Did I ever have schizophrenia?

I'm so confused. I don't even believe in the labels/classification system, but honestly I built a big part of my identity on being a successful unmedicated schizophrenic and that is the last official diagnosis I had before I left the system. Now I'm going through the DSM trying to work out what the hell I had, and if I did indeed ever have sz, and if maybe my clinical negligence case is actually unfounded because maybe I did have something approaching it and how can so many doctors in so many countries be so ****ing wrong??

This is the DSM criteria for schizophrenia:
I don't know. My immediate thought about a lot of things is that they are somehow connected to me. Part of this is my spiritual belief that everything is interconnected. Part of it is downright paranoia, which may be part of trauma or may be nuttery. I don't know. The Olympics security has been freaking me the **** out for the past few weeks and I have to constantly remind myself that they're not coming after me or watching me. I used to believe that the university I attended was "out to get me" because they were so ****ing discriminatory, but maybe it was just institutional blindness rather than them coming after me?? I used to think I was very intelligent, but then I only got an upper second class degree and nearly didn't pass the Bar. Was that a delusion? The doctors always treated it as such.

Yeah, I totally have all of this. I see visual stuff all the time, which I call synesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia) but the doctors always called hallucinations. I hear voices, they're my own Greek chorus and they're often friendly, sometimes annoying, sometimes mean -- just like real people. I can feel my rapists touching me very often, but I think that is from trauma. I also smell and hear more real things than normal people, usually when I point the stuff out other people acknowledge it's a real smell/sound.

No. Except when I'm tired and can't maintain my English. I do talk to myself though, except I think a lot of people do that.

I stopped talking both after I was raped (each time) and after the ECT I was made to have. I also continue to stop talking on occasion. I am also extremely flexible/a human pretzel. I can put my legs behind my head and do all kinds of crazy yoga **** without trying. Sometimes I squish myself into tiny places the less flexible amongst us could not fit into, such as the shelf below my closet. Why is that a symptom of sz? I don't understand the flexibility thing.

Nobody has ever judged my fluency in my native language, only in my second language. When I first moved to the UK, I had never before lived in an environment where English was my primary language to function. So I'm not sure. I don't think ESL stuff should count, but do they count it?? I also take a long time to think before I talk, but I think that's from the legal training and not from a disease. We legal beagles are coached to be reflective and speak minimalistically.

Yes, definitely. I find it very difficult to make eye contact and I don't show a nice range of emotions. Like Homer Simpsons says, I have two emotions: angry and hungry. I use Greek body language, so I'm told, I guess because Greek people use a hell of a lot of body language and when I was living there I picked it up and really enjoyed it. The expressiveness freaks out the British people, though.

I'm not sure. I am a young person, isn't this the phase of our lives where we all do this anyway? Our friends change, our interests change, etc. This certainly happened to me.

****ing hell, I have FOUR voices that converse with each other and with me. Aren't voices for conversing?

No. None of these. I don't think I could have got where I am if I suffered from these. Except maybe I have poor concentration/am very scatty.

Hrm. I was always accused of this. It's certainly try that around the time I was diagnosed at age 18-ish, I stopped doing so well in school as I had always done and I have never got back there. But I was accepted to Oxford at 16, so I was at one point achieving academically at the very highest level that only a tiny portion of the population ever does. Do the psychs hold me to this very high standard for life? I've never figured out if the function decline is a result of some illness, or the "treatment" I was made to take, or the trauma I suffered. But I never really had many friends and have only just started my career, so I don't know how to judge those.

I have had many of the "symptoms" my entire life. The voices and visual/sensory hallucinations are present at all times.

try not to overanalyze every bit.

but with that said
you are lucky not to have cognitive symptoms.
those are one of my biggest downfalls.

if you were to list your symptoms from most (or worse) to least (or not as bad) what would they be concerning your dx?

for example MINE are:

1. delusions
2. voices/cognitive symptoms
3. asociality

i could go on but some need to be on one number together like #2 has. because they are equally bad.
but you get the idea...

I guess it would be:

1. Affective flattening/asociality
2. paranoia
3. distraction from the hallucinations

I dunno. I feel like I must analyse everything right now. Is it worth it to sue? Why did this happen to me? Why am I saddled with the dx for life? What went wrong, that I am no longer so academically capable?

