A little about my experiences with psychosis and schizophrenia
Ok. Well, firstly, let me say that I am really excited to be writing this. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, recently, but also nearly 10 years ago. There have been periods I’ve taken medication, but for the most part I have gone without medication. Anyway, I am a writer, but because of disclosure concerns I’m not totally ‘out’ or open about being schizophrenic. I have mentioned it online before and have told friends, and well because of my many episodes, many people know about it. But I thought I would share some of the bizarre thoughts I’ve had and a little information on what it feels like to go through an episode of psychosis by describing one. I am in my early 30’s and I was in denial for a long time. I still don’t want to believe it. But after my last psychotic break I’m finally coming to terms and I think I’m eventually going to start talking about it openly and possibly advocating and writing about it; I’m not sure yet. I think it’s fascinating, and I want to share with people but the stigma sucks and I still have hope to maybe try some jobs for which disclosing myself as a schizophrenic might exclude me from getting the job. Anyway, here’s one of the many examples I have of delusion: I was working for a property owner at an apartment complex. I worked in property management, doing mostly landscaping and snow removal. I had a woman landlord who I worked directly for and she managed the properties and reported to the owner of the complex. Now, while I was working for them, I began to get paranoid. I thought that this landlady was actually the mother of the owner and they had some grand scheme going whereby they didn’t tell people they were related. I thought she was the “Mother” as in she was the head of the crime family. So she wasn’t just the landlady, she was a crime boss. Her German last name was a front, of course, because she was really Mexican—I thought she was the head of a Latin crime syndicate. Her son’s name was a cover too(why they would change their names and ethnicity makes no sense whatsoever—in my delusion I thought that because the town I live is a good portion German that they were trying to be German and hide that they were minorities. So, and of course this is part of the delusion, I was an undercover cop. Yes, my parents had placed me into this apartment complex—I was working for the police department indirectly through them. So, my parents helping me find an apartment was all a front, I was actually an undercover police officer and my cover was that my parent’s helped me out. So there was no trace of my link back to the police department. So like, I was a cop, but I really wasn’t a cop. So I thought that I was living in this apartment complex run by a Latin Crime syndicate, working for them undercover as a cop. I remember one day I drove with the landlady to buy some carpet for apartments and I thought I was being sent with her for her to find out if I was a cop or not. And I was never told I was a cop…so as the delusion formed in my mind, I thought I was coming to know my identity as a cop, I was convinced of it. So I was working for these people but it was like me against them—I thought I was like sent in to get information on how they ran the business…then I had some real bizarre shit—I thought someone from the police department was controlling me, like I was a tool placed into the complex. They had this technology that they could load me up with energy and when I went to sleep I would unleash all this mind power that would blow everyone’s mind. So they used that as a last resort when they couldn’t make a case against the people, they loaded me up and bombed the whole place with this high frequency mind bomb that screwed everyone’s brain up. So yeah, that’s just one scenario I had. I have a lot more material. I think I may start using it as material for my fiction writing like Philip K. Dick did.