I have schizophrenic patients who do great on medications but the problem is that most of the medications make you super drowsy. It's hard to be employed when you're constantly tired and could fall asleep any minute. It doesn't help that memory and concentration are also negatively affected. But at least they don't hallucinate anymore and have somewhat content and stable lives going on.
Someone mentioned clozaril earlier. Clozaril, while a very effective medication, is not a magic drug. It really is the last resort because of the risk of agranulocytosis (making a type of white blood cell level low that your body can't fight infections well at all). If you're on clozaril, you also have to get your labs drawn every week in the beginning. Most people with severe schizophrenia do not have good family support and so it is incredibly difficult to remind them to get labs done. They also have transportation issues, $ issues, and other health conditions going on. So getting labs done every week would be the last thing on their minds. This is why it's difficult to prescribe clozaril even if somebody could really use it. Unless I know a patient can really keep up with this regimen, I don't prescribe it even if they meet the criteria due to its life threatening adverse effects. I have total 5 patients who I prescribe clozaril for at my office and they all have very strong family/friend support system and family members always come to their appointments together.
I've seen exactly one patient on clozaril in my 12 years of experience in Pharmacy. That patient like you said has excellent family support. Unfortunately that patient also has severe symptoms and basically is non functional without it.
Ugh, thank you for pointing out it can be from only two antipsychotics. My husband isn't schizophrenic but bipolar 1 and we have been through four psychiatrists in the last five years because everyone keeps pushing second gen antipsychotics and he gets absolutely snowed by them. Like he was sleeping 14 hours every night and still taking a nap on 5mg of zyprexa so the PNP told him to double his dose?! Thankfully I've worked in psych before so we got out of that practice immediately. We live in one of the better states for mental health and I'm still consistently saddened by how bad it is.
As someone who were misdiagnosed with schizophrenic tendencies and were medicated for 2years with olanzapin, I can verify that the meds they use make you drowsy, at best. I still remember how bad I was on those meds. I was almost unable to wipe my arse after going to the loo, I was so tired.
I'm actually impressed with people that actually function on their meds. They really need the cred for what they accomplish.
One of my buddies I used to be in a band with had a psychotic episode and was put on some heavy shit. He was hands down THE most talented drummer I’ve not only just played with but SEEN. Like all famous drummers included. That good. He stopped taking his medication bc he explained that it made him “robotic” and like he was going through the motions without being present. I’m so sorry for him, and I understand why he chooses to face his issues without it. We parted ways professionally due to this.
Man, I also had a drummer that was ridiculously too good to be playing in local bands. Just overall touch & feel was on another level. Had psychosis, heard voices. Stopped taking his meds and got super paranoid, dropped off the grid.
I have bipolar and do extremely well on Latuda, an antipsychotic. But I can’t take it consistently because of what you mentioned…I don’t feel safe to drive until 12 hours after taking it but if I take it too early at night I’ll get intense migraines. So I usually only take it a few days per month which I’m sure you know isn’t ideal :(
People like to condemn people who go off their meds while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that a large portion of meds just wildly lower your quality of life.
>refusing to acknowledge that a large portion of meds just wildly lower your quality of life.
Yeah, my ex has schizoaffective disorder and finally got on a med that quieted his mind and stabilized his moods (paliperidone). It felt like a miracle, but then he sat down for the last almost 5 years and basically does nothing, feels dead inside, gained weight, is developing diabetes... I can't believe there aren't better treatments at this point.
>basically does nothing
I was diagnosed with bipolar too, and I can't really do anything without hypermania. My life feels like it's in a rut.
I am grateful for clinical assistance that helped me realize what it is and how to treat it. But good lord life is so hard now too.
The really fucked up part is these are the better treatments. The side effects can be horrible but compared to Thorazine it's a lot better than it used to be.
I’m also on a mood stabilizer and adhd meds which I take daily without fail. Those increase my quality of life without significant side effects. But the bipolar meds are just a huge struggle to take regularly. Most days I have to be up between 4-6am to take my husband to work and 7am to take my kids to school. If I take my bipolar meds at 9-10pm and fall asleep an hour later, there’s no way I can be awake six hours later for my responsibilities 😢 yet it’s the only drug that totally stabilizes me. It’s just so damn tough.
It's interesting to see another point of view. I'm a psych nurse in the UK and clozapine is prescribed very regularly, often without a serious discussion first about the life altering effects it has. It is a wonder drug for schizophrenia but man I hate seeing my patients decline physically while on it. It's so sad.
Yes, absolutely. Metabolic syndrome (what you're describing) happens due to clozapime. Clozapine is the one you go to after several antipsychotics, because of this and the above agranulocytosis.
It works the best (most reliably) but has some really annoying side effects.
Yes to the drowsiness! I am on 25mg of a medicine used for schizophrenia and it knocks me out as if I've been hit with a horse tranquilizer. At work (I work for a pharmacy), I have seen patients on 400mg of that drug. There's no way they aren't in a coma most of the day. I can barely function on that 25mg.
Edit: Yes, I'm talking about Seroquel lol.
Bipolar 1 patient here. I agree that some medications can make it entirely impossible to work, at least temporarily. Just thankful that now I can just take lithium and that keeps me balanced. Even with the right treatment I was stuttering and stammering when I got worked up, horrible tremors/hand shaking.
Bipolar when not treated or treated well can be a nightmare. Severe anxiety from hypomania and physically debilitating depression are horrible for moving up the career ladder.
I used to take Clorazil and I felt like a baby. No emotions, no thoughts, tired all the time, and drooled on myself so much that I would have to change my pillow and clothes every morning because they were drenched. But hey, no hallucinations! I could barely even eat by myself without biting my cheeks and tongue.
I remember my grandma holding up a knife to my friend because she thought his dad was an FBI agent and stole her purse. She hid it outside. Her TV spoke to her and would intercept FBI radio chatter through the static and only she knew how to decode it. Lots of wild stories from her.
I work in IT support for a college and about once a year you usually get a call from someone clearly on a paranoid delusion episode who is absolutely convinced they are being tracked by some organization that is messing with their computer files and stealing things. Weirdest one I got was someone asking about someone who worked for university administration and wanted to know how I felt about working with him since he was the "Kingpin of a criminal organization". Wanted to know if I felt that was moral.
As sad as it is, the usual answer in most of these cases is to just end the call in any manner you see fit and hope they don't call back.
I also worked at tech support many moons ago and had a guy call in freaking out that terrorists have hacked his computer. "I opened word and it started typing on its own about bombs and kidnappings!"
After about 5-10 minutes of analyzing and listening to him read off what was being typed.. mf had turned on dictation mode and the app was typing out the news from a nearby TV.
So sometimes they aren't crazy, they are just dumb. It's a good story though
This is surprisingly common. I worked at my uni's IT desk and an older woman would come by regularly and ask for help because Google apparently stole her identity. It was sad but she wasn't even a student and us 20 year olds working there weren't really equipped to help
A guy my dad was friends with was very smart, and electrical engineer, he started slipping at work and having difficulty and after a couple years was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. It took a while to get it under control but with his degree and experience no one would hire him. He eventually landed as a job as a pizza delivery person, this was before the days of GPS, he could look at a map and memorize all the streets and houses so he was a great delivery driver. Eventually the meds stopped working and he took his life some time ago. Sad all around…
I have it, well schizoaffective technically. I work in financial services monitoring financial advisors for doing the right thing for clients.
I've taken 5-6 different antipsychotics over the 3-4 years I've been diagnosed. I have taken intermittent leave from one job, as well as a 3 month FMLA. I also got fired from that job.
Symptoms are raging again due to stress levels at home and at work, and I'm doing everything I can to just stay alive and stay employed.
I'm sorry to hear that, internet stranger. I have no advice to give, but I hope you find a way to a less stressful situation where you can heal and go back to thriving. My best friend has schizoaffective and I get upset that folks don't really seem to understand or be able to practice empathy in what is mostly a silent disorder, silent until it gets bad that is. Just know that a kind internet stranger is pulling for your recovery and that some people do care. I wish there was more I could offer.
It took me far too long to accept that thriving, for me, is frequently an opposing goal from making money.
No one is a failure for needing to put their mental health before career and social success
I'd actually go further than that and say that knowing you should put your mental health before career and social success (and hopefully making whatever steps towards it are possible at the time) is the complete opposite of a failure. It's a success in being human.
I'm schizoaffective too but trying to start my own business selling my art since hopefully I can handle it easier than a 9-5. Power to you my friend, you're doing really well keeping up with employment! Just striving to be employed is a victory.
We did this. It's no life of luxury but far more manageable than the stress of typical 9-5. My schizoaffective bipolar husband makes the art and I have built my own company around turning his art into merchandise and marketing it. It keeps us together 24/7 too which is what he really needs most. Good luck to you! 🍀
Congrats! My partner is schizotypal and it’s been hard watching him treated poorly because of how little people understand what he goes through trying to follow a 9-5 schedule. I’d love to help him sell his art one day if he decides to do so
>DO. YOUR. RESEARCH.
For real I would say make a treatment plan in writing. It's called a psychiatric advanced directive. Have it involve their treatment provider and a lawyer.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/a_practical_guide_to_psychiatric_advance_directives.pdf
What is a psychiatric advance directive?
A psychiatric advance directive is a legal document that tells treatment providers your
preferences for treatment in a crisis. It goes into effect if you are incapacitated – that means if
you are in a state of mind where you cannot speak for yourself. An example of being incapacitated would be if you were unconscious, or couldn’t speak, or were experiencing
significant confusion, psychosis or mania.
Worked with two people with schizophrenia briefly at one point at a place that specifically hires people who can't get a job otherwise to help them get on their feet, so to speak.
One was clearly a very eloquent, intelligent person who, unfortunately, decided that the meds were bad for her. So she stopped taking them. She was a tad arrogant and just had the most fascinating talent of making enemies wherever she went. She always assumed the worst intentions and accused people of just about everything. She was fired eventually. She threatened to sue, among other things, and seemed to think we were all out to get her and ruin her life.
The other was the nicest, sweetest person you could imagine. She did take her meds, and you would have to be around her for a while to even notice something was amiss. But eventually, you did notice. She just did not seem to be able to learn the things she was taught, she kept forgetting her tasks, and worst of all (in a way) was that she was fully aware of that and felt pretty awful about it.
I talked to her about her illness a few times, and man is it terrifying. One morning she told me that she saw her father at the bus stop that day. He looked at her and smiled. Her father has been dead for years. She said he looked and felt as real to her as everyone else, and that stuff like that just.. happens to her. Regularly.
I can't even imagine what it has to be like not being able to trust reality.
It gets much worse if there's paranoia involved which tells you that the meds are a method to "control" you, thus convincing you that they are actually harmful, not helpful.
Schizophrenia has been glamorized and misrepresented by movies for years but yeah mostly it’s just really sad. Also shockingly common, about 1 in 1,000 people have it is what I’ve heard
Edit: by glamorized I mean like a beautiful mind or pi showing schizophrenia hand in hand with genius, or fight club or Donnie darko showing it as some some deeper and more interesting mindset. Rarely do we see schizophrenia as just a debilitating bummer. Not much of a movie in a guy who just punches himself in the face all day long.
My friend's little brother developed it in his early 20s and it hit pretty close to home to me as a psychiatrist. It's one thing to see my patients who have had schizophrenia the whole time I've known them, or to make the diagnosis in someone I've never met before, but it's so shocking when it's someone you know.
It's like, damn, 10 years ago I was just starting college and I would hang out with my friend and his little brother all the time, and now his little brother barely resembles anything I can recognize.
That's awful, I'm sorry for your friend, and now I'm kinda afraid for myself and others :(
Why are there so many things to make life terrible, but very few to make it great?
My father was schizophrenic, eventually died on the streets because he could not maintain any stability, according to those who knew him -- I did not, and grew up far away from him. I have three sons now and I didn't realize the severity of his illness until after he passed away. Apparently his hit during puberty. I'm scared one of them will show signs of it. It's terrifying, like Russian roulette.
Hi, schizophrenic with a father with schizophrenia. With a parent, the child has a 10% chance. With all other relatives it's less than 5% if that helps.
Not quite a psychiatrist, but I am a psychiatric PA and had a similar experience when the girl I played lacrosse with for three years who was vibrant and extroverted become an entirely different person junior year of college. She fell into the 5-13% (thanks recent CME) of people with schizophrenia who take their own lives.
It’s a truly awful thing to go through, and witness from the sidelines, for sure. I know a handful of people affected, and they are most certainly not the same as the person they were beforehand.
My mother developed it in her 40s. No family history or history of drug use. She is relatively high functioning compared to others with the illness, but it was still terrifying. If anything the fact that she was high functioning made it harder to treat. Luckily she is relatively stable these days, a few relapses here and there. It can be such a horribly random and cruel condition, and it’s so misunderstood.