I really understand your POV on the universal interconnectedness. I've had quite a bit of cognitive dissonance over my spirituality over the past year... Did I adopt that perspective thanks to my mental illness or is it a subjective reality like we all experience? And if it's the latter, how can most things be considered a mental illness? Aren't we all deluded, to a degree, because no one can see the world in the same image as the next person? It boggles my ****ing mind.

I've been questioning my own mental state in the same way you have... Mainly because I've never been to a psychologist. So I'm in this weird middle ground of uncertainty. So I understand where you are right now -- In that same uncertainty thanks to the incompetence of your previous professionals.
It's incredible, though, how similarly we function yet our symptoms are quite different. I am more than likely Schizoaffective if anything because Bipolar symptoms still heavily influence me but my psychosis & the negative symptoms still persist without having an episode. But even though I'm usually going through symptoms, it doesn't impede my functioning to a ridiculous degree unless I have a very serious stressor compounding everything. My ASPD & manic symptoms together are what do me in.

1. Hallucinationatory delusions (experiencing a hallucination/distortion which leads me to form a delusion about its presence. they're much more freaky & intense)
2. Avolition/Cognitive symptoms (disorganised thinking, poor concentration, difficulty integrating thoughts feelings & behaviour.)
3. Regular delusions

heres a thread i found on schizophrenia.com called: " If you recover 100%, will your schizophrenic "history" affect your future?"

here: http://www.schizophrenia.com:8080/ji...63147&tstart=0

Newtus, that link yields me an error message.

I already know the answer though. I can't practice law in my own country because of the dx, so I know that it's affecting my future permanently.

im sorry about that.

what are you planning then?

Whenever anyone recovers from sz, the argument is made that he or she was misdx'd to begin with and never had sz at all.

Yeah when I went off all the drugs and shocked the last pdoc by not going absolutely out of my mind, he decided I could never have had sz and started wondering whether I had borderline personality disorder. I was like . . . **** no, see you later fool. And never looked back. Except now I'm looking back.

Also, in any other branch of medicine a misdiagnosis that lead to FIVE YEARS of wrongful treatment would not be dismissed so lightly. There would be at least an investigation/review. Not so for us nutters, though.

not to dismiss personality disorders. but theres supposedly no real treatment for them. theyre seen at something that IS YOU not something thats just disordered and can be fixed and is apart of you. personality disorders are seen AS YOU. they are harder to erase off your records if they are a misdiagnosis. they are seen as untreatable even though some people get medication.

i knew someone once that was seen as a slut and a boozer for having borderline personality disorder. thats with the person i knew. thats when i learned and read about those afterwards.

I've always known borderline personality as the diagnosis given to women who are uncooperative with their psychiatrists.

see thats dumb.
i hope i never get that. ive been uncooperative many times with 1 or 2 of them.

i also dont do drugs and never had sex before so they better not flush me away with that. i was always afraid of that dx ONLY BECAUSE i was female and i DID watch girl interrupted

my wife always says that borderline personality disorder is the medical term they give you for pain in the *****.

Well, I have always been spectacular at giving arse pain, and I was really desperate for the psychs to recognise that rare talent. What can I say?

Also, what slang word for buttocks has five letters?

thats WHAT I SAID TO MYSELF.
i figured it was the female genitalia after that.

no i meant the buttocks word. apparently pc didn't like the way i had written it, so they censored it and that's just how many asterisks they decided to put!

You know what they say about great minds, eh

I like that we can't say a s s, but we can say arse. PC is proving that the Brits are just inherently more eloquent.

you bet your arse they are!

Wait wait what slang word for FEMALE GENITALS has five letters? ???

I swear I am going to learn a new word out of this even if I have to make it up.

*is counting letters*.....i don't know! does newtus? help us newtus!

I guess there's *****, but I don't think PC censors that.

ETA: p u s s y and I guess it does! Bizarre.

I cried on the phone to my mum earlier about all the **** they put in my medical records and my terrible grades and my not being able to find work. She's getting better at being sympathetic.