Schizoaffective bios... let's share.

Hi guys... I thought it might be a good idea to share here how schizoaffective has impacted on our lives, and how the symptoms affect us, and various other issues, like prejudice etc.

So... I'll start off.

I was always an "odd" kid, and was diagnosed autistic when I was about three or four. My Dad refused to accept the diagnoses, because I was a very bright kid (when I finally started talking) and the family ignored some of my odder behaviours... particularly because my oddness was eclipsed by my mother's illness. She was either schizophrenic or bipolar. They never managed to diagnose her before her suicide, when I was nineteen.

My first "psychotic" break, I suppose, was when I was sixteen. I'll post a description later in this thread... for now suffice it to say that I thought I was literally "away with the faeries"... one of my many coping mechanisms to assure myself that I wasn't really mad, no matter the evidence.

I was very frightened of being considered like my mother, so I did a great deal of running... I went to university and blew my chances of being taken seriously as an academic when I told my tutor that I'd seen the devil playing fiddle outside the covered market. I did manage to graduate with a good degree, but never got an academic reference to go further. On the other hand, I did manage to have a son, who has been the light of my life. I was twenty four when he was born, and went directly into post partum psychoses. Fortunately it was a peculiarly positive kind of psychoses, I thought my son was an angel, and could communicate with me telepathically, could fly when I was sleeping, etc. I actually saw him flying towards me on several occasions.

About five or six months after his birth I went into a corresponding depression... the only thing that kept me going was the fact that I loved my son.

Since I was in my mid to late teens I'd developed the certainty that I was being observed, and followed... usually by the English government, occasionally by aliens... I was aware that most people wouldn't believe me, so I tried not to say anything. At my Grandad's funeral I was convinced that someone had put a bug in his coffin... one of my cousins, to calm me down, told me that he'd removed the bug and flushed it down the toilet. I was twenty at the time.

After a while I got involved in protest politics, which did lend some credence to my idea I was being spied on. I moved house I think on average every year to a year and a half, in order to escape my neighbours (who had been persuaded to spy on me, or so I thought) and to get away from the bugs that had been planted around the house. I used to go round whereever I lived with a portable radio tuned between frequencies on fm, listening for spikes in the white noise, convinced that these squeals marked the spot where the house had been bugged. On one occasion I climbed up into the attic, and "discovered" a bug right above the bed where my husband and I slept. (This was my second husband, he was very tolerant of my peculiarities.) He told me to put masking tape over the spot the "camera" was, and that he'd get a friend of his, who was an electrician, to remove the bugs. Of course my husband knew there weren't bugs there, but he was trying to make me feel safe.

In the past I've taken apart light switches, plugs, telephone connections, fuse boxes, looking for bugs. I'm amazed I didn't kill myself through electrocution.

On top of these paranoid thoughts, there was the problem that I couldn't have mirrors in the house. Other things beside my reflection used to look out at me. In a house I lived with a fixed mirror I simply hung a shawl over it. Therefore I've never become properly acquainted with the art of makeup, and my hair is fairly hit and miss. Now I have a small shaving mirror, which I look into when I have to. This is a major improvement since being on antipsychotics.

My curtains have been shut for decades. Only recently have I been able to allow guests into my house.

Visual hallucinations are generally quite fleeting... shadows of people from the corner of my eye, quick vivid flashes of colour and movement that disappear in a heart beat. Sometimes they become more corporeal. Sounds range from random words, to insults, to people laughing about me, commenting on my failures etc. When I worked in an office every time someone answered the phone, I could hear the person on the other side sneering at and criticising me. This made it impossible for me to trust any of my colleagues or work with them. It didn't help that I was genuinely being bullied in my last office.

I've had sensory hallucinations as well, touch, smell. My favourite aural hallucinations though are when I hear beautiful music... I don't get that one too often. Usually it's people swearing at me in a variety of languages.

When I've been very bad I've been unable to leave the home, and can't tell the difference between things that really happened and things I dreamt/hallucinated.