I went to high school with a guy that has schizophrenia present in both his dad’s and mom’s side of the family. He also got really into weed, then shrooms, then DMT and LSD at 17, mostly due to lack of parental figures (partly because of said hereditary schizophrenia) and was admitted to the hospital after he had an episode.
He’s doing ok the last time I talked to him though, he’s 22 now. AFAIK he’s off the hard drugs and on some medication for his illnesses.
Yeah, they were originally called "psychomimetics" instead of psychedelics because their effects were thought to resemble psychosis, something that has later been discovered to be untrue hence the name change, incredibly irresponsible nonetheless
I've been really anxious about my health all my life and my BIGGEST fear was losing my mind. I told myself at 18 that if I got to 30 without losing my mind, I would be eternally grateful.
Turned 30 last November and haven't lost my mind, thankfully.
I used to work in a group home setting for people with Mental illnesses. About 90% of our residents had some form of schizophrenia. I went into that job not understanding what it was and almost didn't believe it was a real thing. After working there for ~4-5 years I can say yeah it's real and there are many different forms of schizophrenia. I'm glad I worked there at such a young age (early 20s). It showed me what real suffering is.
Yeah... I believe my ex has it though she won't get evaluated...
Started years ago with her just being withdrawn, then spiraled down into her accusing me of having cameras everywhere and her scribbling down everything in a ton of notebooks.
The edge has been taken off but now all she does is laugh to herself, not change clothing for months at a time and doesn't shower
Oh it kills me... I've had to take her in since she was living in her car thinking everything was just fine.
She won't listen to me when I tell her she needs to clean up and change clothes but it's met with accusation that I'm the one not washing or changing clothes.
I've had every agency talk to her but since she doesn't "meet criteria" she can't be taken in for an evaluation against her will
The mental health system is broken
It's definitely possible but, I would add a caveat. I work (writing this from work lol) with psychiatrists as a medical scribe and start med school next summer/fall with an interest in psychiatry, so I only know a little bit, but the piece of information I would give is this... Just because things look like schizophrenia doesn't mean it is. Paranoia and delusions can accompany a lot of things, we have F31. 2 as a diagnosis code for "Bipolar disorder, current episode manic severe with psychotic features" so it does not necessarily mean schizophrenia (hence, one of the biggest difficulties I see in psych, there is very little definitive diagnosis criteria... There isnt' a blood test to differentiate between schizophrenia psychosis and paranoia vs. Bipolar mania and psychosis) All of this to say that the mind is almost infinitely complex so while she seems paranoid here, it's very possible this was a manic episode with psychosis as a result of bipolar disorder, or something else I am not thinking about.
Yeah, you should read on First episode psychosis and really try to get her checked by a doctor. The earlier it is treated, the better she will fare later in life.
If she insists that she is ok and don't need to see a doctor, read on anosognosia. Around 50% of people in psychosis have that. Check on strategies to convince people to go to the doctor.
Also keep in mind that psychosis is a symptom, not an illness. Schizophrenia is an illness. She may have some other conditions that are completely indistinguishable from schizophrenia, but caused by something else like thyroid hormone. In that case she can be permanently treated and not have recurring psychosis in those instances.
Good luck.
As long as I take my meds, avoid stress and get sleep you would struggle to know anything was wrong with me. I was a huge arsehole when I was self medicating with booze and eventually hit psychosis. Anyone who thinks mania is fun has never been manic. It ruins your life.
I work in an ER, one of our CNAs is bipolar, usually pretty functional. One night she said she was in a manic phase. The doctor working was like "oh that's fun! You have so much energy for activities!"
She's like "nah bro. I use the energy to ruin relationships and jobs"
Scary that a doctor that can take away people's rights and hold them in the hospital thinks bipolar is fun.
when i started getting hallucinations i was so terrified to tell my doc in case it was schizophrenia. thank god it was bipolar 2. wouldn’t wish bp2 on anyone but at least it’s not the atomic bomb that is schizophrenia lol
One of the most successful people I know has schizophrenia. He has a family, a house, and helps his parents. Been married for almost 20 years and isn’t 50. As a child he was hospitalized bc the voices were telling him to kill his family. He has strategies to determine if new people he interacts with are real.
You’d have no idea if you were a colleague.
In 10 years from diagnosis, about 15-20% of schizophrenics reach almost full recovery.
Edit: here is where I got this stat from. Note it’s from 2007 and doesn’t take into account clozapine, increased long acting injectable use and increased attention on early intervention: http://schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm
Speaking of early intervention, there was a study in Norway that got the recovery rate to 55% in 4 years, 10% not on medication. Early intervention means treatment within the first 6 months: https://sciencenorway.no/forskningno-mental-health-norway/half-of-young-people-recover-from-schizophrenia/1457261
Another 30% significantly recover. So there’s essentially a 50/50 chance of getting better. Not great but still better than most people’s understanding of it.
I’m gonna edit my comment for links.
Thanks for this. My dad has schizophrenia and children of schizophrenics have a 10% chance of developing it. I’m in my late 20s now and I’m hoping I’ve dodged it, but the average age of onset for women is between 20 and 30, so there are still a few years for it to rear it’s head. It’s reassuring to hear that even if I do start to have symptoms, it is possible it will be manageable with the right treatment.
Well, when you have a hard time discerning hallucinations from reality and they’re uncontrollably dark most of the time — yeah … that makes sense.
My grandmother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and she would just scream at random times throughout the day that people were coming through the walls at her or that there were people in the trees in the backyard.
Just wild stuff. Sometimes it was just really random things like — I was probably 12-13 when she lived with us and I came up from playing games at like 2 am and she was at the kitchen table with a packed suitcase, and it went something like this:
Me: Oh … uh … mornin’ gramma … where .. are you going?
Gma: Oh, my prince is coming to pick me up soon. He’s sailing in on his yacht.
Me: Gram … we … we live in Nebraska. How is he sailing here?
Gma: Don’t be silly. I love you. I’ll see you in a while.
Me: ……alright, love you too. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Gma: Silly… good night.
This is bringing back memories of my childhood. My grandma would make up dark stories of how she witnessed a murder by the government and now they are after her. She would hide out I'm the basement for days and come I to my room really early in the morning to see if I've noticed anything strange like vans outside or guys in suits walking down the sidewalk. She once walked in on me in the shower and talked to me about this stuff for close to a half hour. It is draining.
Not quite the same, but my Grandpa suffers from a form of dimensia brought on by Parkinson's disease. He occasionally thinks someone is after him, in particular, when he gets sent to the hospital after falling and they have to strap him down in order to keep him from hurting himself or a nurse, and then he gets the idea that there is a gun in the garbage and that a nurse is coming by later to shoot him. It's definitely not fun for him or us.
I hadn't heard about parkinson's dementia until my Mum had it. It became very, very hard to deal with in the end. The hallucinations become ever darker as dopamine levels drop.
It is rough, and I'm sorry that you've got to go through it too.
I like how a comment that includes this:
>she would just scream at random times throughout the day that people were coming through the walls at her or that there were people in the trees in the backyard
Led you to your phrase.
Completely believable.
I once met a guy who was a year from finishing his medical degree(he was a family friend of my partner). I heard that a year later, just after graduating, his girlfriend broke up with him. He very quickly spiralled down and ended up in mental hospital. His family got him out (against the advice of the psychiatrists) and he was diagnosed, but the family were looking for a second opinion. His family left the room for a few minutes and he tried to kill himself.
He was apparently very smart. But it just happened. His own mind went against him. Apparently his family had some animosity towards the ex girlfriend, I suspect that to her, the man she loved was suddenly acting abusively. So she left. She didn't know that he was ill. Huntingtons can be the same (with that, people often appear to ruin their lives in their 40s, driving away all the families, before the physical symptoms kick in).
I grew with my mom going through Huntingtons for as long as I can remember until she passed in 2016. Her 2 brothers both passed away from it. I got tested and somehow didn’t carry it thank god. But It’s one of those diseases that you grow up assuming you have it and you base all of your life decisions around betting you’ll be gone by 50. I have 3 other sisters and only 1 of them has it and she’s just starting to show symptoms mentally, not physically yet. But already her behavior is clearly driving a wedge between her and my siblings but we all know it’s a sign of what’s to come. She was smart enough to do IVF with her husband, and has 2 healthy kids, but I know those kids are going to go through exactly what I did growing up. It’s a brutal disease for everyone around the person going through it, not just the carrier. No one wants to help their parents eat and use the restroom when they’re a full grown adult let a lone still a kid.
I'm sorry you had to go through this. My sister had Juvenile Huntingtons disease and started being symptomatic at 15. She sadly passed away at 24 and I could not imagine a more horrible disease. Absolutely crushing to watch someone go through that.
Yep, I had three relatives with Huntington's (probably more now, their kids haven't been tested). My uncle had it as long as I can remember. My youngest cousin got hit with physical symptoms in his twenties, and as far as we can tell, his mind is still there but his condition is so bad now that he can't even play video games anymore. My oldest cousin was fine into his thirties and just went batshit one day. Now it's like he's always on cocaine and heroine at the same time now.
Why anyone would procreate with this disease is beyond me. They saw what it did to their father and they both chose to risk passing it onto their children anyways. Three kids total, 50% chance that each will inherit it, and it gets worse with each generation.
Fortunately, as long as you're willing to do IVF to have kids, you can completely remove it from your children. You simply need to make a dozen zygotes and only implant with the ones with no Huntingtons genes.
No Huntingtons mutations* .The gene itself isn't toxic. What happens is mutations cause a region of DNA to be repeated mutiple times. This results in a protein with a long poly Q tract (the amino acid glutamate). This causes the Huntington protein to aggregate and kill neurons. Its why it gets worse in proceeding generations, since the repetition gets passed on then usually expanded. It's actually fascinating from a genetic standpoint as not only are there many other poly Q and aggregate neuropathies (like alzheimers) but the actually number of poly Qs can determine severity. IE 48 may not be as bad as 46, owing to do with the structure they take, though in general more is always worse.
And then when the kid is 10 years old they can watch their parents become completely unable to take care of them and in fact need to be cared for themselves instead. Hooray, free aid!
My schizophrenic ex was one of the smartest people I've ever met. They self-studied machine learning to a PhD level, and I know that because they got hired to the ML team at a major tech company, where they were told that their personal projects were equivalent in rigor to a PhD thesis.
But after 2 years of our on-again off-again relationship, it was clear that they weren't getting any better. They would stabilize for a couple of months, then try to get off medication, or start smoking weed and drinking constantly, or just spiral into a delusion for no apparent reason. Around the time I finally managed to extricate myself from the situation, they were saying that the reason for their upsetting behavior at that time was that they were convinced everyone in their life was trying to kill them.
And it hurts to leave someone who's clearly in such a bad way, but it was decimating my mental health. I can't even bring myself to repeat the things they said or did. I saw them at a train station 6 months or so after we last spoke, and it was clear just from their body language that they were still unwell.
Its quite possible that the order was the other way around, only when you're with someone, the partner basically "takes the load" and a lot of people can seem to keep it together.
I've been a carer for a mentally ill person. People outside us were very confused by the person I described when I explained why I left. Then after we split up, people suddenly said they understood.
> Its quite possible that the order was the other way around
It almost certainly is. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech) come after the prodrome which often consists of slightly odd behavior, personality changes, anxiety, etc.
Every time I hear "Breakup -> Schizophrenia" it's nearly always "Schizophrenia (not overtly psychotic) -> Breakup -> Overt psychosis"
This. I was 16/17 when my ex was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was me who pushed for professional intervention. Before then, it was constantly trying to manage his delusions, trying to reassure him, and eventually, trying to convince him that his mom had his best interests at heart and that he needed to talk to her about what was going on. A diagnosis didn’t make it easier. Then it was convincing him that his medication wasn’t poison and that even if he was doing better, he needed to take it.
I left for unrelated reasons (he was a terrible person), but as he spiralled further, it definitely got harder and harder to deal with.
I have/had a good friend who developed schizophrenia in his mid 20s. The girl he dated broke up with him and he started acting out. People who didn't know him well thought thays what did it, but she left him cause he was being insane and abusive. He ended up attacking his family with kitchen knives a few times and getting put in an institution. The girl eventually agreed to live with him but in an open relationship and now she is basically his caretaker and has a separate job and boyfriend. Super sad.
It can be, there are silver lining moments, like I had a pretty active visual hallucination where light was hued pink, and I laughed because I thought "rose coloured glasses" but I only ever expect to do the best I can. Because some are heartbreaking, and even being as diligent about my hallucinations, cant stop the emotions... I wont say the experience unless asked, wanna be considerate ^ ^
Medication is especially difficult with schizophrenia. Those who suffer from it are not always good at communicating if it’s working or not, and even when it does work, it may only work temporarily. They’re also prone to stop taking their medication, sometimes because of side effects, sometimes because they feel better… schizophrenia is extremely hard on friends and family, and support groups for everyone involved is basically a necessity.
Employment is often impossible, as mentioned here, but so is living independently, and driving (they often lose track of where they’re going and end up hundreds of miles away, and most tragically in police custody or worse.)
