Quote:
Originally Posted by medicalfox
I thought watching a movie on schizophrenia would be comforting because I figured I could relate to it well like how I relate to this forum. It ended up being the opposite and making me very sad watching it because I related to that girl in the movie too well, especially in the beginning. I have voices tell me false things like my boyfriend cheats on me, everyone hates me, ect. just like the main character in the movie and I believe it because they are so influencing and I do terrible decisions based on what they say like wanting to separate myself from everyone. I felt bad seeing how the voices told her about the lies of her boyfriend cheating, her smashing things, etc. because I do that too. I generally try to keep my symptoms to myself to try to be as functional as possible, but I can't always hide my symptoms and ignore them.
My boyfriend had a good question though. In the movie they mentioned recovering schizophrenics and he was surprised that some schizophrenics can become symptom less. He wanted to know how a schizophrenic would know they were recovered if they always take meds, would they have to stop and find out the hard way? I couldn't answer his question since I never met anyone who was seriously ill with schizophrenia become symptom less. I'm assuming this is more common in people that have a more milder case of schizophrenia.
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People are generally considered recovered when they no longer have symptoms or have them very intermittently whether they are on meds or not....the criteria are different for different research studies though...some of them require things like employment or relationships as indicators of functional recovery. But I can tell you the way my doctor handled things you have to have 6 months symptom free on meds then you slowly taper off them. Most of his patients had sz. The tapering process is very long like 6 months or more even from a low dose of AP so if you're going to relapse it's likely to happen during the taper then you just go back to a higher dose. I don't have sz but I had a month and a half of psychosis....at 1 year we tried tapering and I felt unbelievably angry and was filled with anxiety so we stopped. I told him we'd try again in a year because that followed the British model. A year later I was afraid I would feel the same anger and did not want to try...he spent at least half our appointment explaining to me why I should go off the meds. I was terrified....it is actually my first post of PC. I had never actually heard of anyone recovering except from brief psychotic disorder which is 1 month or less. I didn't want to relapse. It wasn't worth it because it had taken a full year to feel well again. But somehow I ended up doing it anyway...just one more try and it worked. I am two months off the meds now and feeling great.