Anti psychotics have made a huge difference to my quality of life. I don't have the hallucinations anymore, and the paranoid delusions have greatly reduced in intensity.

Manic symptoms have been rarer than depressive symptoms... when manic I've given away large sums of money, and taken my son on exciting trips to different countries... Europe and Africa. It might sound weird, but my last manic episode occured after my husband died. I "realised" I was on a mission from God (won't bore you with the embarassing details) and that the world was going to end soon. That being the case I had to spend all my money in order to do the most good before the end came.

I spent all my money, the world didn't end, and it finally hit me that I wasn't going to see my husband again in the near future. That's when depression really hit. Losing my subsequent job didn't help much either.

When I was eighteen, twenty three and thirty six I made suicide attempts... I don't remember the last one. I was so crazy at the time... my husband was the only person who could bring me back. I should have been hospitalised at least twice (possibly more) but my husband took heroic efforts to save me from that eventuality. I'm amazed I've escaped it since he died (four years ago.)

Finally being diagnosed, and having meds to help cope with the worst of my symptoms has been life transforming. In the end being diagnosed schizoaffective has been a very positive thing. Not everybody has to know it, but at least I now have a name for the nameless opression that's overshadowed my life since I was sixteen.

[size=1][font face=tahoma]Though I am not schizoaffective & don't have a lot of input to add, I have been doing a lot of reading around the forums of disorders I am not particularly affected by. I must say, though, that you are tremendously brave for posting the history of essentially your entire struggle!! Hopefully this goes to help someone with their own & to get the help they need to improve their quality of life. : )

Long story short. Im 16 years old. I thought everyone could read my mind. I saw leeches on my skin and picked them off until I had big bloody spots. And I ofyen hear voices telling me their going to kill me. I attempted to kill my brother because I believed he was an alien sent to kill me. That is how I ended up in a mental hospital. But thankfully my medicine has kept me basically straightened out since.

Well please bare with me in trying to describe my journey and the length. I don't expect for everyone to read in full detail.

Well here it goes from what I can try and remember. I was verbally abused by my mom, dad, brother. Physically abused by my brother which was always dismissed by my parents. Since his doctor told them it was due to his accident and that was that. Want to clearfiy that dad did showed love but it was towards the end of his fight with cancer.

As a teen I felt that evil spirits were watching and living in my house or any where I was. They wanted to do me harm. After the brith of my wonderful daughter at age 24 I even knew I incountered one of the evil spirits by trying to pull my child and choking me at the same time. I also dealt with the evil inside of me. To confirm I it I would look in the mirror and see myself but it was evil. At night I was terrifed that my baby girl would become evil as well. I would laugh at my mother-in-laws death, look forward to the whole experince of making arrangements of the funeral of my father and many other things. Which now I feel really bad about. Parnaoid I have reread and rewritting over three times. Uggh.

As for voices I heard my grandfather always trying to say he was there to protect me and help. Others were the negative verbal abuse (my mom, brother and dad). The ones I did not recognize agreed to them and tell me to harm myself or others. Although I don't understand how I did not carry the harm out. I got close to stabbing one of the so many guys I saw. I could imagin exactly how to carry it out in great detail with vision of the blood and so forth. At the same time something trying to stop me from fear of jail. In my head was a battle of evil and good. Thank GOD the good won.

I was always told and asked why I was always having a smile on my face. I hide depression, visions, voices, odd behavior or thoughts from everyone. Only the guys that I would wind up trying to get affection from would see the depression and suicidal thoughts. My husband reminds me of many situiations where cousins, random guys I would end up with telling him "she is crazy, you can have her, I don't want anything to do with her."

As for the bipolar mania, depression, spedning habits, special powers or abilities, creative, acting in odd behaviours, being sexual at high levels and many other things I can't think of right now. Sure you all know what they may be.