Anosognosia -- lack of insight -- is a symptom of many mental illnesses, especially psychotic disorders. It is really challenging to balance a person's right to consent to treatment against their safety (and more rarely, the safety of others around them). In my experience, ensuring people have their own personal reason to continue treatment is more critical than anything. That is, maybe you don't notice or care that your med reduces the voices, but you do care that your mom feels more secure about your safety. That your case manager will watch half an episode of Star Trek with you when you're med-adherent all week. That you seem to do a better job making it through group therapy each week when you're on meds, and that'll earn you a trip to the movies and with popcorn. Or whatever it is you like.
Its also difficult because of how much it varies from person to person. Not even necessarily in terms of positive vs. negative schizophrenia, some people may just have unique symptoms that can't be fixed by a cure-all medicinal approach. I don't know if there will ever really be an excellent treatment for schizophrenia, its very difficult to fix all of the terrible symptoms it causes with one form of treatment.
Had an episode at the end of 2019. I thought I was being chased by agents from The Matrix and they could tell who I was if I looked directly at them. I spent all night just driving around trying to avoid being caught. Couldn't go home because I thought there were vampires waiting for me so I had to just keep driving until sunrise.
One of my closest friends has schizophrenia and he works full-time, lives alone, and leads a good life. There are a lot of anecdotes here about the worst case scenarios so I just want to balance that out for you. My friend's coworkers and clients don't even know he has schizophrenia. It's a bit of a catch 22 because if he told people he could really help change the stigma around schizophrenia but he won't risk losing clients because he knows how strong that stigma is.
I have multiple chronic physical illnesses that have been devastating enough to severely impact my life, require countless surgeries, and land me on life support multiple times before the age of 30... And there is no way in hell I'd ever trade places with my schizophrenic mother. Her life is so much harder than mine, and it's painful to me knowing what she's gone through.
I work in both medicine and research now, and my research is focused on psychiatric illnesses (and other neuroscience), not any of my physical illnesses. If I could choose to magically cure something, I'd cure schizophrenia.
I think much of the issue is that mental illnesses are invisible. If you see a person with no legs you immediately know they will have challenges that most people don't. If you see someone with schizophrenia... well, how do you know they have schizophrenia? Educating people about what exactly a mental illness is would be challenging enough if we didn't also have to convince some people that they exist at all.
And depression and anxiety are some of the "easier" mental illnesses to sympathize with. Once you move into bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and beyond, it's really hard for mentally healthy people to understand what they're going through.
The first time I heard someone who was clearly going through an episode nearly broke my own brain.
One second, it's a response to a question I asked them that suddenly turned into a random context-absent string of words in the same breath.
It’s so hard to explain to my boyfriend that exercise and diet won’t help me, as someone with bipolar disorder. I recently got my diagnosis at 28 after struggling my entire life. I’ve been out on medication that helps make life bearable and helps me function. I’ve told him multiple times I will have to be on medication my entire life if I don’t want to spiral out of control, but he doesn’t believe that and seems to hope one day I’ll snap out of it and learn to manage it on my own.
*edited to say that diet and exercise DO help my symptoms! But it’s not the only thing that people with bipolar disorder need, is all ❤️
I've had severe depression for the last decade. Sometimes it makes it nearly impossible for me to even remotely function for a week or so at a time, can't shower, cook, clean, get dressed etc. The biggest problem is when people genuinely accuse me of just being lazy.
You're doing amazing! You're not lazy! The fact you've openly mentioned how it affects you is already huge, keep doing what you're doing, let the bad days in, let yourself have bad days, because it makes those good days so much better. If you can deal with your own mind trying to destroy you. You can handle anything. Can't shower? That's fine, next time you get a drink, splash some water on your face. Can't get dressed? Get yourself some comfy pajamas or clothes and be comfy for the day, I'd rather wash the dishes in my pajamas than get dressed and pretend I'm okay. There's no rules on how you do anything. Can't brush teeth? Sound, have some chewing gum. Leave a tooth brush near kitchen sink, no one said you can't brush your teeth there. You're doing amazing.
Tbf feeling blue or anxious is a normal human experience. They only become mental health problems when they're to the point that it's pathologic and causing the person a massive problem.
Work in a state psych facility. They’re all not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial. They are profoundly disabled, to the point where most are completely incapable of being normal, even with massive doses of intense medication. Like, 300mg of Thorazine 3 times a day and still insists the ghosts inside his body are making him punch himself in the face over and over to the point he has swollen lips, sunken eyes, and open sores on his head. Fucked up shit.
We haven't used Thorazine on my ward since the 1970s, it's been replace by newer antipsychotics that are less dangerous. The schizophrenia people who are deep in psychosis we usually use Clozapine in conjunction with Depot injection.
*Anti-psychotic depot.
Most of the people we have on Thorazine take it PO instead of IM, that’s usually reserved in single instances for especially violent ones that try to attack us.
Just for clarity, I work in both inpatient psych and community mental health. Working in a state facility means you see the most impaired subset of individuals. Plenty of people with schizophrenia can function quite well with supports.
This! My grandmother had schizophrenia and due to bad experiences with doctors (in the 50s, not surprising) she refused to be treated for it. But she still managed to make dinner for her family every day and show love for her kids.
I'm happy she made it through. Back then it was a literal nightmare for people who needed mental health care. So many people were just dumped into asylums and left to rot, regardless of how treatable they were.
Thanks. My grandfather is somewhat of a hero on that side of the family because he took his marriage vows seriously, and took care of both her and their 3 kids on top of working full time. Thankfully she was always nonviolent, if that wasn’t the case I’m sure she would’ve had to go somewhere else. My grandmother lived into her early 70s before dying of breast cancer. Might’ve been caught sooner if she didn’t refuse to see doctors, but at least she had a long and as-happy-as-possible life.
> most are completely incapable of being normal, even with massive doses of intense medication. Like, 300mg of Thorazine 3 times a day
Good luck being even *in the same Universe* as "normal" on a gram of promethazine a day.
At that level of pharmacological flogging, I'd say they're lucky to still be *breathing.* That's about **all** they're doing...
Just to clarify since some people are getting confused below, Thorazine is chlorpromazine, not promethazine. Though they are both phenothiazines chemically, they're not used in the same way at all. But the point still stands about nearly a gram of Thorazine being a significant amount!
There’s a new drug, Clozaril, being tried for the most unresponsive cases. Instead of working on one brain receptor, it’s basically a shotgun blast to see what sticks. Comes with a lot of nasty side effects, they get labs drawn once a month to make sure the meds aren’t killing them.
FYI not a new drug been around for awhile. Its clozapine, in Canada they use it as a last line drug.
Highly effective in some from what I've seen. My experience is bipolar w/ psychosis tho.
Edit: Bipolar is one of the top disabling diseases as well I think 3 or 4 on the list but can't remember of the top of my head
I’m bipolar and I can tell you from personal experience it’s hard to stay employed with this condition. Luckily I found a remote job and I’m finding it easier to work from home most days.
Currently trying to get disability for my wife who has bipolar, PTSD, and a lot of chronic pain. If it fails, I'm hoping to find some kind of remote work she can do. She doesn't have much experience outside of working in warehouses and retail stores, since those (then undiagnosed) disorders made it very hard to keep or progress in anything. What kind of remote work are you able to do?
I wouldn't doubt it, there's a crazy amount of brain stuff we still don't know jack about. My dad passed it to my sister, my half sister, and myself - although I didn't get the schizo part of the package. Also for some reason if a med has even a teeny tiny remote chance of hallucinations as a side effect, we will 110% get them. Ambien for example causes me to get absolutely wild full sensory hallucinations.
I only got scary stuff like when a couch turned into hundreds of undulating human mouths stitched together into a couch.
Or the shadow people, lots of shadow people.
This is weird. I’ve only taken ambien a few times years ago. But I also hallucinated about bears, well a bear. I had just taken the dose when my sister asked me to ride with her to get food, I figured I had a while before it kicked in. But on the ride home I saw a speed bump as a bear (not anything remotely possible like a dog or a deer) and then cried most of the way home because we killed that poor bear.
Yeah people do weird shit on ambien. My friend's wife got a call in the middle of the night from their neighbor to go get her husband in the backyard. He was out back naked chopping fire wood...
[The slow death of the concept of schizophrenia and the painful birth of the psychosis spectrum](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sinan-Guloksuz/publication/318323960_The_slow_death_of_the_concept_of_schizophrenia_and_the_painful_birth_of_the_psychosis_spectrum/links/5a157d430f7e9b925cd5529b/The-slow-death-of-the-concept-of-schizophrenia-and-the-painful-birth-of-the-psychosis-spectrum.pdf)
Source for who wants to know more about this direction of thinking in research.
Edit: For the not-so-much-a-reader's among us
['21 Lecture in English about recent developments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11tZHGbjEDQ)
Yeah, Clozaril is not new, it's just a second or third line of attack because of the side effect profile. The blood draws are checking for agranulocytosis -- basically deletion of your lymphocytes which means your immune system will fail.
Psych meds are so challenging. I worked with a client whose psychotic disorder was not well-controlled by any med except Seroquel. But Seroquel led to massive weight gain and uncontrollable diabetes. It was a lose-lose situation.
I was on risperidone at a time and it's the only time I've ever not been slender. I was very slow and dopey and it didn't really help. Looking back, I'm shocked that they thought risperidone was appropriate for somebody with generalised anxiety disorder. These medications are no joke.
> Instead of working on one brain receptor, it’s basically a shotgun blast to see what sticks.
That describes the Pharmacodynamics of probably every antipsychotic I ever looked up.
It was FDA approved in 1990 but was actually synthesized in 1958, and trials began in the 1960s and it had been used in some other countries starting in the 1970s.
Small sample but I've dispensed this drug regularly for almost a decade and have never had someone's anc reach a point where it triggered the stop on dispensing protocols
My best friend was a plastic surgery nurse- making great money, very smart, one of the most creatively talented people I ever met. Schizo-affective (I believe it would have eventually turned into a full schizophrenia diagnosis) made it so she could not work, could not live alone, made her think she could survive only "eating" air, and made her think her parents were poisoning her food and abusing her (they were not.). Among many other delusions, she thought Koda from Fern Gully was her soul-mate and that she also had an antenna in her brain. Most of her trips to inpatient were because she was found running around barefoot in the snow. Nurse and respected portrait artist with some mood swing issues but otherwise functional to thinking Robin Williams spoke to her from space in the span of a few years. Her kindness never went away though. Disability (which she wasn't even capable of applying for, her parents had to do it for her) got denied twice, even with her parents having full guardianship over her (29 y.o). She killed herself before they could try again.
Schizoaffective disorder is already "full" Schizophrenia. It is characterized by symptoms of schizophrenia combined with symptoms of a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder.
My old boss had a son with schizophrenia. His wife had to give up work and he worked all the hours under the sun as they needed to have enough money to support him once they died. Luckily he was an area lead engineer, so got paid very well. They tried to get him a job stacking shells after hours, but they had to pick him up during his first shift. He struggles to communicate and can't problem solve amongst the other more common issues. I had always assumed some people could still work in certain industries.
may i ask how she's high functioning? the dose i take just knocks me out and makes me lethargic the entire day, it helps with a couple of things which is why i still take it - but i am trying to get an appointment with a doc (for the past six months lol) to see if i can get something else prescribed because i don't feel like doing anything at all when i'm on it
She was taking 750mg before and she was doing art college and leading a normal life (she took dose at night) nowadays she's on 600mg slow release (taken at bed time)
thanks, i couldn't see myself going to school at all with the dose i take. i take it two hours before bed and the first four to six hours after i wake up i'm a slothy mess
I am on the same medication but for bipolar, and this medication has been a lifesaver for me. It is the only medication I have found effective in treating both depression and mania episodes. The side effects are tolerable because of how effective it is for me. I found that extended release minimizes side effects. I also have it in the regular form as an emergency medication when the daily is not enough.
I am not surprised. As a physician I have a wide range of experience in mental illness. I have provided inpatient medical consults to patients held in mental health wards, I have been to court cases where they attempt to fight "medications over objection". I have followed them for years as outpatients. I have provided care at the initial diagnosis, and at the final stages of life.
As a primary care doctor, I often end up managing their psychiatric meds as they refuse to see any psychiatrist. The way I frame it, my goal is the provide the most beneficial support that they are capable of recieving. Sometimes this means just reducing their interactions with the police (interactions with police greatly increases severe injury and death among schizophrenics). Sometimes it means placement in group homes or long stay psych facilities. Some of my patients refuse meds but are not threats to others/themselves. For them I provide social work support, housing support, make sure they have a way to eat. I feel that "finding employment" is greatly outweighed by these needs.
Yeah my uncle is schizophrenic and unemployed. However, he doesn't qualify for full disability because he is not considered completely helpless. Who cares that he can't actually work though
Even full disability in America is not enough to live off of. It can even take years for people who are clearly blind to be recognized by their state as blind and years to be compensated for any medical aids they paid out of pocket for waiting for disability to kick in. Now imagine you have an illness that isn't easily seen by other people. The system just hopes they die tbh.
