schizophrenia
Schizophrenia 101; look beyond the pop culture portrayals and learn the reality behind this oft-stigmatized mental illness.
Blood and Chocolate
“Today is Friday the 30th, 2021. The time is 1:30AM. I’m detective James Marllow. Badge number 3580. Sitting with me is Eric Porter. Hello Mr. Porter. I ask that you acknowledge that the interview is being recorded and that you consent to the recording.”
By Shayla Beesley5 years ago in Psyche
Peace
I wake up and the need to put my thoughts in order construes to the blank sheet of paper that’s right in front of me. How can I determine how I feel in words that can only explain so much but explain everything at the same time? It’s like the meaning of love, an easy thing to get into that can bring you a sense of belonging and peace. I enjoy writing about mental illness because it’s what I experience. It’s a matter that is controversial to society but internally devastating to someone experiencing it. My experience was like no other when I was going through it. It was like my mind took over my entire being and controlled everything I thought and said. It’s not something that I feel is necessary to be judged by. It’s not something that should be poked by blame for. It’s something that should be seen like any kind of disease. It’s like having a tumor in the brain, you take medication to devour it, to shrink the mass that is holding back the person’s ability to function correctly. It just occurs relentlessly and freely in the mind. Where no one knows how it occurs or why. But it is an experience like no other and perhaps its partially psychological because its unique to the persons experience in life. However, it is still unknowingly occurring in good people. The mind is not who you are, it is like a navigating device determining, analyzing, and experiencing who you want to be. When I journal, it brings me a sense of eye-opening experiences because not everything I think and feel makes sense. That’s the downside to having schizophrenia it injures the mind and makes everything you experience seem hindering. I can have a thought that I’m worthless and the voices take over and I get the choice to agree. Yet, sometimes I don’t even know why I think this way. It isn’t something that I’ve done or said that has allowed me to go down the path of self-destruction. But rather a feeling of worthlessness. Where does this feeling come from? I think it comes from the chemical imbalance in my brain that is disturbing the chemicals that allow me to feel the right way. You see it’s all a science and not a spiritual disconnection with god. It should not be stigmatized. It is something I have to deal with on a regular basis because there has been more stigmatizing then trying to find answers to what is happening in the mind. It has to be more than a chemical imbalance because there are people who take up to ten medications and still, they hallucinate and hear voices that disturb their everyday life. It’s easy to think the intrusive thoughts that happen in my mind are something that is real because everything you experience in your consciousness is created in your subconscious. Everything that occurs In your mind is the experience you face in life. So, at first you can’t help but believe it’s all true. But with care and wisdom you realize its one experience you face in life and don’t have to make it your reality even though its disturbing. I don’t wish this illness on anyone it is hard to come out of when it’s something you face every day not knowing when the voices will occur or when you’re going to hallucinate. With great support and medication, you can choose to believe it Is just a disease that is medical and physical. Although there are still people out there who believe it’s a spiritual occurrence and that is easy to believe, its only detrimental to the person experiencing this to believe that. The reason is because it’s easy to feel like you’re being punished by something beyond you. Believing that will cause a feeling of not wanting to exist. So, with great care I want to illustrate that it’s important to realize it is a brain disease and nothing more that brings me too a sense of peace and realization.
By Cerina Galvan5 years ago in Psyche
The Witness
I woke to the feeling of a hundred hands. They surround me, holding me, lifting me towards the surface of my self. I continue forward, opening my eyes to the light of the world. My perspective shifts as I lift my left hand from the black polyhedron. As I sit up to a room of rust, an ominous picture hangs just before this room's passageway. Their bones undisturbed on a rusty ski lift, no semblance of fear in their being; it must have happened in an instant. The solitude of these heights.
By Tyler Chase5 years ago in Psyche
Factors of schizophrenia
Nowadays, there are more and more friends suffering from schizophrenia, so more people are beginning to care about the main cause of schizophrenia. We know that there are many reasons that can cause schizophrenia. Let me introduce you to the factors of schizophrenia.
By Paula J. Spencer5 years ago in Psyche
Schizophrenia & Schizoaffective Disorders
Schizoaffective..... Schizoaffective disorder, as defined by the Mayo clinic, is a mental health disorder that is marked by a combination of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression or mania. Frankly, this can sound horrible to a newcomer.