Which now brings me to the present and the last 6 or months of my life. At this time I feel what is I guess as normal as I can be. Hopefully not in my mind, if you know what I mean. It all took place cause my husband finally sat me down and said enough is enough. I had done so much wrong to him and my daughter. I did things that he tells me which I remember some but not all. I find scripts from psych that I was prescribed but don't recall taking or seeing psych. This is all too scary for me. I don't remember how I first saw a psych. I do remember at one point I could not take the voices, visions, and all anymore. I did ask him to take me to get help. So I decided I would have to come to terms and ask questions, educate myself and try to find out or accept that I am schizoaffective/bipolar I along with all other diagnosies. Cause I am tired of fighting with all this inside and hurting the only family that does love me which is husband and daughter. I have now caused so much pain to her that she has to see a counsler to deal with her problems along with helping us have a normal realtionship. Which I fight daily of knowig if it is even normal. I quesiton everything my thoughts, feelings, actions everyday.

Thanks in advanced for reading. All I can say is "Is this really true? Do I really have this illness? Can it be a mistake? Can I feel normal like I do right now and still have this? I have not had these syptoms to the degree I had before so I am unsure of myself. I know no one here can medically answer but just wondering if anyone feels or understands what I am going through. Please forgive me for such a long description.

I've recently been diagnosed Bipolar 1 because of psychotic experiences, but the Pdoc decided I must be manic on the basis of the psychosis. I'm not so sure. I'm actually totally confused right now.
Unlike many, I didn't have an abused childhood. I was given the freedom of the town (the gate was open) at age 2 and a welcome home hiding later.
I never did appreciate institutions - hospitals hurt when I got stitched up, nursery schools lumped me with nasty competitive kids who far outnumbered the toys in the sand pit.
Schools expected me to perform bizarre tasks like endlessly repeat meaningless phrases about numbers, then rote learn them in my after school play time.
Actually, yes, I did have a traumatic childhood, having to comply (against my will) with rules and punishments which I vehemently resented.

It wasn't until I was around 18 and doing military training that I began to question whether what I was seeing and hearing was true. It was initially about whether I was interpreting people correctly.
Were they laughing with me or at me? Were they shouting at me because they were encouraging me, or angry at me?
During Marines training, something snapped. I threw myself into everything we did. If it was combat skills, I was a killing machine. If it was fitness, I was out front every time, all the time. I didn't care if I got killed or hurt anyone in the process. I was angry. I had lost my value in life. Ridiculous things amused me. Then nothing amused me. Bomb blasts that scared the life out of my patrol didn't wake me from sleep.

Fast forward 25 years.
Fairies enter the room and after a while of my watching them, they lead me to a jungle gym and show me a rope. I know what to do. It won't be painful. I feel so at peace, and the fairies are with me. A child walks up to me and gives me a hug. The fairies vanish (faders!)

Orchestras play in the night. I get up and listen to detect which direction it is coming from, but my wife urges me to get back to bed - there are no orchestras.
It's autumn, and I walk past a tree covered in beautiful pink blossoms. Huh? Rewind. Check again - stark, bare tree. Ugh! I was so enjoying that walk.
I have an urge to fly from the top balcony in an auditorium, but the hall is too small for decent aerobatics, so I resist the forces pulling me to stand on the rail.
There are too few instruments in our church band. I add the needed pieces in my head, and compose the score for them. The sound I create is far fuller and richer than the sound coming up from the stage. My music frees people of their masks and clothes, and I see into their souls as they sit there, listening to the sermon. My music continues, and the preacher is drowned out in my head by soul-washing music. God's word subordinate to man made music? Grandiose? He is gracious and the lightening bolt misses me.

Many other strange experiences of unity with other people, music making colours, voices shouting in my left ear (they leave the right alone, cos they know it hurts more in the left one).

You know, except for the deadly hallucinations (sirens), they are all really quite innocuous, and don't worry me. What worries me most is that my brain is scrambled much of the time, and that makes it impossible to plan and organise the tiniest things in life.