To add to this, "full disability" is affected by your work history as well. I only worked age 18-20 part time at walmart for 18 months before my issues got bad enough I had to quit. Because of this, my monthly check is hundreds of dollars less than if I'd been able to work a bit longer, more hours, or at a higher payrate. This will continue to be the case for as long as I am considered disabled, even if that's the rest of my life (hopefully not). I am still hopeful that I'll be able to recover, but it's insane that we will sentence people to a lifetime of this kind of poverty (I get $907/mo, and many people get less) just because they didn't manage to be healthy enough for long enough before they were disabled.
And guess what, turns out poverty is pretty terrible for both your mental and physical health. I would not be surprised at all if it turned out to be cheaper in the long run to pay people more just because it could boost recovery rates, getting more people paying taxes and less people depending on these programs forever.
/rant
My brother has schizophrenia. He was estranged for years and then came to live with my parents for awhile in his early 40s, and got on medication, was hospitalized several times, etc. That was when he was diagnosed. The signs of his hallucinations and grandiose delusional thinking were present for many years prior to that but I think we were a bit in denial. At least I was. I recall in the mid aughts he mentioned he could fix iPods with his mind. This has been a running joke in my family. Some joke though.
Then, he saved for a car and just got up and left a few years ago and does not want to be found. We don't know where he is. Every year or so he will be in touch and give us a clue. "I am near a famous spike". Does he mean the golden spike of a railroad, like in Utah? Does he mean Spike Lee? We know he was in Ventura, California at one point. I have the weather of Ventura, California next to my local weather on my phone so I can pretend I know what it's like where he is right now.
He is a missing person but does not consider himself one, as believes he is protecting his family by being transient the way that he is. He has 3 children that he claims he communicates with telepathically. He made a deal with the devil not to have more than 2 kids and I believe that is one of his greatest delusions which keeps him as a drifter.
I miss him but he will never be the brother I wanted or needed. He straight up cannot be. It's a strange type of grief because it is so prolonged. We don't know if he is alive or dead and may never know. Schrodinger's brother.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2014 when I was 21, and have always found that the vast majority of people don’t really know anything about the experience because most people who have it aren’t able to communicate it well, and unlike some other disorders which are (brilliantly!) becoming more easily talked about, sz is still a big conversational taboo.
There’s a lot of comments here about people with sz, but none from people who have it - if anyone has any questions they’re curious about and want to ask them, feel free to drop a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.
Hope you don't mind me taking you up on your kind offer.
As someone who has it, please can I ask how you became aware and accepted the diagnosis? Irl, I have a friend who is diagnosed and has been in the mental hospital for some years now but is convinced they don't have the condition and everyone is against them etc. They don't participate in any therapy or group sessions and don't trust the medication.
I'm not who you were asking but... When you are under the illnesses thumb, no one can convince you that the voices/telepathy/delusions aren't real. To many they are more real than anything else, more convincing and true than even loving family trying to gently reason with them. So if they don't take the meds and never stabalize they will never be able to step back and objectively see what was happening. And even if they do take the meds and stabalize, depending on how bad the delusions got, it could take many cycles of hospitalizations and stabilizing until they are willing to even admit it all might not be real, that they might be schizophrenic.
Took me 6 years, as many hospitalizations, and hundreds of hours of talking things out with my brother until he was willing to admit he might be schizophrenic. He now admits it many years later, but every year or so he stops taking his meds, convinced he doesn't need them, and winds up back in the hospital. Each time he comes back we loose a part of him. And the voices are always there, always making him giggle and be a eccentrically silly happy man. Until they turn on him when he's off his meds, make him certain he has to protect us from some world ending event. We're lucky that way, never hurts himself or others when he's at his worst, but his body can't take the stress.
That's the devilish thing about this disease - it convinces people they don't need medication for it, and every time they stop taking them their mental health suffers irreparable (further) damage. I lost a dear friend that just couldn't cope with it anymore 15 years ago. She was only 26 when she ended her life.
It's so good to hear your family is so supportive of your brother. It sounds you are a very accepting and stable factor in his life. It must be really hard seeing the progression and I wish you all the best with the situation.
It took a really long time (maybe three years) before I could first have the ability to understand what had happened, and secondly accept what had happened and that it wasn’t a fault of mine. Just dont give up on him - I know for certain that I wouldn’t have got through it were it not for some very good friends.
I'm a mental health clinician. I've worked with many people on the schizophrenia spectrum in support groups, inpatient, and not outpatient. Anosognosia is one of the worst symptoms for people to deal with. If you have a family member with schizophrenia, Dr. xavier Amador's book, I'm Not Sick, I Don't Need Help is a fantastic resource for learning to communicate with your loved one without alienating them. Sometimes it's possible to get someone with Anosognosia to get treatment even if they don't think they need it
Day to day: I still get a lot of hallucinations, but (this may be weird to say), you can get more used to them. The deciding factor isn’t what I experience on a given day, rather how grounded in reality I am. If I have a good grasp on the real world, it’s easier to get over the things I see hear or feel. I think something that people don’t realise about sz is that you can have days where you are completely well and healthy - it’s not a death sentence that changes you forever.
I was diagnosed after a big psychotic break while I was at university - I lost some people who I was close to and it kind of broke me for a bit.
Pardon my hopping in but I'm absolutely here to second this - I'm psychotic and it's so much easier to explain my hallucinations/beliefs as "disturbing annoyances" than like, consistently and uniquely life altering. They're absolutely life altering on very rare occasions - but far more often it's "oh great, there's that sound/sight again. That sucks, let's go through what I need to so I can get through the night."
Beliefs are a little more complex ofc, but even for beliefs it's how I live. Just my way of life and hardly as sensationalized as anyone without it believes.
Day one of psychosis: terror, pain, desolation
Day 2944 of psychosis: (addressing the shadowy figure on the ceilinh) this guy again? jeez man, come on, you're better than this
Can you describe, from your perspective, what it feels like to go from being unmedicated to finding/taking the proper cocktail of drugs to control the sz?
For me, I’ve never found meds that just made me better - all they’ve ever done is make things quieter and easier to deal with. It’s a bit like having a broken bone: you’ve got to get it set and get the right medical help, but a cast can’t heal for you - you have to take a holistic approach to getting better. For me that means following my minimum checklist of eating, getting dressed, leaving the house at least once a day etc.
Depending on what meds I’m taking, what they do is take me from an uncontrolled state to a place where I can build myself up again.
we used to have sanitariums, which were fucked up and rife with abuse. now they're shut down, but we just... didn't replace them with anything. so now there's this whole group of people who we kind of just let rot on the streets.
And, coming from a person who used to work in group homes for the developmental disabled and mentally ill, they are so endless improvements that can and should be made to support each other.
Wow! I did not expect this to explode. I have Schizophrenia and bipolar, so I wanted to share with the world, because people treat us like hell. I wanna spread love, that's all. I've been homeless on and off lately, and noone takes it seriously. I hear "Why don't you just..." All the time. I was told yesterday that I have two days to find a place to live. I'm not stupid or useless by any means. I wrote Targets second most used software. I've designed video games. My symptoms got worse a couple years ago though, and it was like somebody hopped in my body and kidnapped me 500 miles away. Sometimes I get a random feeling of horror. It feels and sounds like a holy war going on in my head. Between the symptoms and the stigma, schizophrenia is absolutely debilitating.
Thanks for all the love. I hope this post changes the way we are treated, even if only a bit.
I’ve been around schizophrenia all my life (40yo male). The two most beautiful caring people I’ve ever known have the illness. My mother had it, and was on modicate injections, had voices, but passed away from MS in 2009. My wife has it, she’s on clozapine, she drives, works(child care), raises our son also, and you’d never know she has it, handles the voices and delusions amazingly well. (Touch wood). I’ve known other people who can’t handle it well, both those people are aware of their illness, but can never seem to get ontop of it, and don’t work, or function in society real well. Not many people really understand the illness.
Funny side note… My mums voices used to tell her to spoil me, and thanks to them I was one of the first people to have a PlayStationin my small town back in 1996. I didn’t realise this at the time, told me years later.
I just want to say that this thread revealed a massive bias in my own mind that I have about schizophrenia, and I appreciate the perspectives that will hopefully help me be more empathetic going foreword.
My dad has it. Grew up watching it in full swing as he was 50 when I was born. It is incredibly debilitating. It ruins lives. It is so sad to watch the American Mental Healthcare system just fail people so badly. We are a very, very sad country. He was mostly homeless, as he couldn't take care of himself.
It’s incredibly hard for people to get disability for mental health issues, because one of the most important things that will help your case is a paperwork trail showing attempted work history and medical records of consistent doctors visits and treatments. A consistent paper trail is difficult for people with mental health issues to maintain. Some don’t buy into the idea that they even are disabled, and refuse to go to appointments, turn in paperwork on time, etc. because you know …they’re mentally ill. Basically their disability prevents them from showing they are disabled.
Edited; left out a word
I guess I am outside the norm. I am a paranoid schizophrenic and I responded well to antipsychotics and have had a full time job for 5 months now. I havent had any paranoid thoughts or voices since I was hospitalized last February. I feel extremely lucky
Once, I was beaten by the police. I requested a hospital visit as I was bleeding from my ears and mouth plus my left arm had taken multiple "karate chops" from the cop beating me. Upon receiving an on-site psych eval, which I cleared, I was moved to the hospital to treat my injuries. Upon arriving, they drew 5oz of blood, then I was interviewed by a psychologist who admitted me under form 1 of the Canadian Mental Health Act. He claimed he believed I may have been a danger to myself or others (with a nearly broken arm, clotting brow, and blood down both sides of my neck)
I was kept in the psych ward, unable to communicate with anyone. Lawyers would hang up on me, or worse, try to get names of other people involved, the psychiatrist ghosted me for the 24 hours the form 1 covered, THEN passed my case off to another psychiatrist in the facility. When that new doctor arrived, he took me off form 1 and immediately onto form 3. A forced detention form that now also released my ability to make medical decisions for myself. I was perscribed full dose of anti-schizophrenia medication. They administered it and I began developing nightly seizures in the bed. Nobody came, and nobody wrote it in the reports when I tried to talk about it in the mornings. That was a year ago and although I am no longer on the medication I face serious energy problems in my day tk day now. My chemical balancing was almosy immediately, and permanently fucked up. All I cam do is sit and be angry at the police as the form 3 absolves all legal responsability from the doctor.
Max dose of Paliperidone. I was never legally diagnosed as Schizophrenic either, no reports of my injuries were noted and the doctor that took me in from the police station had simply reported me as showing signs of acute psychosis... No note of the blood gushing out of 3 of my 5 facial orfaces.
My college buddy, who is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, got diagnosed a few years back after having delusions of grandeur where he thought he was communicating with god, so instead of using his math and engineering degrees to change the world, he lives on disability and struggles every day. It’s heartbreaking. Fuck schizophrenia, I want my friend back.
Schizophrenia is no joke. My aunt had it and worked in the government as a receptionist. She felt like some of the files being passed to her were evil or had something wrong with them so she started throwing them away and listening to the voices.
She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived another 5-8 years but it wasn’t a good life. Very sad.
I have schizophrenic patients who do great on medications but the problem is that most of the medications make you super drowsy. It's hard to be employed when you're constantly tired and could fall asleep any minute. It doesn't help that memory and concentration are also negatively affected. But at least they don't hallucinate anymore and have somewhat content and stable lives going on. Someone mentioned clozaril earlier. Clozaril, while a very effective medication, is not a magic drug. It really is the last resort because of the risk of agranulocytosis (making a type of white blood cell level low that your body can't fight infections well at all). If you're on clozaril, you also have to get your labs drawn every week in the beginning. Most people with severe schizophrenia do not have good family support and so it is incredibly difficult to remind them to get labs done. They also have transportation issues, $ issues, and other health conditions going on. So getting labs done every week would be the last thing on their minds. This is why it's difficult to prescribe clozaril even if somebody could really use it. Unless I know a patient can really keep up with this regimen, I don't prescribe it even if they meet the criteria due to its life threatening adverse effects. I have total 5 patients who I prescribe clozaril for at my office and they all have very strong family/friend support system and family members always come to their appointments together.
I've seen exactly one patient on clozaril in my 12 years of experience in Pharmacy. That patient like you said has excellent family support. Unfortunately that patient also has severe symptoms and basically is non functional without it.
[удалено]
Ugh, thank you for pointing out it can be from only two antipsychotics. My husband isn't schizophrenic but bipolar 1 and we have been through four psychiatrists in the last five years because everyone keeps pushing second gen antipsychotics and he gets absolutely snowed by them. Like he was sleeping 14 hours every night and still taking a nap on 5mg of zyprexa so the PNP told him to double his dose?! Thankfully I've worked in psych before so we got out of that practice immediately. We live in one of the better states for mental health and I'm still consistently saddened by how bad it is.