By Becky Howell5 years ago in Psyche
Wardlord
I am a Marine Corps veteran with scizoaffective disorder and this is my story. I enlisted into the Marines at age seventeen with the consent of my parents who decided it was better than me living in the low income housing myself and a good friend had moved into. I had been kicked out of the house shortly after my 17th birthday because I was partying too much and had started smoking Newport 100s. I had also been involved in a hit and run and since my vehicle was in my fathers name, he now had a warrant out for his arrest. After paying the fines and clearing his name I was out bouncing from couch to couch. I had been homeschooled the majority of my life but had attended a Christian school in Kansas City, MO named The Daniel Academy. This school was horrible, we didnt learn anything other than how to fake a seizure when being prayed for. We were taught that there were Angels visiting us during praise and worship sessions in the morning time and if the spirit of God moved the staff we didnt have class all day. I had grown up in Mississippi until I was 13 years old when my parents had been layed off within days of each other and we had to move up to Missouri. I do not fully understand or remember why this school was selective but I find it and the Church that sponsored this school if you would like to call it that to be the single most damaging time period in my life over any drug addiction or erratic behavior that was soon to follow. I learned almost everything I knew about how the world works from first hand experience or finding the information my own goddamn self. I was not a believer myself so trying to find friends who hadnt drank the kool aid was very hard to do. I was an outcast and a troubled teeanger with a demonic cloud over my head as the dean of the school said. I would have demons cast out of me damn near every week I was there. Its hard to convince yourself that something is not wrong with you when shit like that kept happening. I fucking hated it and I still carry resentments toward some of the people there. Mostly I have forgiven the kids I went to school with and I am working on healing from that as I move foward in life and now have kiddos of my own. Needless to say I did not want to participate in anything going on at the school and the staff knew it too. They kicked me out when I was in the 10th grade. So a year and a half later I am getting ready to go to bootcamp after being kicked out everywhere I have been. I got my diploma from a local Community college and was starting to patch things up with my family. I had a girlfriend who I thought was going to be there forever and I thought I was hot shit. After arriving at bootcamp I realized that I had most likely made a huge error in going but I wouldnt be able to live with myself if I went home. I hated it for the first month or so and then I started kind of digging the whole idea again. I would imagine myself in far off places doing some hood rat shit with my buddies I had yet to meet while hiking to keep my mind off of how dumb it felt to walk up and down some fucking hill in the dark. I graduated bootcamp and went home on leave. The gap between me and my family closed a little more and I thought things were going good with the lady friend. After leave was over it was back to the basics but this time I was at the school of infantry on Camp Pendleton, California. I hated that shit too for a while. I wanted to go home and I was tired of the shitty food and the shitty hikes and getting up in the middle of the night to watch gear that nobody was going to fucking steal. This was in March 2014. Russia and the Ukraine were getting into a pretty big confrontation and we were gearing up for war with Russia. The shit never happened and my motivation went completely away for a while. I graduated from there and went to my first actual unit. There, it was back to the new basics. I hated that shit too but soon found my little homeboi clique and it wasnt so bad. We did alot of cool training and I was in the helicopter company so I didnt have to hike as much, so things could have been worse. Then I started partying again after being pretty chill in that department for quite a while. I was really starting to fit in with America's finest pieces of shit that She had to offer. I was one of the pack. I started to love it, and I was finally accepted somewhere. I was still a fucking boot and still am for that matter cause I never went to combat and never really got to do my job, but it still felt important at the time and gave me a sense of belonging. Things were going to shit with the ole lady and I didnt give a fuck, I had been using MDMA and going to some 18 and up clubs and raves in San Diego and was feeling like I belonged into two groups. Myself and a few close buddies viewed ourselves as warrior hippies and it was kind of fun to shoot guns all week and then go drug it up from Friday to Sunday morning. We got really into that scene but it was time to deploy. For some dumbass reason I proposed to my lady friend and got on a damn slow boat to China, partied it up in Hong Kong and went to Disneyland over there 50 shades of puke drunk. It was fun and I also had my first experience with a prositiute there. I knew it was a piece of shit move but she was back home fucking anything that moved from gas station clerks to people at church. Fair is fair. I still feel bad but here I am. We went a bunch of places on that deployment including Kenya where I pulled security for then president Barrack Obama, not to name drop or anything. I was on the damn night shift at the airport over there I did not get to meet him but that would have been pretty fucking rad. I got to go to Dubai, Kuwait, and Bahrain twice. After getting back on the boat leaving Dubai my fiance told me she had to decided to pursue her life long dream of becoming a lesbian and that she couldnt pretend anymore. So I wanted to blow my brains out right then and there. I hated her but I needed her for some strange reason that I wasnt able to explain other than now knowing I was a "simp". We pulled into Hawaii on the way home and I got to visit my favorite titty bar in all of the land, Hawaii by Night. Im pretty sure they are still open but I loved the trashiness of the pool table with a pole in it. It was a blast. I had been sober from drugs this whole deployment cause how the fuck am I gunna bring em with me. I was drinking enough to fill the gap so it didn't matter at all. When I got home to Camp Pendleton all my friends went to go raving but my mom had come to see me and we hung out for about a week before I got to go on leave to home. The fam bam had moved back to the Sip and it was pretty cool to be back for more than a couple days since I was 13. My best friend came to visit and I picked her up from The Nola airport and we made a day of that and she stayed for about a week and a half. I bought a truck from my dad with some of that deployment tax free money and drove her back to the aiport and kept on heading west down the I10. I had like four days left to drive about thirty five hours but I decided to drive it in one go because my friends were having a hotel party and going to a rave. So after driving all that with no sleep I arrived in San Diego. This was my first time having full blown psychosis. I drank a bottle of vodka after arriving by myself and nobody thought much of it. They didnt know I didn't sleep and I even drove the car to somebody elses house to pick up more people. Then we went to some warehouse and I completely lost it. I blacked out but have faint pictures in my head of slapping some poor womans ass as hard as I could and then she climbed up on my back punching me so hard that I was fully awake but not aware of why I though I was in Mississippi with all my buddies there and this chick rightfully so beating my head in. I deserved it but I was confused as fuck. We got back to the hotel and I started shit with people I did not know and was getting into stupid arguements about what zip code we were in and I couldn't really comprehend what was going down. Luckily my friend decided to take my drunk, psychosis riddled ass back to the barracks and gave me some of his doritos and let me sleep in his room so I didn't cause any trouble. I am thankful to him for many reasons but this is one of the biggest. People never realize how a small act of sharing your last bag of doritos can affect a sucidal person. I finally went to sleep and was bright eyed and bushy tailed the next day. I went and got some real food and I had hope for the future in almost every aspect. My fingers about to fucking fall off cause I am doing this like I just took some benzedrine or however the fuck you spell that shit Kerouac was taking, but alas I have no such cheat code. So I will do this in episodes or chapters or however you want to think of it. Peace be upon you the good reader if you indeed exist.