I'm looking and hoping that some day I will get functional enough to work again.

Hey Mokie, I just wanted to say how brave you are to have shared your story in such painful detail. It takes a brave mother to face the fact that they hurt their child. I worry about what my illness may have done to my son. If you're a little kid living with someone who genuinely believes they're being hunted by demons, how do you process that? It's all but impossible... My son sees a school nurse, but that's mainly to do with his asperger's syndrome. But I can't help but worry... he missed so much schooling because I moved about, and he had such a crazy childhood, watching me hunting for listening devices... I wonder what I exposed him too. I do think that our children can suffer a lot. You have done just the right thing by getting your daughter the help she needs, the counselling etc. And she must know that you love her, that in itself is terribly healing.

Regarding whether you can be ill, despite your feeling better now... I think you can. I'm not a doctor, but I think your improvement is down to the treatment you've had. The child abuse you suffered needs to be dealt with as well, I hope you have some kind of therapy for that.

Tsunami Surfer, you write so eloquently about your experiences. Somewhere in the fracture of our perceptions there is a truth... I wish I could get at it. It's interesting how many of us hear music... I wish I could write it down. I know what you mean about the difficulty getting organised. Apparently it's called executive disfunction disorder, and is common amongst people on the schizophrenic spectrum. I hope also that you'll be able to go back to work one day. In the mean time, look after yourself. Improvement can be incremental. With persistence, I'm sure you can get there.

Thanks mgran. It feels good to hear from others that I am brave. Especially right now when I find it so difficult to say anything. The paranoia of if I am saying, explaining, expressing and so forth, correctly. As for my daughter, well she tnow tells me how much she missed and needed me to be her mom. That does hurt but I fight to be here for her now. I can't take back the past. As my husband says "You could not control the past, now you have to look towards the future". It's amazing how he is so forgiving and how my daughter now does not always say "Can't wait till I am 18, so I can move out and all cause of you". Those words were always so strong and painful. Now I enjoy being with her as much as she wants and even spending time with her friends. Still have our ups and downs but with much love to share between us. Hope your son is doing fine and that you too can enjoy time with him like I do with her.

OK, here's an account of my first fully fledged psychotic break. It's edited from something I wrote, back when I was trying to make sense of it through... I don't know, magical realism or something. I've removed some details, since the original account is so specific that you could probably find me on google earth otherwise. There are some little notes in the text, I've added these so my readers on PC can understand a bit more about the context.

So, bear in mind that when I wrote the following account I was still psychotic, though obviously coherent enough to string a narrative together, and my views don't necessarily reflect what I believe now. I think the account probably gives you a good idea what an "episode" is like.

"When I was sixteen I spent some time in Sligo. My mother was living at Rosses Point, which called itself a village, even though it was just a straggly long string of houses that faced across the water, looking to Knocknarea. Queen Mab is said to be buried up there. Locally it's known as the "witch's tit", amongst other honorifics, because the cairn on top of the mountain does bear an unfortunate resemblance to a nipple. Also, it's bloody cold as a witch's tit up there. For centuries folks have been making regular trips up the mountain, and laying a stone on top of the cairn. They really REALLY want to make sure she stays buried. *(note... Mab was a mad Irish queen, sometimes considered a vampire or demon, and of very ill repute.) You'll hear people talk of "Sligo Time," because time often moves differently there. Part of this can be explained scientifically. When the sun goes down, there is no land mass in the way, the ocean stretches unbroken all the way to America, and so you get an extra half hour or so of dusk at the end of the day. And when the sun comes up in the morning you can sit and watch a ghost sunrise as the light bounces off the water at far distances, shining on the West, a pale reflection of the day break.

Despite these scientific explanations though, time does indeed do weird things there, that have no easy rational.

