prose-n-scripts
Why being forced to hide psychotic symptoms is detrimental to recovery:
Hi! it’s your friendly neighborhood schizoaffective and i have a story to tell, a story that’s backed by research.
my psychotic symptoms were early onset. my earliest memory of psychotic symptoms was 6 years old, when my parents were changing the locks on the house and i had an intense belief that changing them would mean someone had broken into our house and hadn’t left. i believed my toys had human emotions and felt sad if i played with another toy, so i refused to buy new toys because i was so scared of making my toys sad.
i had a very flattened emotional response (which i would later learn is a symptom of schizophrenia), and in kindergarten and first grade when we learned about emotions, i learned to fake the look of emotional response. i learned how to put a smile on my face when i felt happy and to put a frown on my face when i felt sad. when i was alone, i would practice, but some days i was too tired to do it and i kept my face in the natural way: flat. it wasn’t that i wasn’t feeling emotions, i just couldn’t express them the way people wanted me to
during my elementary school years, i made up words constantly to communicate. i couldn’t form proper sentences, something was blocked in my brain and everything felt scattered and scrambled (disorganized thoughts and speech). my teachers broke that habit in me, not by helping me learn to organize my thoughts, but by teaching me not to speak unless i knew exactly what i was trying to say.
then came middle school and i started hallucinating and my delusions got worse. but everything i had learned from teachers and tv was that hallucinations are scary to people, and i didn’t want to be scary. i would be laughed at if i told anyone about my strong beliefs (delusions) so i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t tell anyone that i believed that the characters in my tv show were real and the government was hiding their existence and if they knew that i knew they’re real, they’d put me on a watch list. i didn’t tell anyone i was hearing sounds that came straight out of a horror movie. i hid that.
i hid it so well that i avoided treatment. i had an acute psychotic episode, and all i said was that i was having panic attacks. i didn’t tell anyone about the delusion that school was going to literally kill me, or that i heard blood curdling screams in the hallways and when i was trying to sleep at night. i avoided early intervention.
for other reasons that i won’t get into, i was put on seroquel as a mood stabilizer, but as many of you know, it’s also an antipsychotic. this was the first time in my life i felt some kind of relief from my symptoms. i didn’t connect the dots because my psychiatrist called it a mood stabilizer, not an antipsychotic, so i didn’t know why i was feeling better in those areas.
it wasn’t until 10th grade when i was taking a psychology class from a teacher i trusted that i connected the dots. by this time i knew i had psychosis. i had access to the internet and i had googled what was wrong with me, but it wasn’t until a class where he emphasized getting help that i thought ok, now i should bring it up.
by this point, i had had 2 more acute psychotic episodes that kept me out of school, but because i was taught to hide everything, i still didn’t tell anyone the real reason why i couldn’t function. “paralyzing panic attacks” became code for “whatever the real reason is that’s keeping him out of school”. but my teacher made me think i needed help, especially because we were learning about schizophrenia in class and i had a sneaking suspicion that i, someone with a family history of schizophrenia, had it.
i brought it up to my doctors and i was started on antipsychotics, this time with the official name of antipsychotics. but it was a bit too late. my psychiatrist told me that if we had caught it earlier, i may have reacted to treatment better.
i’ve been in treatment for years and the longest i’ve gone without an acute psychotic episode is 5 months. i’ve done my research and in patients with psychosis, the first few months after psychotic symptoms are present are vital to the treatment and recovery of the patient.
it’s not just, oh you won’t suffer as long, it’s literally you will have a better chance at recovery. if you catch psychosis in the prodromal stage, it can greatly reduce the chances of another psychotic episode happening.
by being taught to hide my illness from a young age, i lost the chance at having an easier recovery. yes i learned to confine myself to societal expectations and appear “normal”, but i caused myself more pain in the long run.
early intervention is key to an easier recovery, and i’m going to leave a few links to show you what i mean.
ted talk about early psychotic intervention
talking with a psychiatrist about early psychosis intervention
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