So I was diagnosed with brief psychotic disorder last year. My family started noticing there wasn't something quite right about me. They would question the way I talked, walked, my memory and my unusual behaviour. I've always been known by friends as "the eccentric one" but they thought this was going beyond eccentricity. I started getting really paranoid. That a secret society and people I knew were out to get me. I had really bizarre hallucinations as they're called. I would look in the mirror and I would see myself as a wolf. I told people but they never believed me. My mum started to get really worried saying "but there's obviously something not right about you in your head if you think this is all going on!". My friends also started noticing something wasn't right. But they are amazing friends... At my work place (a community farm) everyone, volunteers and staff and children gathered round me to help me when I was experiencing a horrific hallucination of a man in a cloak and knife. They were so kind. The other teenagers were saying "we won't let anyone hurt you".

I can't distinguish dreams from reality. I am good with my speech though. But occasionally I do get muddled up and I get these thought blocks. I feel like my thoughts are being stolen by this evil woman. There's even a video footage of me getting my words mixed up. Me and my friends had to make a video of our favourite film and about ourselves for this course. Suddenly my friends were all laughing their arses off. I couldn't figure out why. Then I realised I had mixed up my words because of the voices distracting me. It was pretty funny so I just laughed with them.

But anyway I just feel so alone. And I hate the stigma of psychosis. One person I know in a course said "let's make the robot (we're building an animatronic) psychotic so he'll want to kill everyone!" I was so pissed off at that. People tell me I need to not notice these people. But how can't I when I've had people telling me to kill myself because "we don't want you to breed so we don't have any more little schizos running around killing everyone". It hurts. It really hurts. I feel like my family don't understand just how terrifying this all is for me.

I also can't trust myself. People say my delusions aren't real. But to ME all these so called delusions, hallucinations, etc are real and scary!

For those who don't want to read all this, here's my symptoms as described by family and doctors:

Hallucinations (of all types but mostly voices)
Delusions
Thought blocks
Occasional sadness
Occasional speech mixups (this is one of my least predominant symptoms)
Pretty weak short term memory
Bizarre behaviour


So here I am now on Seroquel XL (originally I was on Risperidone). I'm slowly getting better. I think the best therapy has been my dog, cat and art. If you'd like to see my art just search for Art by Alicia Holt on Facebook or SuzukiShiba on DeviantART.

If you share any symptoms like this I'd really like to talk! I'm so sick of being alone on this subject.