I’ll be the first to tell you that recovery from schizophrenia or any other major mental illness is a very long process, it can take years to get stable, if actual stability is even real. It’s important to work at it though and be cognizant of the steps you are taking to improve your mental health. I’d even go so far as to say it’s not so much a process but a journey with the ultimate goal of feeling comfortable in your own skin and in society. I think I’m at a pretty good point right now, my meds are doing their job for the most part, I haven’t had an episode in about 3 months and I’m slowly ..read more

For a long time, I actively rebelled against disclosing any information about my schizophrenia, even avoiding the subject matter altogether so that I wouldn’t have to tell people I had it. I remember bringing one of my books to a friend at a bar one night, and an older woman struck up a conversation with me about it. Disclosing was pretty unavoidable due to the book being specifically about my psychotic break. When she asked me if I had schizophrenia and I said yes, she actively recoiled and shook her head as if to get a rotten taste out of her mouth. In another instance, I was on a first dat ..read more

I know how easy it is to fall into a spiral of beating yourself up. One minute you’re thinking about something completely innocuous and then that will somehow trigger a memory of something you did or said that you regret, and before you know it you’re overanalyzing and replaying this situation that you can’t change even if you wanted to. Sometimes this spiral goes on for a long time. Sometimes it can wreck your mood and your self-esteem for the entire rest of the day. It’s probably something you never even meant to do either, like saying something that seemed fine at the time, but, looking ba ..read more

There’s a lot of fear surrounding mental hospitals for various reasons. Whether it’s the stigma surrounding the unmedicated psychiatric patient, or the numerous media portraying either haunted and abandoned psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric hospitals as essentially prisons full of crazy people, a lot of people are freaked out by the very mention of them. There seems to be a lot of misinformation about what exactly a psychiatric hospital is and what it’s for though. The main purpose of psychiatric hospitals is to provide, essentially a resting and rehabilitation place for people struggling ..read more

Not only does it take work to find stability, but also to maintain it once you’ve found your footing. Sometimes what’s required is a strict regimen of being faithful to your meds as well as your personal work or therapy. You’ll find that it’s incredibly easy to slip up on one or another of these things and the result is an inevitable falling back into psychosis. You may think, somewhere along the way that you feel better and you may even forget that you have a mental illness. As a result you may become more lax on taking care of yourself and taking your meds but then, in a matter of time, thi ..read more

It’s no mystery why a good amount of people living with schizophrenia or other major mental illnesses also suffer from depression, sometimes severe. Be it a function of the illness itself or just the weight of dealing with the extreme circumstances of mental illness, depression is a very real concern. Mood disorders and mental illness are essentially dance partners in that they move together and affect one another in different ways. Symptoms of one disorder could trigger symptoms of the other and finding a balance where you can be stable is a long process. It takes a tremendous amount of self ..read more

The process of finding a relative stability after a diagnosis of schizophrenia or any other major mental illness can take a long time, sometimes years. You have to contend with the symptoms of your illness (which may never go away completely), the stigma and the emotional toll of having mental illness, the various side effects of your meds, and relearning how to be a functional member of society. I consider myself mostly stable (after 17 years) but I still have blips a few times a year, as I imagine most people in our situation do. I still suffer from bad paranoia and anxiety, and I still fal ..read more

Along with our daily regimen of medication for schizophrenia comes something that can be debilitating for a lot of people, the side effects. Of course the benefit of the meds far outweighs the trouble we have to go through as a result of the side effects but still, it’s a sad situation that we have to go through these things at all. I can remember, near the beginning, when I had just gotten out of the hospital and I was on a med called Abilify. While it worked pretty well for the delusions and the voices it gave me a horrible condition called akathisia where I felt like I was unable to sit st ..read more

A common delusion among people with schizophrenia is that they have somehow been ordained by God to carry a message or to do something important. They believe they are either prophets, angels or God himself. In this thinking they are subsumed with the idea that they have been chosen for a higher purpose and have been given these visions and voices to lead them on a path of righteousness. Many times they will focus on religious messages, scripture or iconography as a means to find direction for their ‘mission”. I am no stranger to this set of beliefs. In 2006 I took an impromptu trip to the Un ..read more

Everyone’s deserving of love right? There’s no one on this earth that deserves to be alone but for people with schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses, love and relationships can be incredibly hard to, not only build, but also sustain for a variety of reasons. First, and I hate to say it but there still exists a pretty unshakeable stigma around the ‘schizophrenia’ label. A lot of people associate that word with danger, instability, or even violence, and while the fact remains that more people with schizophrenia, in fact, happen to become victims of violent crime than perpetrators, the ..read more