By Noah Brownlee5 years ago in Psyche
How to make sense of schizophrenia and psychosis
From experience, I would say psychosis is a way of making sense of the world in our own way. It is more than just a mental disease. It can be dark and unusual to many people, but to the person experiencing it, it is more so a challenge a mere illusion and battle with the nature of societal expectations of reality. To me, normal life is quite evil and tricky. At least, what people who perceive normal entails it to be. Yet, everyone experiences their own realities in a way that makes sense to them. For me, my psychosis makes sense to me. Although it can be hard to deal with since it is different from the norm, it entails a story that is quite beautiful. Comparing it to the real world it can be eccentric and completely unique to itself. Honestly, I believe people are programmed to act a certain way and believe a certain way for the benefit of societal control. An example of this is our bodies, I'm not trying to say our bodies shouldn't be nourished, they should be, and health is a major factor in the reasoning of the existence of psychosis. I believe and I have yet to find factual evidence on this, but I think the negative connotation in our minds is connected to our malnourished body, the toxic energy we are given from foods like outside chemicals effects our entire being. However, I believe that psychosis can be a positive notion in our minds as long as we feed it positivity and recreate a world that can be seen as wonderful. If my world is different from yours, that doesn't mean I'm psychotic it means my values and views are different from yours and what kind of world would we be living in if we all thought the same, a boring a pointless one. We are all just trying to make sense of our lives. In the words of Professor Fletcher at Gresham College, he states that the brain is striving to make sense of the world, confess a ready-made tendency to deviate from reality and to create its own world. For me, the world we live in is quite evil and the world I tend to live inside my head is a lot more beautiful. We have perceptions of the world that makes sense of the sensory electrical signals from heat, light, and force. Professor Fletcher from Gresham College said, “We are direct recipients of reality we are decoding the signals we receive”. So, in this statement he is saying that our psychology has a message for us trying to make sense of the life around us. We associate our senses with the data our brain is receiving, what we have already known and learned. A lot of which we hold onto are traumatizing events in the past. Because it impacts a lasting impact on our feelings, Maya Angelou said “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. An example I experience with psychosis is hearing my mom say she hates me even though she never said that. It’s a feeling perceived by thought through my sense from what I’ve learned about and felt in the past. I have yet to heal from my hyper-sensitivity stages. This is not to say my mom didn’t do her best at trying to raise me, she did her best at what she knew. It is that my own perceptions of the world is different and highly sensitive toward the actions of others and what I’ve learned from them.
By Cerina Galvan5 years ago in Psyche
Introducing Me!
I am currently a mother of two happy, healthy, and adorable children who happens to have schizophrenia. I enjoy writing and it has long been on my heart to write about motherhood, mental health, and other random “adulting” subjects. I may not be any good at it, but I can’t be any worse than all of the articles in a Google search engine that talk about how horrible it is to know a schizophrenic – let alone have one be a mother.
By The Schizophrenic Mom5 years ago in Psyche
To Be Free
“They’re looking because you’re talking to no one” Scene one It’s a ritual to go to art exhibits with my sister Raven, as I chat it up with her, I look around and I'm infuriated to see everyone looking at her with confusion and judgment. “Has nobody ever seen a woman with cancer before? It’s like they think all illnesses are contagious” grumbles Jerrick. I locked eyes with a European man, he gave me a slight nod and a smile. “A gesture of pity,” I thought. My sister giggles. “What?!” I exclaim. “They’re looking because you’re talking to no one”. “You’re somebody! Stop calling yourself no one, you’re everything to me, my world in fact”. “Sorry to interrupt, you seem just as uncomfortable as I tend to be at these exhibits, curious as to why you still come?” says the European man. “Well” as I pull myself together “My sister and I have a ritual, she's an art teacher and I'm an electrical engineer, I love to break apart machines and piece them back together into something entirely different, so I have a deep appreciation for art but not for the people who possess them.” “Looks like we are men of like minds, lovely to meet you two” he hands me a card with an address scribbled and gives me a nod and a smile and disappears into the crowd. “Curious..”
By Jillian Paris Ferguson5 years ago in Psyche