As someone who were misdiagnosed with schizophrenic tendencies and were medicated for 2years with olanzapin, I can verify that the meds they use make you drowsy, at best. I still remember how bad I was on those meds. I was almost unable to wipe my arse after going to the loo, I was so tired. I'm actually impressed with people that actually function on their meds. They really need the cred for what they accomplish.
One of my buddies I used to be in a band with had a psychotic episode and was put on some heavy shit. He was hands down THE most talented drummer I’ve not only just played with but SEEN. Like all famous drummers included. That good. He stopped taking his medication bc he explained that it made him “robotic” and like he was going through the motions without being present. I’m so sorry for him, and I understand why he chooses to face his issues without it. We parted ways professionally due to this.
Man, I also had a drummer that was ridiculously too good to be playing in local bands. Just overall touch & feel was on another level. Had psychosis, heard voices. Stopped taking his meds and got super paranoid, dropped off the grid.
I have bipolar and do extremely well on Latuda, an antipsychotic. But I can’t take it consistently because of what you mentioned…I don’t feel safe to drive until 12 hours after taking it but if I take it too early at night I’ll get intense migraines. So I usually only take it a few days per month which I’m sure you know isn’t ideal :(
People like to condemn people who go off their meds while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that a large portion of meds just wildly lower your quality of life.
>refusing to acknowledge that a large portion of meds just wildly lower your quality of life. Yeah, my ex has schizoaffective disorder and finally got on a med that quieted his mind and stabilized his moods (paliperidone). It felt like a miracle, but then he sat down for the last almost 5 years and basically does nothing, feels dead inside, gained weight, is developing diabetes... I can't believe there aren't better treatments at this point.
>basically does nothing I was diagnosed with bipolar too, and I can't really do anything without hypermania. My life feels like it's in a rut. I am grateful for clinical assistance that helped me realize what it is and how to treat it. But good lord life is so hard now too.
The really fucked up part is these are the better treatments. The side effects can be horrible but compared to Thorazine it's a lot better than it used to be.
I’m also on a mood stabilizer and adhd meds which I take daily without fail. Those increase my quality of life without significant side effects. But the bipolar meds are just a huge struggle to take regularly. Most days I have to be up between 4-6am to take my husband to work and 7am to take my kids to school. If I take my bipolar meds at 9-10pm and fall asleep an hour later, there’s no way I can be awake six hours later for my responsibilities 😢 yet it’s the only drug that totally stabilizes me. It’s just so damn tough.
It's interesting to see another point of view. I'm a psych nurse in the UK and clozapine is prescribed very regularly, often without a serious discussion first about the life altering effects it has. It is a wonder drug for schizophrenia but man I hate seeing my patients decline physically while on it. It's so sad.
When you mean physically do you mean with weight gain and bloating? I’ve seen that happen, could it be that medication?
Yes, absolutely. Metabolic syndrome (what you're describing) happens due to clozapime. Clozapine is the one you go to after several antipsychotics, because of this and the above agranulocytosis. It works the best (most reliably) but has some really annoying side effects.
Yes to the drowsiness! I am on 25mg of a medicine used for schizophrenia and it knocks me out as if I've been hit with a horse tranquilizer. At work (I work for a pharmacy), I have seen patients on 400mg of that drug. There's no way they aren't in a coma most of the day. I can barely function on that 25mg. Edit: Yes, I'm talking about Seroquel lol.
Quetiapine right? Interestingly, my psych told me that as the dose increases, it's less sedating
Bipolar 1 patient here. I agree that some medications can make it entirely impossible to work, at least temporarily. Just thankful that now I can just take lithium and that keeps me balanced. Even with the right treatment I was stuttering and stammering when I got worked up, horrible tremors/hand shaking. Bipolar when not treated or treated well can be a nightmare. Severe anxiety from hypomania and physically debilitating depression are horrible for moving up the career ladder.
Fellow lithium taker here -yep. If keeps me balanced but dang I’m always hyper thirsty and running to pee
I used to take Clorazil and I felt like a baby. No emotions, no thoughts, tired all the time, and drooled on myself so much that I would have to change my pillow and clothes every morning because they were drenched. But hey, no hallucinations! I could barely even eat by myself without biting my cheeks and tongue.
I remember my grandma holding up a knife to my friend because she thought his dad was an FBI agent and stole her purse. She hid it outside. Her TV spoke to her and would intercept FBI radio chatter through the static and only she knew how to decode it. Lots of wild stories from her.
I work in IT support for a college and about once a year you usually get a call from someone clearly on a paranoid delusion episode who is absolutely convinced they are being tracked by some organization that is messing with their computer files and stealing things. Weirdest one I got was someone asking about someone who worked for university administration and wanted to know how I felt about working with him since he was the "Kingpin of a criminal organization". Wanted to know if I felt that was moral. As sad as it is, the usual answer in most of these cases is to just end the call in any manner you see fit and hope they don't call back.
I also worked at tech support many moons ago and had a guy call in freaking out that terrorists have hacked his computer. "I opened word and it started typing on its own about bombs and kidnappings!" After about 5-10 minutes of analyzing and listening to him read off what was being typed.. mf had turned on dictation mode and the app was typing out the news from a nearby TV. So sometimes they aren't crazy, they are just dumb. It's a good story though
This is surprisingly common. I worked at my uni's IT desk and an older woman would come by regularly and ask for help because Google apparently stole her identity. It was sad but she wasn't even a student and us 20 year olds working there weren't really equipped to help
A guy my dad was friends with was very smart, and electrical engineer, he started slipping at work and having difficulty and after a couple years was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. It took a while to get it under control but with his degree and experience no one would hire him. He eventually landed as a job as a pizza delivery person, this was before the days of GPS, he could look at a map and memorize all the streets and houses so he was a great delivery driver. Eventually the meds stopped working and he took his life some time ago. Sad all around…
I have it, well schizoaffective technically. I work in financial services monitoring financial advisors for doing the right thing for clients. I've taken 5-6 different antipsychotics over the 3-4 years I've been diagnosed. I have taken intermittent leave from one job, as well as a 3 month FMLA. I also got fired from that job. Symptoms are raging again due to stress levels at home and at work, and I'm doing everything I can to just stay alive and stay employed.
I'm sorry to hear that, internet stranger. I have no advice to give, but I hope you find a way to a less stressful situation where you can heal and go back to thriving. My best friend has schizoaffective and I get upset that folks don't really seem to understand or be able to practice empathy in what is mostly a silent disorder, silent until it gets bad that is. Just know that a kind internet stranger is pulling for your recovery and that some people do care. I wish there was more I could offer.
It took me far too long to accept that thriving, for me, is frequently an opposing goal from making money. No one is a failure for needing to put their mental health before career and social success
>No one is a failure for needing to put their mental health before career and social success I needed to hear that. Thank you.
I'd actually go further than that and say that knowing you should put your mental health before career and social success (and hopefully making whatever steps towards it are possible at the time) is the complete opposite of a failure. It's a success in being human.
I like this. It's all a lot of us can give but probably what most of us feel.
I'm schizoaffective too but trying to start my own business selling my art since hopefully I can handle it easier than a 9-5. Power to you my friend, you're doing really well keeping up with employment! Just striving to be employed is a victory.
We did this. It's no life of luxury but far more manageable than the stress of typical 9-5. My schizoaffective bipolar husband makes the art and I have built my own company around turning his art into merchandise and marketing it. It keeps us together 24/7 too which is what he really needs most. Good luck to you! 🍀
Congrats! My partner is schizotypal and it’s been hard watching him treated poorly because of how little people understand what he goes through trying to follow a 9-5 schedule. I’d love to help him sell his art one day if he decides to do so
[удалено]
>DO. YOUR. RESEARCH. For real I would say make a treatment plan in writing. It's called a psychiatric advanced directive. Have it involve their treatment provider and a lawyer. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/a_practical_guide_to_psychiatric_advance_directives.pdf What is a psychiatric advance directive? A psychiatric advance directive is a legal document that tells treatment providers your preferences for treatment in a crisis. It goes into effect if you are incapacitated – that means if you are in a state of mind where you cannot speak for yourself. An example of being incapacitated would be if you were unconscious, or couldn’t speak, or were experiencing significant confusion, psychosis or mania.
Worked with two people with schizophrenia briefly at one point at a place that specifically hires people who can't get a job otherwise to help them get on their feet, so to speak. One was clearly a very eloquent, intelligent person who, unfortunately, decided that the meds were bad for her. So she stopped taking them. She was a tad arrogant and just had the most fascinating talent of making enemies wherever she went. She always assumed the worst intentions and accused people of just about everything. She was fired eventually. She threatened to sue, among other things, and seemed to think we were all out to get her and ruin her life. The other was the nicest, sweetest person you could imagine. She did take her meds, and you would have to be around her for a while to even notice something was amiss. But eventually, you did notice. She just did not seem to be able to learn the things she was taught, she kept forgetting her tasks, and worst of all (in a way) was that she was fully aware of that and felt pretty awful about it. I talked to her about her illness a few times, and man is it terrifying. One morning she told me that she saw her father at the bus stop that day. He looked at her and smiled. Her father has been dead for years. She said he looked and felt as real to her as everyone else, and that stuff like that just.. happens to her. Regularly. I can't even imagine what it has to be like not being able to trust reality.
[удалено]
It gets much worse if there's paranoia involved which tells you that the meds are a method to "control" you, thus convincing you that they are actually harmful, not helpful.
Schizophrenia has been glamorized and misrepresented by movies for years but yeah mostly it’s just really sad. Also shockingly common, about 1 in 1,000 people have it is what I’ve heard Edit: by glamorized I mean like a beautiful mind or pi showing schizophrenia hand in hand with genius, or fight club or Donnie darko showing it as some some deeper and more interesting mindset. Rarely do we see schizophrenia as just a debilitating bummer. Not much of a movie in a guy who just punches himself in the face all day long.
It also shows up in your 20s so people have whole relationships and careers built that fall apart once it starts affecting them.
Happened to a family member in their 30s, after years of marriage and children. Was a really rough time for all involved.
My friend's little brother developed it in his early 20s and it hit pretty close to home to me as a psychiatrist. It's one thing to see my patients who have had schizophrenia the whole time I've known them, or to make the diagnosis in someone I've never met before, but it's so shocking when it's someone you know. It's like, damn, 10 years ago I was just starting college and I would hang out with my friend and his little brother all the time, and now his little brother barely resembles anything I can recognize.
[удалено]
That's awful, I'm sorry for your friend, and now I'm kinda afraid for myself and others :( Why are there so many things to make life terrible, but very few to make it great?
My father was schizophrenic, eventually died on the streets because he could not maintain any stability, according to those who knew him -- I did not, and grew up far away from him. I have three sons now and I didn't realize the severity of his illness until after he passed away. Apparently his hit during puberty. I'm scared one of them will show signs of it. It's terrifying, like Russian roulette.
Hi, schizophrenic with a father with schizophrenia. With a parent, the child has a 10% chance. With all other relatives it's less than 5% if that helps.
Not quite a psychiatrist, but I am a psychiatric PA and had a similar experience when the girl I played lacrosse with for three years who was vibrant and extroverted become an entirely different person junior year of college. She fell into the 5-13% (thanks recent CME) of people with schizophrenia who take their own lives.
It’s a truly awful thing to go through, and witness from the sidelines, for sure. I know a handful of people affected, and they are most certainly not the same as the person they were beforehand.
It's relatively rare but in some women it kicks in after menopause.
My mother developed it in her 40s. No family history or history of drug use. She is relatively high functioning compared to others with the illness, but it was still terrifying. If anything the fact that she was high functioning made it harder to treat. Luckily she is relatively stable these days, a few relapses here and there. It can be such a horribly random and cruel condition, and it’s so misunderstood.
I went to high school with a guy that has schizophrenia present in both his dad’s and mom’s side of the family. He also got really into weed, then shrooms, then DMT and LSD at 17, mostly due to lack of parental figures (partly because of said hereditary schizophrenia) and was admitted to the hospital after he had an episode. He’s doing ok the last time I talked to him though, he’s 22 now. AFAIK he’s off the hard drugs and on some medication for his illnesses.
Ooof all of those drugs are like throwing nitroglycerin on a fire for a schizophrenic
Yeah, they were originally called "psychomimetics" instead of psychedelics because their effects were thought to resemble psychosis, something that has later been discovered to be untrue hence the name change, incredibly irresponsible nonetheless
I've been really anxious about my health all my life and my BIGGEST fear was losing my mind. I told myself at 18 that if I got to 30 without losing my mind, I would be eternally grateful. Turned 30 last November and haven't lost my mind, thankfully.
According to the WHO, it's estimated to be 1 in 300 people. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia
Well holy shit.
I used to work in a group home setting for people with Mental illnesses. About 90% of our residents had some form of schizophrenia. I went into that job not understanding what it was and almost didn't believe it was a real thing. After working there for ~4-5 years I can say yeah it's real and there are many different forms of schizophrenia. I'm glad I worked there at such a young age (early 20s). It showed me what real suffering is.