The house my mother lived in at the time was one of the old "cotter" houses with a corridor down the middle, so you could open front and back in an emergency and let any troop through. *(a troop is another term for the wild hunt, or the Slua Dubh, spiritual beings considered either faeries or demons, that ride the night and can drive people mad... that's the legend anyway.) That didn't happen when I was there. Sometimes a troop might pass overhead, but you'd just keep your head down and keep walking, if you were caught out in it, all the while praying under your breath, if you had any sense.

It seems there are a lot of such troops in the area, it's been mentioned in poetry through the centuries. The locals have learned to live with it, even to the design of their cottages. That's why the houses face the sea... so that the doors face in the right direction when the Sidhe *(Irish for the Old or Ancient... the idea being that these were the "people" who lived in Ireland before humans came.) come through, flowing over the mountain and the sea. Nobody would think of excorcising them... these beings have been there a lot longer than we have, and God put them there. We're fellow tennants of the land. If we had any complaints about our ancient neighbours, the only solution was to take them up with the Landlord.

One evening, coming back from the last day of the school, I got distracted talking to someone (folks are friendly in Ireland, and you can have conversations with random strangers that go on far longer than they would over here.) I realised it was heading towards dusk, so I made my apologies, and started to walk as briskly as I could the rest of the way from Sligo town to Rosses' Point. By the time I could see the string of houses I realised it was dark. It gets very dark there. You can feel it.

The sea is to the left of me, the fields to the right, and the little street facing the water across from Mab's tomb seems to be getting further and further away. There's an increasing weight to the darkness, like Something is pushing to come through. I don't want to start running, in case the Something notices me, and starts to chase me... but I'm walking increasingly swiftly, and my heart's beating like a hammer in my chest.

Then, with a real sense of relief, I see a young woman walking towards me, head down, her features hidden by her long hair. I don't recognise her, but I think I'll just pass words with her, to take the edge of my fear.

Then, too suddenly, she is so close I can see her clearly. She lifts her head, and the hair blows back. I look into my own face.

At which point the weight behind the darkness breaks through, and the image shatters, and I can't remember anything. It doesn't want to be remembered.

The next thing I know, I'm back home, in bed, my mother's sitting next to me, she's been praying. When she sees I'm awake, she leans over and kisses me, starts talking, but I can't understand a word she's saying. In fact, I can't understand a word anyone's saying, and apparently I don't speak a word anyone else can understand either.

Various different people come in praying over me, sprinkling holy water. The old grannies are sitting in the living room praying the rosary, and I just lie there like a log. In the end it's my mother who gets through to me. She didn't leave me for longer than to visit the bathroom. She holds me up and makes me sup soup. She gets water down me. She prays quietly, non stop. One day (I think three days later) I simply woke up knowing I was hungry and sat up in bed. The world made sense again. I could speak to people, and whatever happened in the darkness on the road, I forgot about enough that I could live with it."

There's more to that story, but that's as much as I can share. Hopefully it will help someone realise what an incident feels like, how real it is, and how much part of our "real" lives the psychosis can be. It's imbedded in your experience... it's not just a bad dream you can shake off or forget. It really happened... On the one hand, I know that the Sidhe, and and the Host are not real... on the other hand, I know too well that they are.

I also dealt with demons during my psychotic episodes. They told me I was either the devil himself, the son of perdition, or Jesus' evil brother.

Had an almost cult like religious bringing up. None of this happened during my childhood, because the stress of being 20 and in college and falling out of love with someone and trying to join a church ended up triggering something in my genes.

I remember what it was like to be sane. I wish I could return.

I'm sorry, hartbroken. (((hug))) Just because you haven't been able to return yet doesn't mean that it will never happen. Maybe if you look at the little steps along the way it will seem less daunting.

Okay, I'm feeling really naked and vulnerable right now... somebody else post something, so I'm not the only person on this thread admitting to a thoroughly loony episode!

Don't forget I shared too. Was so scared, paranoid but now feel some relief to letting some of this out. Since know one around me understands what it is I live with everyday.

