What it’s like living with schizophrenia every day, when medication works and someone supports mentally. Do you still think about having it. Thank you.
It’s debilitating. I feel I can’t compete with people without schizophrenia. Although I’m intelligent, I’m not highly functional and have lots of anxiety and a feeling of disconnectedness from normality. Although it isn’t so bad sometimes, things will never be “normal”.
It’s a fight to stay in touch with reality. Reality always seems a little off. I think about being conscious and space time and movement and detail.
It’s like how much you can accept the fact that you can’t function normally while trying to get better about it. You need to accept it to get better and need to get better to accept it.
I struggle with delusional thinking, paranoia and the recovery process. It’s not hard for me right now to keep in touch with reality since I’m on meds, but I also suffer from anxiety. I don’t feel much of a cognitive decline, just a little memory loss, but it’s improving as time goes by.
I think about it everyday, really obsessed over it.
I used to be obsessed I used to think about it all the time but as time went on I don’t think about it as much and just live my life and do things to get by to the best of my ability.
Do you notice a lack of social skills from the norm? Like today at the psychosocial club there were two staff members flirting with each other and everything was coming so naturally for them. I’ve never been able to do that. Then again I’m younger than them so maybe I haven’t reached my social “prime” in life, but I constantly question if I ever will become so socially adept. I don’t think I will in the way that these two were talking. I’m good with words and stuff but not good at conversations. Maybe I need to put myself out there more.
I could have good conversations with the other people with mental illness though but it’s tough for me to talk in a normal way, especially to people with normal problems.
i kind of drift into an anxious state where I start grabbing at my empty pockets (lol i dunno if i do that but you catch my drift)…I become awkward. I don’t even worry if I have social anxiety anymore…I may have it, I may not. But I don’t have anxiety about my anxiety, other than I know it’s there and I know I need klonopin or else I get panic attacks.
I noticed I’m getting better at it, without much effort. I stopped caring if others think I’m crazy, I always liked being eccentric in a way, so thats easy for me. The other night went out with friends and I was saving something on my phone and someone was talking to me and I said “What?” really loud without noticing, everyone found it funny and laughed, but I realized it was completely out of place for me to do that. So it’s weird sometimes, but I manage.
Remember that “normal problems” are problems anyway, we tend to put ourselves out of the human equation but we’re in it.
I can tell you that as a mother to a diagnosed son-it is a VERY tough road to go down with someone. Your life may be very chaotic-especially if he is not on medication.
Read some old posts on this forum. Educate yourself on this illness. Be prepared.
I am on medication and doing fairly well. I come on here most days and discuss my illness, because I like fitting in. With my friends, I usually don’t talk about it unless I’m having a rough day or someone is asking a specific question.
But you really don’t seem to get how much this illness is going to change your life. You assume your family member will immediately find a med that works great, and he will stay on it, and your love and support will be enough. That is a faint possibility, but you need to prepare yourself for something more realistic. It took me eleven years to find a med that actually worked. Some of the meds made me suicudal, some made me hallucinate even worse, some made me totally delusional and some made me so high I ended up putting myself into horribly risky situations.
Which family member of yours has been diagnosed?