hello-

i've been meaning to ask this question over here for a while. I usually post on the schizophrenia forum but i thought this would be a good place to ask this question.
I'll try to make this as short as i can. I have a tendancy to ramble on about this stuff. I dont even know if anyone will be able to answer my question, but it's worth a try i guess.

ok. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia about 1 year ago, when i was seventeen. I'd been diagnosed with many other things since i was 8 or 9, including depression, language processing disorder, anxiety, psychotic depression, OCD, ADD, etc.)
I've been having symptoms of schiz my whole life (started hearing voices and seeing things when i was about three or four) but things didn't get real bad until 2 years ago.

so...durring my childhood i heard voices and had visions on and off, but i didn;t really realize back then that it was abnormal, because it had been happening all my life. I also had a ton of trouble in school and making friends. Other kids always thought i was kind've weird and the school work was terribly hard for me. I've always gotten poor grades, no matter how hard i tried. I was sent to a private school when i entered 5th grade and from that point on, continued to frequently switch schools until i finally dropped out last year in 12 grade.

Anyways...when i was about 9, i started having severe fear and paranoia and anxiety which resulted in me having panic attacks many times every day. I'm trying to figure out if this was just part of being schizophrenic, because i know that schizophrenics can have severe anxiety and fears like this, or if this was more of an anxiety disorder. At the time that this first started going on, i was not really hearing voices or having visions.

I was afraid of everything--mostly other people trying to kill me and my family. I constantly worried that people were putting bombs outside my house, poisoning my food, hiding in my house waiting to jump out and kill me when i was alone.
But i also had other fears--fears of just freak accident happening, like car accidents, plane crashes, cancer, and i had the belief that i had a life-threatening food allergy. This resulted in my eating very little and only eating things i was familiar with. Still, 50% of the time, i would have a panic attack after eating, either because i thought i was allergic, or because i thought it had been poisoned.

Well, anyways..im wondering if these fears i've had are more like paranoid delusions seen in schizophrenia, or if this is similar to some kind of anxiety disorder.

The fear and panic attacks went on daily for the next 5 years or so, until i found the right meds and got most of it under control. These days, i still sometimes worry about such things, but i dont have panic attacks. And my worries are more of paranoid delusions, i guess you could say. I mostly spend my time thinking and worrying about the spies that follow me, and the government which is using me as an expariment, and that hollywood is an evil cult, trying to do me harm, and that everyone is against me, trying to break me more and %#@&#! me off.

thanks for any input. Sorry this thing got so long

-Becka