I'm feeling a bit better today, Mokie... I've been dealing with quite some stress at the moment, and a medication change. I couldn't get to voluntary work today, and couldn't get to an appointment to discuss my son's schooling. I had to rearrange the latter, and I'm convinced that the school are talking about me behind my back. But it will get better. I'm talking to the doctor later today, thank God.

God knows your doctor? Talk about hot connections!!! Voluntary work I think is a lot better than involuntary work. I know the "behind your back feeling". Hope you get that one sorted out (I haven't yet).

I saw my gynaecologist/psychiatrist yesterday and she very kindly offered me a hospital bed for an indefinite period. I felt I couldn't impose on her generosity when there were other more deserving people. She transformed into something sinister before my eyes and explained simply that the alternative would be involuntary commitment where I would have no control over my treatment... (Nurse Ratched alarm bells ring, blended with the shriek music from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho).
My cause wasn't aided by the workmen using jack hammers outside the window, causing me to hold my ears in agony, and the jolly lithium that causes me to tremble. She thought I was a total nutter. She wants to take away my companions who tell me I am special and warn me of neurological espionage. They dropped me on that one - we didn't see it coming.

So now I have to go in and become a second hand smoker (patients at the psych hospital chain smoke and there is no escape) and get fat on antipsychotics and lack of gym facilities. But I am taking in my phone, so I can access PC Fit thumbs, here we come....

I hope you find some peace in the hospital and your mind quiets down a bit for you. It's never fun to go in, but once I'm there, I know I am safer and can begin to heal. I hope this will be your experience as well. Let us know how you're doing.

Hey Tsunami, I hope you're feeling better soon... it must be very frightening to be faced with involuntary hospitalisation. I've been having nightmares about it... it's one of my big fears. Would you be able to keep in touch with us? You know we all have your back.

Hi all. Your shared stories are very traumatic and you are all brave and I am glad you are all still here fighting the illness. My story doesn't seem as poignant , though it is part of who I am and I would like to share it in this safe place.

My illness begins at 19. I had began feeling as though I couldn't understand what people were saying and had trouble reading situations and body language.Mostly I took things negatively as it had something to do with me.While family and friends said nothing out of the ordinary was happening, to me their body language,voice inflection and word usage left me confused. I began hear friends voices in my head, clear as a bell and it was always them cursing and belittling me. I already had low self esteem and my friends were the source of the little I had. I guess I tried fighting it alone for a while, even as the voices turned to more aggressive hate paired with killing myself. But they came and went, I always questioned my friends and its part of what drove them all away.

My cousin gets married and while there I transform people into other people and even talk to them as if their someone else and the large conspiracy delusions began on a minor scale. I believed my moms side of the family to be top level KKK members and me and my father were to be assasinated. I thought after the wedding they were gonna drive into a forest and have a cross burning, the most horrific of this day was my delusion that came at the dinner. They were serving "chicken" in my mind my family would take the meat of a deceased family member and serve them during special occasions so that they could be reincarnated through the next lines children. So there for I didn't eat anything prepared or made by the family. During the walk down the ile I paniced and though snipers were on the roof going to shoot and that planes above(outside wedding) were going to drop a bomb, I was about to get up then shared with my aunt what I was thinking, she some how conviced me to stay put. But everyone knew at that wedding that Adam was crazy.

From there I ended up on a few meds that didnt work and in a few short term institutions that didnt help.