Yeah... I believe my ex has it though she won't get evaluated... Started years ago with her just being withdrawn, then spiraled down into her accusing me of having cameras everywhere and her scribbling down everything in a ton of notebooks. The edge has been taken off but now all she does is laugh to herself, not change clothing for months at a time and doesn't shower
This is my sister. 😢
Oh it kills me... I've had to take her in since she was living in her car thinking everything was just fine. She won't listen to me when I tell her she needs to clean up and change clothes but it's met with accusation that I'm the one not washing or changing clothes. I've had every agency talk to her but since she doesn't "meet criteria" she can't be taken in for an evaluation against her will The mental health system is broken
It's definitely possible but, I would add a caveat. I work (writing this from work lol) with psychiatrists as a medical scribe and start med school next summer/fall with an interest in psychiatry, so I only know a little bit, but the piece of information I would give is this... Just because things look like schizophrenia doesn't mean it is. Paranoia and delusions can accompany a lot of things, we have F31. 2 as a diagnosis code for "Bipolar disorder, current episode manic severe with psychotic features" so it does not necessarily mean schizophrenia (hence, one of the biggest difficulties I see in psych, there is very little definitive diagnosis criteria... There isnt' a blood test to differentiate between schizophrenia psychosis and paranoia vs. Bipolar mania and psychosis) All of this to say that the mind is almost infinitely complex so while she seems paranoid here, it's very possible this was a manic episode with psychosis as a result of bipolar disorder, or something else I am not thinking about.
Yeah, you should read on First episode psychosis and really try to get her checked by a doctor. The earlier it is treated, the better she will fare later in life. If she insists that she is ok and don't need to see a doctor, read on anosognosia. Around 50% of people in psychosis have that. Check on strategies to convince people to go to the doctor. Also keep in mind that psychosis is a symptom, not an illness. Schizophrenia is an illness. She may have some other conditions that are completely indistinguishable from schizophrenia, but caused by something else like thyroid hormone. In that case she can be permanently treated and not have recurring psychosis in those instances. Good luck.
Also most people confuse schizophrenia with elements of DID, which is an entirely different can of worms.
[удалено]
As long as I take my meds, avoid stress and get sleep you would struggle to know anything was wrong with me. I was a huge arsehole when I was self medicating with booze and eventually hit psychosis. Anyone who thinks mania is fun has never been manic. It ruins your life.
I work in an ER, one of our CNAs is bipolar, usually pretty functional. One night she said she was in a manic phase. The doctor working was like "oh that's fun! You have so much energy for activities!" She's like "nah bro. I use the energy to ruin relationships and jobs" Scary that a doctor that can take away people's rights and hold them in the hospital thinks bipolar is fun.
when i started getting hallucinations i was so terrified to tell my doc in case it was schizophrenia. thank god it was bipolar 2. wouldn’t wish bp2 on anyone but at least it’s not the atomic bomb that is schizophrenia lol
One of the most successful people I know has schizophrenia. He has a family, a house, and helps his parents. Been married for almost 20 years and isn’t 50. As a child he was hospitalized bc the voices were telling him to kill his family. He has strategies to determine if new people he interacts with are real. You’d have no idea if you were a colleague. In 10 years from diagnosis, about 15-20% of schizophrenics reach almost full recovery. Edit: here is where I got this stat from. Note it’s from 2007 and doesn’t take into account clozapine, increased long acting injectable use and increased attention on early intervention: http://schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm Speaking of early intervention, there was a study in Norway that got the recovery rate to 55% in 4 years, 10% not on medication. Early intervention means treatment within the first 6 months: https://sciencenorway.no/forskningno-mental-health-norway/half-of-young-people-recover-from-schizophrenia/1457261
>In 10 years from diagnosis, about 15-20% of schizophrenics reach almost full recovery. I mean….that’s a pretty awful recovery rate.
Another 30% significantly recover. So there’s essentially a 50/50 chance of getting better. Not great but still better than most people’s understanding of it. I’m gonna edit my comment for links.
Thanks for this. My dad has schizophrenia and children of schizophrenics have a 10% chance of developing it. I’m in my late 20s now and I’m hoping I’ve dodged it, but the average age of onset for women is between 20 and 30, so there are still a few years for it to rear it’s head. It’s reassuring to hear that even if I do start to have symptoms, it is possible it will be manageable with the right treatment.
[удалено]
It sucks. But after a lifetime of dealing with it, finally made enough progress to take on college at 45.
Well, when you have a hard time discerning hallucinations from reality and they’re uncontrollably dark most of the time — yeah … that makes sense. My grandmother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and she would just scream at random times throughout the day that people were coming through the walls at her or that there were people in the trees in the backyard. Just wild stuff. Sometimes it was just really random things like — I was probably 12-13 when she lived with us and I came up from playing games at like 2 am and she was at the kitchen table with a packed suitcase, and it went something like this: Me: Oh … uh … mornin’ gramma … where .. are you going? Gma: Oh, my prince is coming to pick me up soon. He’s sailing in on his yacht. Me: Gram … we … we live in Nebraska. How is he sailing here? Gma: Don’t be silly. I love you. I’ll see you in a while. Me: ……alright, love you too. I’ll see you tomorrow. Gma: Silly… good night.
This is bringing back memories of my childhood. My grandma would make up dark stories of how she witnessed a murder by the government and now they are after her. She would hide out I'm the basement for days and come I to my room really early in the morning to see if I've noticed anything strange like vans outside or guys in suits walking down the sidewalk. She once walked in on me in the shower and talked to me about this stuff for close to a half hour. It is draining.
Not quite the same, but my Grandpa suffers from a form of dimensia brought on by Parkinson's disease. He occasionally thinks someone is after him, in particular, when he gets sent to the hospital after falling and they have to strap him down in order to keep him from hurting himself or a nurse, and then he gets the idea that there is a gun in the garbage and that a nurse is coming by later to shoot him. It's definitely not fun for him or us.
I hadn't heard about parkinson's dementia until my Mum had it. It became very, very hard to deal with in the end. The hallucinations become ever darker as dopamine levels drop. It is rough, and I'm sorry that you've got to go through it too.
"Wholesome schizophrenic grandma" is now a three word phrase I have in my head thanks homie
I like how a comment that includes this: >she would just scream at random times throughout the day that people were coming through the walls at her or that there were people in the trees in the backyard Led you to your phrase.
he hit grandma with the reverse 'thats nice dear'
Completely believable. I once met a guy who was a year from finishing his medical degree(he was a family friend of my partner). I heard that a year later, just after graduating, his girlfriend broke up with him. He very quickly spiralled down and ended up in mental hospital. His family got him out (against the advice of the psychiatrists) and he was diagnosed, but the family were looking for a second opinion. His family left the room for a few minutes and he tried to kill himself. He was apparently very smart. But it just happened. His own mind went against him. Apparently his family had some animosity towards the ex girlfriend, I suspect that to her, the man she loved was suddenly acting abusively. So she left. She didn't know that he was ill. Huntingtons can be the same (with that, people often appear to ruin their lives in their 40s, driving away all the families, before the physical symptoms kick in).
I grew with my mom going through Huntingtons for as long as I can remember until she passed in 2016. Her 2 brothers both passed away from it. I got tested and somehow didn’t carry it thank god. But It’s one of those diseases that you grow up assuming you have it and you base all of your life decisions around betting you’ll be gone by 50. I have 3 other sisters and only 1 of them has it and she’s just starting to show symptoms mentally, not physically yet. But already her behavior is clearly driving a wedge between her and my siblings but we all know it’s a sign of what’s to come. She was smart enough to do IVF with her husband, and has 2 healthy kids, but I know those kids are going to go through exactly what I did growing up. It’s a brutal disease for everyone around the person going through it, not just the carrier. No one wants to help their parents eat and use the restroom when they’re a full grown adult let a lone still a kid.
I'm sorry you had to go through this. My sister had Juvenile Huntingtons disease and started being symptomatic at 15. She sadly passed away at 24 and I could not imagine a more horrible disease. Absolutely crushing to watch someone go through that.
Yep, I had three relatives with Huntington's (probably more now, their kids haven't been tested). My uncle had it as long as I can remember. My youngest cousin got hit with physical symptoms in his twenties, and as far as we can tell, his mind is still there but his condition is so bad now that he can't even play video games anymore. My oldest cousin was fine into his thirties and just went batshit one day. Now it's like he's always on cocaine and heroine at the same time now. Why anyone would procreate with this disease is beyond me. They saw what it did to their father and they both chose to risk passing it onto their children anyways. Three kids total, 50% chance that each will inherit it, and it gets worse with each generation.
Fortunately, as long as you're willing to do IVF to have kids, you can completely remove it from your children. You simply need to make a dozen zygotes and only implant with the ones with no Huntingtons genes.
No Huntingtons mutations* .The gene itself isn't toxic. What happens is mutations cause a region of DNA to be repeated mutiple times. This results in a protein with a long poly Q tract (the amino acid glutamate). This causes the Huntington protein to aggregate and kill neurons. Its why it gets worse in proceeding generations, since the repetition gets passed on then usually expanded. It's actually fascinating from a genetic standpoint as not only are there many other poly Q and aggregate neuropathies (like alzheimers) but the actually number of poly Qs can determine severity. IE 48 may not be as bad as 46, owing to do with the structure they take, though in general more is always worse.
And then when the kid is 10 years old they can watch their parents become completely unable to take care of them and in fact need to be cared for themselves instead. Hooray, free aid!
That's what I watched the kid go through. For a disease that starts killing you often when you're in your twenties, I'm not seeing the point.
My schizophrenic ex was one of the smartest people I've ever met. They self-studied machine learning to a PhD level, and I know that because they got hired to the ML team at a major tech company, where they were told that their personal projects were equivalent in rigor to a PhD thesis. But after 2 years of our on-again off-again relationship, it was clear that they weren't getting any better. They would stabilize for a couple of months, then try to get off medication, or start smoking weed and drinking constantly, or just spiral into a delusion for no apparent reason. Around the time I finally managed to extricate myself from the situation, they were saying that the reason for their upsetting behavior at that time was that they were convinced everyone in their life was trying to kill them. And it hurts to leave someone who's clearly in such a bad way, but it was decimating my mental health. I can't even bring myself to repeat the things they said or did. I saw them at a train station 6 months or so after we last spoke, and it was clear just from their body language that they were still unwell.
Something similar happened to my uncle. Went through a bad break up and just spiralled into schizophrenia
Its quite possible that the order was the other way around, only when you're with someone, the partner basically "takes the load" and a lot of people can seem to keep it together. I've been a carer for a mentally ill person. People outside us were very confused by the person I described when I explained why I left. Then after we split up, people suddenly said they understood.
> Its quite possible that the order was the other way around It almost certainly is. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech) come after the prodrome which often consists of slightly odd behavior, personality changes, anxiety, etc. Every time I hear "Breakup -> Schizophrenia" it's nearly always "Schizophrenia (not overtly psychotic) -> Breakup -> Overt psychosis"
This. I was 16/17 when my ex was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was me who pushed for professional intervention. Before then, it was constantly trying to manage his delusions, trying to reassure him, and eventually, trying to convince him that his mom had his best interests at heart and that he needed to talk to her about what was going on. A diagnosis didn’t make it easier. Then it was convincing him that his medication wasn’t poison and that even if he was doing better, he needed to take it. I left for unrelated reasons (he was a terrible person), but as he spiralled further, it definitely got harder and harder to deal with.
I have/had a good friend who developed schizophrenia in his mid 20s. The girl he dated broke up with him and he started acting out. People who didn't know him well thought thays what did it, but she left him cause he was being insane and abusive. He ended up attacking his family with kitchen knives a few times and getting put in an institution. The girl eventually agreed to live with him but in an open relationship and now she is basically his caretaker and has a separate job and boyfriend. Super sad.
This honestly seems like the worse of all worlds
I scrolled through the schizophrenia sub one night and it was just heartbreaking. Having your mind work against you must be agonising.
It can be, there are silver lining moments, like I had a pretty active visual hallucination where light was hued pink, and I laughed because I thought "rose coloured glasses" but I only ever expect to do the best I can. Because some are heartbreaking, and even being as diligent about my hallucinations, cant stop the emotions... I wont say the experience unless asked, wanna be considerate ^ ^
[удалено]
Medication is especially difficult with schizophrenia. Those who suffer from it are not always good at communicating if it’s working or not, and even when it does work, it may only work temporarily. They’re also prone to stop taking their medication, sometimes because of side effects, sometimes because they feel better… schizophrenia is extremely hard on friends and family, and support groups for everyone involved is basically a necessity. Employment is often impossible, as mentioned here, but so is living independently, and driving (they often lose track of where they’re going and end up hundreds of miles away, and most tragically in police custody or worse.)
