Hi, Couple of months ago I met a guy who was diagnosed with schizophrenia disorder so all of it is pretty new to me. He gets treatments, seeing his psychiatrist on regular basis and going to psycho therapy. We got very close, and he was always telling me that I help him staying ‘sane’. But lately everything has changed. He started to get those episodes when he was asking me ‘are you trying to poison me???’ when I only brought him bananas for lunch. Or yesterday he asked ‘can you swear that you are not trying to kill me?’. I have no idea how to react to all of those questions. I know this is only his illness talking but this can be pretty heartbreaking and I don’t know what’s the best way of reacting to it. Best for me and best fro him.
Hi and welcome to the forum. It is a great place to find support and to get ideas on how to deal with symptoms of this horrible illness. Paranoia is a common symptom and causes strange behavior in our loved ones. I have never and I mean NEVER found it successful to directly address the fears and delusions, but found it best to go around them. For example, when unmedicated, my daughter stopped eating regularly. It took me awhile to figure out that if I prepared 3 plates, and let her choose the one she wanted it worked best. My husband and I chose from the remaining two plates. You have to work out things to “fit” his delusions.
I am sorry to say that this is going to be a very hard relationship for you both, for you especially. Diagnosis with this illness is not usually given unless the hallucinations and delusions have already lasted for over 6 months, from what I’ve seen. And although medicines help, and sometimes supplements, symptoms usually remain that make life out-of-the-ordinary for the entire future.
this is tough… very tough and exactly what happened to me 
… feel free to read my story.
It is really hard to give you advice… however @oldladyblue has said what i was going to say and that is pointing out directly the delusions doesn’t help/work usually. I am right in the middle of this at the moment and i have to say, with next to no insight, it is really one day at a time… expect nothing and accept that expecting nothing is the new norm.
Does your partner acknowledge (when he is on his medication) that he is ill with Sz? And i don’t mean just telling you, i mean having real insight into what it means for him and the people around him. If so i would say that this is a huge positive for him and in turn his future relationships.
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Thanks for sharing your story! After reading a lot of stories on this forum I came to conclusion that the case I am facing is really mild. My partner acknowledges his condition and he’s delusions don’t last long. After reading about your wife being in a hospital for weeks my guess is that my partner is well balanced with his meds. I know him only for couple of months and my curiosity was why suddenly I became the object of his delusions. It wasn’t like that before. He was coming to me with a lot of thoughts like ‘my mother tried to poison me, I feel funny in my stomach after dinner’ or ’ i think they put something in my vape juice in the shop’ or ‘someone is trying to hack my computer, I get this random adds on Facebook like they wanna make me paranoid’. He was coming to and ALWAYS calming down when I was explaining that this is his schizo and he is safe. He is very aware of his condition and usually he has the delusions under control very quickly, but now I am not sure what to do when I am part of it? And I don’t know WHY I became part of it? Does it mean he can’t trust me anymore?
Thanks a lot for replying to my comment! did you maybe worked on some ‘tricks’ or mechanisms to help your daughter stay connected with the reality? Or to bring her back where she is soaking into her delusional world or wonders? I was reading somewhere about this method when a person that suffers schizophrenia writes those small notes to himself, when is not suffernign an episode, and explains in those notes how everything is like. Then, when episode apears the person can go nack to his own ‘sane’ thoughts. Have you heard about it before?
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Thank you for your reply, and for asking my opinion. I am going to be very honest here. It probably may upset you, @handwashhh but I feel I must say so.
The only REAL success I had with my loved one was police arrested her, the judge ordered meds, and she stayed on meds. To put it bluntly, NOTHING I tried in 2.5 years resulted in REAL success in changing her behaviors. Her psychosis was ruining my family, drove away her friends and relatives, and made me a nervous wreck. ONLY the very lucky sequence of events that resulted in her being medicated with a medicine that works saved my own happiness from totally disappearing.
This is a VERY serious mental illness with lifelong management required: schizophrenia ruins lives, is never cured, and is hard to manage for most individuals. Unless your boyfriend is successfully on meds, his psychosis will probably be unpredictable and unhandleable.
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I have heard about people who did write notes to themselves for the times when their scz was cycling through a flare up. They said it worked well for them.
On a slightly different subject, journaling before and after meds is supposed to be one of the ways that our family members can see in their own handwriting that life on meds is better.