedy act.

[electricbrain]

I have such an intense fear of lapsing back into psychosis that I'll probably freak myself out and lapse back into psychosis. Anyone else caught in this loop?

[evilpsychiatry]

I’ve been on-and-off reading The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk and I thought I’d list some of my favourite quotes (so far)!

“We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”

“We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination.”

“After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t.”

“The foreword to the landmark 1980 DSM-III was appropriately modest and acknowledged that this diagnostic system was imprecise—so imprecise that it never should be used for forensic or insurance purposes. As we will see, that modesty was tragically short-lived.”

“One study, based on Medicaid data in thirteen states, found that 12.4 percent of children in foster care received antipsychotics, compared with 1.4 percent of Medicaid-eligible children in general”

“If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.”

[rec-flies-away]

[redrum-district]

My brain when the psychosis starts to hit:

[faggotjoke]

Me, after taking 15g of melatonin and staying wide awake staring at the ceiling: oh so I'm MANIC manic

[psychotic-psypport]

Hey!

Your goals should be to live Happy, Healthy, and Harmless. Everything else is optional!

Don't let anyone make you feel like you have to be "normal" or drastically different on a core level.

As long as you are functioning, content, and not hurting anyone, you don't have to do or be anything else.

Whatever it is you do that neurotypical people have decided is bad simply because it is different, do it anyways. Be you. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that.

[troubledpastels]

So I'm getting a new therapist, as the one I have now doesn't feel he's capable of dealing with my schizophrenia. It sucks because I really like him. It's going to be my 4th therapist within one and a half years. We're also discussing a more permanent disability benefit because it doesn't seem like I'll be able to work or go back to school soon. We talked a bit about the voices I'm hearing and how I should be more around people even when the voices are bad because it'll help me in the long run.

I spend most of my days thinking and it never stops. My thoughts are racing. The people around me say that most of my experiences are due to my psychosis. I don't feel psychotic? How can I have an illness when I don't feel ill?

[holyholyholey]

Something I think we forget when it comes to schizophrenia and psychosis positivity is just how amazing people with psychosis are.  We live with extra reality that nonpsys dont have to deal with.  Us thinking we’re in a simulation, followed, dead, etc.  are extra things that nonpsys dont have to think about.  Theres a certain privilege that comes with that.  Like nonpsys don’t get questioned constantly about their experiences being real and valid, whereas us psychotics have to live with that questioning when we talk about events that’ve happened to us with anyone who knows we have psychosis.  Its a painful isolating experience, yet psychotics persist and continue living our lives.

Psychotics who can’t do school or work?  Brave, amazing, deserve more love.

Psychotics who can do school but wont be able to work?  Brave, wonderful, deserving of more care.

Psychotics who can work? Brave, take no shit, deserves more displays of affection from others.

Psychotics just living their lives, doing what they can?  Awesome.  You all deserve the world <3 <3 <3

[enby-onceler]

oh? you're my friend? then name three of my psychotic delusions

[jacquesweed]

[tretic]

Don't fucking invalidate people's experiences in an attempt to badly empathise with them.

[teethcore]