Schizophrenia - Faking it or Real?

I was in hospital with someone who was faking having bipolar once. Didn’t see him when he first came in as I was in the next level up on the wards for having lost it so much I forgot what you call it. Anyway when I seen him he even told me he was faking for financial gain from work. God knows how he was getting away with it because he was not even trying to act, just seemed normal…

I live with my paranoid sz son. Believe me,
they aren’t faking it. It is real and sad

we are all brilliant actors on here… !?! :man:

and the best male/alien actor goes to…" dark sith ".

" horray, horray "… :trophy:

" i would like to thank my fellow actors for the amazing support i have had…
and the director and producer and writer…for the amazing horror movie…!?! " :imp:

dark sith bows
take care :alien:

I have the same findings. My in laws think I am faking, my wife told me this. She doesn’t believe I am, she’s seen my worst-ish… Luckily I’ve not had a truly major meltdown in front of her, crap, yes I have. They just see me mostly in the evenings and weekends sometimes when I’m with my son. He’s the only person that makes me feel normal, or at least comfortable to be myself with–and that makes a huge difference in my stress levels. A two year old doesn’t expect you to be a certain societally deemed way, they just take you for what you are. My boy can help keep me in the right place mentally. That’s not to say that somedays he’s not a little too much for me and I don’t get strained or tense, and have the voices and mental fisfirings, but moreover, he’s my little man and helps me. (We’ve been mentally communicating since he was in the womb. We are connected in the mind speak area.)

Why would I fake this is what I don’t get. I see no benefit to be gained from it. I have dreams and stuff that I’d really like to accomplish, but I don’t know that it ever will happen because even my wife doesn’t support me in my endeavors because she doesn’t believe I can make it happen or follow through…

I cannot imagine anyone being able to fake it.

I do not see any reason anyone would ever fake it.

Work in the criminal justice system for a while. The reasons get clear real quick. (And they’re not always what you think.) (Charlie Manson, for example, repportedly relished being thought of by the inmates around him as one fucking whacked out crazy and dangerous screwball.)

I feel like a fake a lot of times. But my nice and helpful voices keep reminding me I have schizophrenia.

“You are schizo”
“Nobody likes you”
“Hahaha! Schizo!”

Do you think some non-criminals could be faking it too? (A substantial number?)

I fake being normal a lot.
SZ just comes naturally, but
being SZ isn’t what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Me neither. I didn’t chose this shit. I was doing so well, I had a great job and family and friends and pets, and then BAM! My brain went nuts made me believe a lot of stupid things and those damn voices. Never leave me alone. I even hear them in my sleep in my dreams. :frowning:

I have seen occasional cases of malingering in public health settings seemingly because the patients wanted drugs, hospitalization (to them, a protective environment), SSDI benefits including Medicare, food stamps, or maybe even just attention. Not very many, though. And most people who don’t actually have sz don’t know how to fake it very well. Most of the front-liners in public health (including the VA) are on the lookout for this stuff and won’t be fooled for long.

The people who get diagnosed on tumblr are faking

So true though, in the past things were a lot worse. Still bad though, you can’t hospitalize someone without them being dangerous which kind of defeats the purpose of a hospital. If a hospital were to make you better, why would you have to be dangerous or suicidal? My dad is actually lobbying to change this :slight_smile: I called 911 recently luckily he came home just in time to tell the police that my mom was ok he said they would just take her to jail and hold her in a cell until the county commissioner would say there wasn’t cause for a hospitalization–since she is not a dangerous person, just has chronic schizophrenia. Which is why the mental health system is broken here.

My father truly loves my mom. They are still married. He is trying to get her help but is at odds with a system that doesn’t help people with schizophrenia unless they are dangerous criminals.

Feel like I was born under a rock. Or maybe I’m just too old… What is tumblr? Is it like face book or instagram?

Ok. I googled and found out on wikipedia. Blogs and stuff.

It would be god damn fucking hard as hell to fake your way into a full diagnosis. You’d have to have the full scope knowledge of a psychiatrist at 18-21, understand the pathology, the characteristics that increase the likelihood of development, positive and negative symptoms, you’d have to be very familiar with actual schizophrenics to understand their cadence, posturing, thought processes, so many things you’d have to take into consideration.

It would be like staging a bank robbery, only instead of a massive fortune, you receive a guaranteed but nigh-unlivable income that you lose if you ever get full time work, and you have to keep up this persona constantly, during regular meetings, and to do that you have to understand the different phases and progression, the effects of medication, you have to actually take the medication, because if you don’t they will force you. You have to actually fake a complete psychotic break, which isn’t just a short public outburst, you’d have to go to the hospital and pretend to slowly get stable on medication, and many hospitals are not very nice places.

If you’re willing to do all this, you probably needed the medical help anyway, and you are probably severely disabled in some way.

Sometimes i feel like I do’nt have it even when I taste the fruit of the labor produced by my symptoms, I can feel denial of my illness at times when things are calmer. I would like to get the ssdi soon which I am working on which is an upside to the terrible outcomes that symptoms can produce.

My appointment for ssdi is coming up. I kind of feel like a leech for taking it. Reminds me of my pastor making fun of people always expecting things to be given to them, he would say " Gimmy gimmy, my names jimmy".

I don’t know about this, I think recently things have gotten better. People with mental illnesses in the past were often committed (against their will) to asylums and often ignored once inside the walls. People now can get treatment out of hospitals and are given the chance to be normal hard working society members (if possible). Drugs have made it better for those of us with Schizophrenia, we can somewhat control our disorder, but not as well as we would like. It’s not a cure for Schizophrenia but treatment/medications do help a great deal and people in the past didn’t have this option.

There’s more of a risk of people not thinking they have SZ. Stigma would keep the fakers out though.