A Day in the Life of a Paranoid Schizophrenic

It's 9:45 am when my mum comes into my room to wake me up. This is early for me. Despite my medication being quite sedating, I'm rarely asleep before 1 am. And because of the sedation, I need at least 10 hours sleep to be able to function properly all day. So I'm quite tired this morning. But I need to be up 'early' today, it's the day I go to the drop-in. I switch on my phone to check my emails. Nothing of interest. I manage to drag myself out of bed and go for a shower.

Whilst I'm in the shower, Dorothy starts talking to me. Dorothy is the voice I currently hear. Thankfully, she's also the only voice I hear at the moment. I've only been hearing her for a few months but she's very similar to other voices I've heard in the past - nasty. Dorothy tells me that satellites are watching me whilst I shower. It's not a pleasant thought, being watched in the shower, but I try and rationalise what she says by telling myself that even if satellites were watching me, they wouldn't be able to see me through the blind over the window.

Has Antipsychotic Medication Made Me Worse?

The first time I took psychotropic medication was when I was 18. I had been suffering with depression for about two years and I was finally given help in the form of a prescription for fluoxetine (Prozac). I was put on 20 mg and I found that it did nothing to me. It had no benefits and fortunately, I had no side effects. After a few months on it, I decided to stop taking it as I felt like I was wasting NHS resources taking something that did nothing to me.

My Story

My problems with my mental health started when I was 13. Not long after I started my third year of high school, I started suffering from depression. My problems worsened when I started being bullied, and this bullying lasted for three years. At 14, I started self-harming and just after this, I attempted suicide for the first time. Fortunately, the depression lifted after two years, but despite the improvement in my mental health, I couldn't cope with the bullying anymore. I decided to leave school after completing my GCSEs and instead of studying for A Levels, I opted to do an apprenticeship in computing.

Sorry for the Absence

You may or may not have noticed that I've been silent on the blog and Twitter front for a while. This has been for personal reasons but now I've decided to come back. A few people messaged me to ask me how I was during this time away and I'm really touched that some people noticed the absence and took the time to send me a message asking if I was OK. A huge thank you to those who did; it really meant a lot to me.

When Intrusive Thoughts turn Problematic

*Trigger Warning* This blog post talks openly about suicidal thoughts and other matters that could be triggering so please don't read any further if you are likely to be affected.

Everybody gets intrusive thoughts. It's the content and intensity of them that can turn them into a symptom of mental illness. Intrusive thoughts are, like the name suggests, a thought that intrudes into a person's mind that wasn't initiated by them. For example, a person could be standing at the top of a flight of stairs about to descend, when the thought, "I'm going to trip and fall down the stairs!" pops into their head. This is a fairly typical intrusive thought and provided the thought doesn't persist to a point where the person is too afraid to walk down the stairs, this isn't a symptom of mental illness. It's just a fleeting thought that the person can dismiss easily.

Ten Things Not to Say to a Person with Schizophrenia

I've seen a few of these types of blog post around, for various mental health problems, so I thought I'd do one for schizophrenia. These are ten things I've heard from people that, although sometimes said to try and help, have been extremely unhelpful.

An Interview on Radio 2

This afternoon, I did an interview on BBC Radio 2 about my experiences of being sectioned. The interview stemmed from a news story about how mental health patients sometimes have to travel hundreds of miles to receive care. That story can be read in full here. In January of this year, I had to travel 60 miles as that was where the nearest bed was. However, for this interview, they wanted my experiences of being sectioned, something that has happened to me three times.