Soon I was believing I could talk to stars and would stay outside all night in the desert cold(I couldnt feel the cold). I would believe I was Jesus reincarnated or some prophet and believed people to be worshiping me, I would pray at stop lights for them to change. Constantly I prayed. I walked the streets all hours of the night. Eventually I came to believe I was Muhammad , it was short lived as I transitioned into believing I was buddha and I had to walk forever until I fell over from exaustion and a tree would spring forth from me. My parents didn't understand what was happening so I was kicked out. I was homeless for two weeks and begged to come back. I wasn't as psycoitic as I would become. I decided I would move back to Indiana alone and in New Mexico I was kicked off a gray hound at the station I was full blown pyschotic believing people on the bus were arriving just for me asking an small shop attendant if an ex love of mine was around. I believed someone waiting in line was a ninja woman and was meant to be my mate so I began doing only what I can describe as perfectly executed kung fu(never had a lesson) the cops arrived they were genuinely scared. I used a walking stick which with my bags I had to leave at the station while they took me to give blood(forced is more like it) my drug screen was clear and they took me to a hospital attatched to the university. I spent a weekand half there and had to be released, while there I had delusions which I cant describe everyone was someone else, thats the best I can do. My parents drove from arizona to pick me up in new mexico and brought me back. A new delusion formed, IT was ALL for ME and I was king tut. All women were mine, men offered them to me along with their cars, though I turned down their offers, everyone was for me and loved me and the world was mine. TV began to seem live and my mind some how warped it to be about me,radio and movies too. The pattern to which people moved on the street or in their cars made sense to me, I began seeing a pattern of codes in all life. I could still talk to the stars but now they were aliens that only confirmed that I was king tut.

well there is a lot more but this is getting long....I ended up in jail where I was placed in the mentally ill unit....there the delusions and thoughts were broke and I came back to reality and had to face some charges for disturbing the peace and such. Yeah I had stopped traffic on a few occasions before this. I was put on medications youd know and have been free from such exoctic symtoms as long as I stay medicated. I have been considered disabled since I was 21 and since have dreamed of going to school and working again. More than anything I want a nice apartment where I can practice the different art disaplines I love and just be at peace.

Thank you for taking time out for me, I hope you gain percpective in who I am and where I come from.

- Mark Twain

Hi HolderoftheDove, I love your sig line. Thank you for sharing in so much detail your experience... I disagree with you, I actually think it's very poignant. I'm glad that your meds are holding you now, and that those psychotic thoughts have gone away. It's scary when you look back and see where you've come from.

hello. i am new in these parts and i want to thank you all, first of all, for sharing your stories. it is very brave of you to do so and i appreciate feeling less alone because you have been brave and shared here.

my adventures with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type) began when i was twelve years old. it was the summer puberty hit and i will never forget the day the voices moved in. and they have not left for long over the years. at first i dealt with just auditory things, mostly people, mixed bag of sex and age, and i got a lot of flack for talking to "myself" at school and in public. i remember clearly other kids laughing at me and asking each other who is she talking to. i got bullied on the school bus for it. a 12th grader would pull my hair and call me names and spit on me and nobody tried to stop her. finally i told my mom and the school put a stop to that. but i still got teased and left out of activities.

nobody understood me at all. i felt so alone.

and then the paranoia kicked in a couple of years later. i wasn't going to school much and the powers that be didn't like that. i had to see a psychiatrist for the first time and he proclaimed me to be healthy as a horse and told my parents to drag me to school no matter what i said or did. that didn't go over well. i kept making excuses to skip school or to come home early. it was torture being there with the voices and the fears.

at sixteen i blocked myself in my room using my mattress and box springs to block the windows. put up blankets and sheets and anything i could get my hands on to further block out the radiation i felt was coming in to get me and steal my thoughts and kill me. i started doing disgusting things like using excrement to plaster foil on my walls to further protect me. my room became a pigsty. i refused to let anybody in and talked very violently to my loved ones. i was afraid of them.

finally enough was enough and my parents dragged me to a psychiatrist again. this time the man listened to what little i would tell him and he suggested i drop out of school, consider community college, and he started me on prozac because he believed i was depressed.

so i dropped out, mom looked into a ged program at the community college for me that involved taking college level courses for credit toward a ged, and i took the prozac. i hoped it would protect me.

i was accepted into the ged program and mom and dad rented a dumpster and helped me clean up my room. i ended up taking the ged exam instead of doing the credits, but i started taking college level courses anyway at nearly 17 years of age. it was freedom. i loved it. i couldn't get enough of it. i got a part-time job. i volunteered at the animal shelter. i got my license and loved flying on the back roads blasting my radio. i shopped and shopped. what in the world was this about? and just when things couldn't be better or sharper or more clear i was lower than low. i dropped out of college and quit the job. i gave up.