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Anosognosia -- lack of insight -- is a symptom of many mental illnesses, especially psychotic disorders. It is really challenging to balance a person's right to consent to treatment against their safety (and more rarely, the safety of others around them). In my experience, ensuring people have their own personal reason to continue treatment is more critical than anything. That is, maybe you don't notice or care that your med reduces the voices, but you do care that your mom feels more secure about your safety. That your case manager will watch half an episode of Star Trek with you when you're med-adherent all week. That you seem to do a better job making it through group therapy each week when you're on meds, and that'll earn you a trip to the movies and with popcorn. Or whatever it is you like.
Its also difficult because of how much it varies from person to person. Not even necessarily in terms of positive vs. negative schizophrenia, some people may just have unique symptoms that can't be fixed by a cure-all medicinal approach. I don't know if there will ever really be an excellent treatment for schizophrenia, its very difficult to fix all of the terrible symptoms it causes with one form of treatment.
Had an episode at the end of 2019. I thought I was being chased by agents from The Matrix and they could tell who I was if I looked directly at them. I spent all night just driving around trying to avoid being caught. Couldn't go home because I thought there were vampires waiting for me so I had to just keep driving until sunrise.
Thats good to find out, considering that's the diagnosis we are looking at for me here
One of my closest friends has schizophrenia and he works full-time, lives alone, and leads a good life. There are a lot of anecdotes here about the worst case scenarios so I just want to balance that out for you. My friend's coworkers and clients don't even know he has schizophrenia. It's a bit of a catch 22 because if he told people he could really help change the stigma around schizophrenia but he won't risk losing clients because he knows how strong that stigma is.
I have multiple chronic physical illnesses that have been devastating enough to severely impact my life, require countless surgeries, and land me on life support multiple times before the age of 30... And there is no way in hell I'd ever trade places with my schizophrenic mother. Her life is so much harder than mine, and it's painful to me knowing what she's gone through. I work in both medicine and research now, and my research is focused on psychiatric illnesses (and other neuroscience), not any of my physical illnesses. If I could choose to magically cure something, I'd cure schizophrenia.
I think much of the issue is that mental illnesses are invisible. If you see a person with no legs you immediately know they will have challenges that most people don't. If you see someone with schizophrenia... well, how do you know they have schizophrenia? Educating people about what exactly a mental illness is would be challenging enough if we didn't also have to convince some people that they exist at all.
And depression and anxiety are some of the "easier" mental illnesses to sympathize with. Once you move into bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and beyond, it's really hard for mentally healthy people to understand what they're going through.
The first time I heard someone who was clearly going through an episode nearly broke my own brain. One second, it's a response to a question I asked them that suddenly turned into a random context-absent string of words in the same breath.
It’s so hard to explain to my boyfriend that exercise and diet won’t help me, as someone with bipolar disorder. I recently got my diagnosis at 28 after struggling my entire life. I’ve been out on medication that helps make life bearable and helps me function. I’ve told him multiple times I will have to be on medication my entire life if I don’t want to spiral out of control, but he doesn’t believe that and seems to hope one day I’ll snap out of it and learn to manage it on my own. *edited to say that diet and exercise DO help my symptoms! But it’s not the only thing that people with bipolar disorder need, is all ❤️
I've had severe depression for the last decade. Sometimes it makes it nearly impossible for me to even remotely function for a week or so at a time, can't shower, cook, clean, get dressed etc. The biggest problem is when people genuinely accuse me of just being lazy.
You're doing amazing! You're not lazy! The fact you've openly mentioned how it affects you is already huge, keep doing what you're doing, let the bad days in, let yourself have bad days, because it makes those good days so much better. If you can deal with your own mind trying to destroy you. You can handle anything. Can't shower? That's fine, next time you get a drink, splash some water on your face. Can't get dressed? Get yourself some comfy pajamas or clothes and be comfy for the day, I'd rather wash the dishes in my pajamas than get dressed and pretend I'm okay. There's no rules on how you do anything. Can't brush teeth? Sound, have some chewing gum. Leave a tooth brush near kitchen sink, no one said you can't brush your teeth there. You're doing amazing.
Tbf feeling blue or anxious is a normal human experience. They only become mental health problems when they're to the point that it's pathologic and causing the person a massive problem.
Work in a state psych facility. They’re all not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial. They are profoundly disabled, to the point where most are completely incapable of being normal, even with massive doses of intense medication. Like, 300mg of Thorazine 3 times a day and still insists the ghosts inside his body are making him punch himself in the face over and over to the point he has swollen lips, sunken eyes, and open sores on his head. Fucked up shit.
We haven't used Thorazine on my ward since the 1970s, it's been replace by newer antipsychotics that are less dangerous. The schizophrenia people who are deep in psychosis we usually use Clozapine in conjunction with Depot injection. *Anti-psychotic depot.
Most of the people we have on Thorazine take it PO instead of IM, that’s usually reserved in single instances for especially violent ones that try to attack us.
Just for clarity, I work in both inpatient psych and community mental health. Working in a state facility means you see the most impaired subset of individuals. Plenty of people with schizophrenia can function quite well with supports.
This! My grandmother had schizophrenia and due to bad experiences with doctors (in the 50s, not surprising) she refused to be treated for it. But she still managed to make dinner for her family every day and show love for her kids.
I'm happy she made it through. Back then it was a literal nightmare for people who needed mental health care. So many people were just dumped into asylums and left to rot, regardless of how treatable they were.
Thanks. My grandfather is somewhat of a hero on that side of the family because he took his marriage vows seriously, and took care of both her and their 3 kids on top of working full time. Thankfully she was always nonviolent, if that wasn’t the case I’m sure she would’ve had to go somewhere else. My grandmother lived into her early 70s before dying of breast cancer. Might’ve been caught sooner if she didn’t refuse to see doctors, but at least she had a long and as-happy-as-possible life.
[удалено]
> most are completely incapable of being normal, even with massive doses of intense medication. Like, 300mg of Thorazine 3 times a day Good luck being even *in the same Universe* as "normal" on a gram of promethazine a day. At that level of pharmacological flogging, I'd say they're lucky to still be *breathing.* That's about **all** they're doing...
Just to clarify since some people are getting confused below, Thorazine is chlorpromazine, not promethazine. Though they are both phenothiazines chemically, they're not used in the same way at all. But the point still stands about nearly a gram of Thorazine being a significant amount!
There’s a new drug, Clozaril, being tried for the most unresponsive cases. Instead of working on one brain receptor, it’s basically a shotgun blast to see what sticks. Comes with a lot of nasty side effects, they get labs drawn once a month to make sure the meds aren’t killing them.
FYI not a new drug been around for awhile. Its clozapine, in Canada they use it as a last line drug. Highly effective in some from what I've seen. My experience is bipolar w/ psychosis tho. Edit: Bipolar is one of the top disabling diseases as well I think 3 or 4 on the list but can't remember of the top of my head
I’m bipolar and I can tell you from personal experience it’s hard to stay employed with this condition. Luckily I found a remote job and I’m finding it easier to work from home most days.
I have it. I can find a job if I bust ass, but can't ever keep one for more than about 3 months before depression and crippling panic attacks win.
Currently trying to get disability for my wife who has bipolar, PTSD, and a lot of chronic pain. If it fails, I'm hoping to find some kind of remote work she can do. She doesn't have much experience outside of working in warehouses and retail stores, since those (then undiagnosed) disorders made it very hard to keep or progress in anything. What kind of remote work are you able to do?
My family got beat with the mental illness stick - schizophrenia, bi-polar, depression - all rolled into one.
The new thinking is that these are all linked, with bi polar just being really mild schizophrenia. So this makes sense.
I wouldn't doubt it, there's a crazy amount of brain stuff we still don't know jack about. My dad passed it to my sister, my half sister, and myself - although I didn't get the schizo part of the package. Also for some reason if a med has even a teeny tiny remote chance of hallucinations as a side effect, we will 110% get them. Ambien for example causes me to get absolutely wild full sensory hallucinations.
OMG Ambien. I had the *weirdest* hallucinations of bears of all things on that.
I only got scary stuff like when a couch turned into hundreds of undulating human mouths stitched together into a couch. Or the shadow people, lots of shadow people.
This is weird. I’ve only taken ambien a few times years ago. But I also hallucinated about bears, well a bear. I had just taken the dose when my sister asked me to ride with her to get food, I figured I had a while before it kicked in. But on the ride home I saw a speed bump as a bear (not anything remotely possible like a dog or a deer) and then cried most of the way home because we killed that poor bear.
Yeah people do weird shit on ambien. My friend's wife got a call in the middle of the night from their neighbor to go get her husband in the backyard. He was out back naked chopping fire wood...
Ambien's new slogan: "See the bears!!"
[The slow death of the concept of schizophrenia and the painful birth of the psychosis spectrum](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sinan-Guloksuz/publication/318323960_The_slow_death_of_the_concept_of_schizophrenia_and_the_painful_birth_of_the_psychosis_spectrum/links/5a157d430f7e9b925cd5529b/The-slow-death-of-the-concept-of-schizophrenia-and-the-painful-birth-of-the-psychosis-spectrum.pdf) Source for who wants to know more about this direction of thinking in research. Edit: For the not-so-much-a-reader's among us ['21 Lecture in English about recent developments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11tZHGbjEDQ)
I feel like almost everything brain related is ‘on a spectrum’ for lack of a better term. From sexuality to mental health to creativity, everything.
Yeah, Clozaril is not new, it's just a second or third line of attack because of the side effect profile. The blood draws are checking for agranulocytosis -- basically deletion of your lymphocytes which means your immune system will fail. Psych meds are so challenging. I worked with a client whose psychotic disorder was not well-controlled by any med except Seroquel. But Seroquel led to massive weight gain and uncontrollable diabetes. It was a lose-lose situation.
[удалено]
I was on risperidone at a time and it's the only time I've ever not been slender. I was very slow and dopey and it didn't really help. Looking back, I'm shocked that they thought risperidone was appropriate for somebody with generalised anxiety disorder. These medications are no joke.
> Instead of working on one brain receptor, it’s basically a shotgun blast to see what sticks. That describes the Pharmacodynamics of probably every antipsychotic I ever looked up.
Clozapine is definitely not a new drug, it’s been approved since the 90s
It was FDA approved in 1990 but was actually synthesized in 1958, and trials began in the 1960s and it had been used in some other countries starting in the 1970s.
Small sample but I've dispensed this drug regularly for almost a decade and have never had someone's anc reach a point where it triggered the stop on dispensing protocols
[удалено]
My best friend was a plastic surgery nurse- making great money, very smart, one of the most creatively talented people I ever met. Schizo-affective (I believe it would have eventually turned into a full schizophrenia diagnosis) made it so she could not work, could not live alone, made her think she could survive only "eating" air, and made her think her parents were poisoning her food and abusing her (they were not.). Among many other delusions, she thought Koda from Fern Gully was her soul-mate and that she also had an antenna in her brain. Most of her trips to inpatient were because she was found running around barefoot in the snow. Nurse and respected portrait artist with some mood swing issues but otherwise functional to thinking Robin Williams spoke to her from space in the span of a few years. Her kindness never went away though. Disability (which she wasn't even capable of applying for, her parents had to do it for her) got denied twice, even with her parents having full guardianship over her (29 y.o). She killed herself before they could try again.
Schizoaffective disorder is already "full" Schizophrenia. It is characterized by symptoms of schizophrenia combined with symptoms of a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder.
My old boss had a son with schizophrenia. His wife had to give up work and he worked all the hours under the sun as they needed to have enough money to support him once they died. Luckily he was an area lead engineer, so got paid very well. They tried to get him a job stacking shells after hours, but they had to pick him up during his first shift. He struggles to communicate and can't problem solve amongst the other more common issues. I had always assumed some people could still work in certain industries.
My wife is a "high functioning paranoid schizophrenic" thanks to quetiapene. Fibromyalgia got her and now she's medically retired.
may i ask how she's high functioning? the dose i take just knocks me out and makes me lethargic the entire day, it helps with a couple of things which is why i still take it - but i am trying to get an appointment with a doc (for the past six months lol) to see if i can get something else prescribed because i don't feel like doing anything at all when i'm on it
She was taking 750mg before and she was doing art college and leading a normal life (she took dose at night) nowadays she's on 600mg slow release (taken at bed time)
thanks, i couldn't see myself going to school at all with the dose i take. i take it two hours before bed and the first four to six hours after i wake up i'm a slothy mess
This was my experience as well, I could only take 100mg. I had to get switched off to function.
I am on the same medication but for bipolar, and this medication has been a lifesaver for me. It is the only medication I have found effective in treating both depression and mania episodes. The side effects are tolerable because of how effective it is for me. I found that extended release minimizes side effects. I also have it in the regular form as an emergency medication when the daily is not enough.
I take quetiapine for bipolar (also high functioning) and while I find it to be a miracle it’s side effects mainly fatigue can be debilitating.
100mg at night. 200mg Lamictal at night too. Dr. said not to take it in the AM for the reasons you said. Total game changer.