i saw a psychologist who guessed i had ad/hd. and depression. so i was put on ritilan and paxil this time.

and now i was working on my second associate's degree and working and doing theatre productions and singing in a choir and volunteering again and i went to see my psychologist and i felt the words just flying out of my mouth and he smiled and stopped me and said you are manic, you have bipolar disorder.

so i went to the psychiatrist who prescribed the ritalin and paxil and he put me on lithium and took me off the other meds.

i graduated. mind you the voices were still with me. i just never told about them. took my two associate's and traded them for a bachelor's degree i nearly didn't finish. because i was flying through the first three semesters and i crashed hard on the last one and nearly didn't make it.

and then i fell apart completely after my parents took me home after graduation.

none of the foiling going up, but this time notebooks filled with ramblings and predictions and religiosity. singing choirs of angels in my room all around me. i knew everything. i hated myself. i would cry from the beauty of it all and weep in agony at the same time. i think my first mixed state. and oh do i hate mixed states. they are the bane of my existence. worse i think than even paranoia. paranoia is terrifying but it isn't the churning wrenching soul-shattering agony of a mixed state -- at least for me. for others paranoia is probably the worst. i mean only to speak for myself.

i ran away. i went to georgia. i tried to get a master's degree there. i figured if i could just leave it all behind it would be okay.

up down up down medium regular places in there at times, but the constant voices always there.

i got hospitalized for the first time in georgia. my first of eleven i believe it is. i do not like the hospital but i will go voluntarily when i can do that because it is much less irritating and i think i get treated a bit better in that situation.

lots of different combos of meds tried.

my parents rescued me again and brought me home and took good care of me.

back home i found a great psychiatrist who really worked with me to find a good med combo. but i was stupid and quit taking my meds more than once.

not long ago, about two years ago, my father was killed in a terrible car accident because a motorhome driven by a tourist ran a stop sign. i nearly lost my mother, too, that day. we had to move and i had to leave my entire support network behind. my mother passed away due to cancer complications about four months ago.

i am not sure how i have held it together as wella s i have these past two years. only hospitalized three times.

right now i am on the combination of geodon (60 mg), abilify (20 mg), and seroquel (200 mg). i take 1500 mg of depakote er. i am on 120 mg of cymbalta. and i have a prn for up to 1 mg of ativan daily if needed.

right now i'm a bit manic, experiencing the ever-present voices, and occasionally seeing things like maps and calendars and my thoughts written out in handwriting on the walls and ceilings. little paranoia. a lot of irritation.

i'm not sure if this is answering to the idea in the original post, but it is how my story plays out. there is, of course, a great deal more to say.

thank you for giving me a place to speak my bit.

Hi Rubysun, that was exactly the kind of honesty I hoped for in the first post... I hope it helped to get it "out there," sometimes expressing our experiences gives them, less power.

I'm so sorry you lost your parents... I lost my husband a few years ago, and it's one of the most traumatic things, to lose a loved one. To have lost both of them must have been awful. I hope you have a support network in place at the moment?

I also really want to commend you on your description of how you protected yourself in your room. That must have been a painful memory to revisit. I've ended up living in pigpens because I won't go out of the house when I'm very depressed and paranoid, and sometimes I'll just stay in my room as much as possible and use a bucket for a toilet, till the whole room stinks. That's always humiliated me, even when I'm doing it, and I try my hardest, when my son is home, to at least keep the toilet situation under control. When he's been visiting family I've been known to stay in my room for days on end. It's an awful feeling to imagine the whole world out to get you. Even if it's not true, it feels like it is.

I was thinking, since you've been through such trauma, that I hope you know you can always talk here, ask questions, express yourself. Everyone here is on your side. (((hug)))