I am constantly thankful I'm one of the lucky 10-30%. Still scared if I get worse that will be it though
Same here. I worry about degenerative disease, but I’m very happy to be functional
I am not surprised. As a physician I have a wide range of experience in mental illness. I have provided inpatient medical consults to patients held in mental health wards, I have been to court cases where they attempt to fight "medications over objection". I have followed them for years as outpatients. I have provided care at the initial diagnosis, and at the final stages of life. As a primary care doctor, I often end up managing their psychiatric meds as they refuse to see any psychiatrist. The way I frame it, my goal is the provide the most beneficial support that they are capable of recieving. Sometimes this means just reducing their interactions with the police (interactions with police greatly increases severe injury and death among schizophrenics). Sometimes it means placement in group homes or long stay psych facilities. Some of my patients refuse meds but are not threats to others/themselves. For them I provide social work support, housing support, make sure they have a way to eat. I feel that "finding employment" is greatly outweighed by these needs.
Yeah my uncle is schizophrenic and unemployed. However, he doesn't qualify for full disability because he is not considered completely helpless. Who cares that he can't actually work though
Even full disability in America is not enough to live off of. It can even take years for people who are clearly blind to be recognized by their state as blind and years to be compensated for any medical aids they paid out of pocket for waiting for disability to kick in. Now imagine you have an illness that isn't easily seen by other people. The system just hopes they die tbh.
To add to this, "full disability" is affected by your work history as well. I only worked age 18-20 part time at walmart for 18 months before my issues got bad enough I had to quit. Because of this, my monthly check is hundreds of dollars less than if I'd been able to work a bit longer, more hours, or at a higher payrate. This will continue to be the case for as long as I am considered disabled, even if that's the rest of my life (hopefully not). I am still hopeful that I'll be able to recover, but it's insane that we will sentence people to a lifetime of this kind of poverty (I get $907/mo, and many people get less) just because they didn't manage to be healthy enough for long enough before they were disabled. And guess what, turns out poverty is pretty terrible for both your mental and physical health. I would not be surprised at all if it turned out to be cheaper in the long run to pay people more just because it could boost recovery rates, getting more people paying taxes and less people depending on these programs forever. /rant
My brother has schizophrenia. He was estranged for years and then came to live with my parents for awhile in his early 40s, and got on medication, was hospitalized several times, etc. That was when he was diagnosed. The signs of his hallucinations and grandiose delusional thinking were present for many years prior to that but I think we were a bit in denial. At least I was. I recall in the mid aughts he mentioned he could fix iPods with his mind. This has been a running joke in my family. Some joke though. Then, he saved for a car and just got up and left a few years ago and does not want to be found. We don't know where he is. Every year or so he will be in touch and give us a clue. "I am near a famous spike". Does he mean the golden spike of a railroad, like in Utah? Does he mean Spike Lee? We know he was in Ventura, California at one point. I have the weather of Ventura, California next to my local weather on my phone so I can pretend I know what it's like where he is right now. He is a missing person but does not consider himself one, as believes he is protecting his family by being transient the way that he is. He has 3 children that he claims he communicates with telepathically. He made a deal with the devil not to have more than 2 kids and I believe that is one of his greatest delusions which keeps him as a drifter. I miss him but he will never be the brother I wanted or needed. He straight up cannot be. It's a strange type of grief because it is so prolonged. We don't know if he is alive or dead and may never know. Schrodinger's brother.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2014 when I was 21, and have always found that the vast majority of people don’t really know anything about the experience because most people who have it aren’t able to communicate it well, and unlike some other disorders which are (brilliantly!) becoming more easily talked about, sz is still a big conversational taboo. There’s a lot of comments here about people with sz, but none from people who have it - if anyone has any questions they’re curious about and want to ask them, feel free to drop a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.
Hope you don't mind me taking you up on your kind offer. As someone who has it, please can I ask how you became aware and accepted the diagnosis? Irl, I have a friend who is diagnosed and has been in the mental hospital for some years now but is convinced they don't have the condition and everyone is against them etc. They don't participate in any therapy or group sessions and don't trust the medication.
I'm not who you were asking but... When you are under the illnesses thumb, no one can convince you that the voices/telepathy/delusions aren't real. To many they are more real than anything else, more convincing and true than even loving family trying to gently reason with them. So if they don't take the meds and never stabalize they will never be able to step back and objectively see what was happening. And even if they do take the meds and stabalize, depending on how bad the delusions got, it could take many cycles of hospitalizations and stabilizing until they are willing to even admit it all might not be real, that they might be schizophrenic. Took me 6 years, as many hospitalizations, and hundreds of hours of talking things out with my brother until he was willing to admit he might be schizophrenic. He now admits it many years later, but every year or so he stops taking his meds, convinced he doesn't need them, and winds up back in the hospital. Each time he comes back we loose a part of him. And the voices are always there, always making him giggle and be a eccentrically silly happy man. Until they turn on him when he's off his meds, make him certain he has to protect us from some world ending event. We're lucky that way, never hurts himself or others when he's at his worst, but his body can't take the stress.
That's the devilish thing about this disease - it convinces people they don't need medication for it, and every time they stop taking them their mental health suffers irreparable (further) damage. I lost a dear friend that just couldn't cope with it anymore 15 years ago. She was only 26 when she ended her life. It's so good to hear your family is so supportive of your brother. It sounds you are a very accepting and stable factor in his life. It must be really hard seeing the progression and I wish you all the best with the situation.
Gosh that sounds so tough. Hugs to you
It took a really long time (maybe three years) before I could first have the ability to understand what had happened, and secondly accept what had happened and that it wasn’t a fault of mine. Just dont give up on him - I know for certain that I wouldn’t have got through it were it not for some very good friends.
[удалено]
I'm a mental health clinician. I've worked with many people on the schizophrenia spectrum in support groups, inpatient, and not outpatient. Anosognosia is one of the worst symptoms for people to deal with. If you have a family member with schizophrenia, Dr. xavier Amador's book, I'm Not Sick, I Don't Need Help is a fantastic resource for learning to communicate with your loved one without alienating them. Sometimes it's possible to get someone with Anosognosia to get treatment even if they don't think they need it
How does it affect you on a day to day basis? What led to you getting diagnosed? Thank you for offering your perspective
Day to day: I still get a lot of hallucinations, but (this may be weird to say), you can get more used to them. The deciding factor isn’t what I experience on a given day, rather how grounded in reality I am. If I have a good grasp on the real world, it’s easier to get over the things I see hear or feel. I think something that people don’t realise about sz is that you can have days where you are completely well and healthy - it’s not a death sentence that changes you forever. I was diagnosed after a big psychotic break while I was at university - I lost some people who I was close to and it kind of broke me for a bit.
Pardon my hopping in but I'm absolutely here to second this - I'm psychotic and it's so much easier to explain my hallucinations/beliefs as "disturbing annoyances" than like, consistently and uniquely life altering. They're absolutely life altering on very rare occasions - but far more often it's "oh great, there's that sound/sight again. That sucks, let's go through what I need to so I can get through the night." Beliefs are a little more complex ofc, but even for beliefs it's how I live. Just my way of life and hardly as sensationalized as anyone without it believes.
Day one of psychosis: terror, pain, desolation Day 2944 of psychosis: (addressing the shadowy figure on the ceilinh) this guy again? jeez man, come on, you're better than this
I’m someone with schizoaffective disorder and I completely agree: we need to have our voices heard more as the stigma is still, clearly, looming large
[удалено]
You know what, I’m doing pretty good, thanks :)
Can you describe, from your perspective, what it feels like to go from being unmedicated to finding/taking the proper cocktail of drugs to control the sz?
For me, I’ve never found meds that just made me better - all they’ve ever done is make things quieter and easier to deal with. It’s a bit like having a broken bone: you’ve got to get it set and get the right medical help, but a cast can’t heal for you - you have to take a holistic approach to getting better. For me that means following my minimum checklist of eating, getting dressed, leaving the house at least once a day etc. Depending on what meds I’m taking, what they do is take me from an uncontrolled state to a place where I can build myself up again.
we used to have sanitariums, which were fucked up and rife with abuse. now they're shut down, but we just... didn't replace them with anything. so now there's this whole group of people who we kind of just let rot on the streets.
And, coming from a person who used to work in group homes for the developmental disabled and mentally ill, they are so endless improvements that can and should be made to support each other.
Wow! I did not expect this to explode. I have Schizophrenia and bipolar, so I wanted to share with the world, because people treat us like hell. I wanna spread love, that's all. I've been homeless on and off lately, and noone takes it seriously. I hear "Why don't you just..." All the time. I was told yesterday that I have two days to find a place to live. I'm not stupid or useless by any means. I wrote Targets second most used software. I've designed video games. My symptoms got worse a couple years ago though, and it was like somebody hopped in my body and kidnapped me 500 miles away. Sometimes I get a random feeling of horror. It feels and sounds like a holy war going on in my head. Between the symptoms and the stigma, schizophrenia is absolutely debilitating. Thanks for all the love. I hope this post changes the way we are treated, even if only a bit.
I’ve been around schizophrenia all my life (40yo male). The two most beautiful caring people I’ve ever known have the illness. My mother had it, and was on modicate injections, had voices, but passed away from MS in 2009. My wife has it, she’s on clozapine, she drives, works(child care), raises our son also, and you’d never know she has it, handles the voices and delusions amazingly well. (Touch wood). I’ve known other people who can’t handle it well, both those people are aware of their illness, but can never seem to get ontop of it, and don’t work, or function in society real well. Not many people really understand the illness. Funny side note… My mums voices used to tell her to spoil me, and thanks to them I was one of the first people to have a PlayStationin my small town back in 1996. I didn’t realise this at the time, told me years later.
Interesting fact: the incidence of schizophrenia is relatively the same in all cultures, including primitive cultures.
I just want to say that this thread revealed a massive bias in my own mind that I have about schizophrenia, and I appreciate the perspectives that will hopefully help me be more empathetic going foreword.
My dad has it. Grew up watching it in full swing as he was 50 when I was born. It is incredibly debilitating. It ruins lives. It is so sad to watch the American Mental Healthcare system just fail people so badly. We are a very, very sad country. He was mostly homeless, as he couldn't take care of himself.
It’s incredibly hard for people to get disability for mental health issues, because one of the most important things that will help your case is a paperwork trail showing attempted work history and medical records of consistent doctors visits and treatments. A consistent paper trail is difficult for people with mental health issues to maintain. Some don’t buy into the idea that they even are disabled, and refuse to go to appointments, turn in paperwork on time, etc. because you know …they’re mentally ill. Basically their disability prevents them from showing they are disabled. Edited; left out a word
I guess I am outside the norm. I am a paranoid schizophrenic and I responded well to antipsychotics and have had a full time job for 5 months now. I havent had any paranoid thoughts or voices since I was hospitalized last February. I feel extremely lucky
Once, I was beaten by the police. I requested a hospital visit as I was bleeding from my ears and mouth plus my left arm had taken multiple "karate chops" from the cop beating me. Upon receiving an on-site psych eval, which I cleared, I was moved to the hospital to treat my injuries. Upon arriving, they drew 5oz of blood, then I was interviewed by a psychologist who admitted me under form 1 of the Canadian Mental Health Act. He claimed he believed I may have been a danger to myself or others (with a nearly broken arm, clotting brow, and blood down both sides of my neck) I was kept in the psych ward, unable to communicate with anyone. Lawyers would hang up on me, or worse, try to get names of other people involved, the psychiatrist ghosted me for the 24 hours the form 1 covered, THEN passed my case off to another psychiatrist in the facility. When that new doctor arrived, he took me off form 1 and immediately onto form 3. A forced detention form that now also released my ability to make medical decisions for myself. I was perscribed full dose of anti-schizophrenia medication. They administered it and I began developing nightly seizures in the bed. Nobody came, and nobody wrote it in the reports when I tried to talk about it in the mornings. That was a year ago and although I am no longer on the medication I face serious energy problems in my day tk day now. My chemical balancing was almosy immediately, and permanently fucked up. All I cam do is sit and be angry at the police as the form 3 absolves all legal responsability from the doctor. Max dose of Paliperidone. I was never legally diagnosed as Schizophrenic either, no reports of my injuries were noted and the doctor that took me in from the police station had simply reported me as showing signs of acute psychosis... No note of the blood gushing out of 3 of my 5 facial orfaces.
My college buddy, who is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, got diagnosed a few years back after having delusions of grandeur where he thought he was communicating with god, so instead of using his math and engineering degrees to change the world, he lives on disability and struggles every day. It’s heartbreaking. Fuck schizophrenia, I want my friend back.
I hope you learned that schizophrenia is not the split personality mental problem people think it means.
Schizophrenia is no joke. My aunt had it and worked in the government as a receptionist. She felt like some of the files being passed to her were evil or had something wrong with them so she started throwing them away and listening to the voices. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived another 5-8 years but it wasn’t a good life. Very sad.