Like I said, almost every psychiatrist will see things the way you see them and accept your conditions. He will gladly put the term “schizophrenia” on your file and proceed to prescribe the drugs you want (olanzapine or risperidone or whatever). He will agree that you have a brain based, neutransmitter related condition with genetic factors associated with it. What you want and how you want others to perceive your problems is the general standard almost everywhere.

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I am MAD. It causes me to believe all kinds of things. I cannot help it. It is caused by a chemical.

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I have no problem exchanging info about whatever I have gone through or am going through. If people say hallucinations cannot be chronic or are non-existent, they are wrong. But you’re also on a website where people have faced serious damages because of psychiatric categorisations because there is a large distance between what their truth is and what has been forcibly stamped on them and it has caused them serious problems. So many articles have been written on it. The internet is replete with people making colourful videos on social media explaining all kinds of “personality disorders”, “mood disorders” and all sorts of other things with barely space for the practical aspects of what such terms do to people or their pitfalls. You will not face any resistance on the myriad of majority psychiatric sites, the 100s of comment sections on YouTube videos or almost any other majority space out there.

Like I said earlier, you have no problem with the term schizophrenia because you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by people who haven’t misused it, it is congruent with whatever your suffering is and you have no problem with the role of someone termed as a schizophrenic. It often doesn’t end with schizophrenia. The longer people spend in the psych system, the more terms get added onto them. The social impact, the legal impact, the medical impact of those terms can be devastating on people’s lives. You also end up inadvertently dragging the problems of one person onto another because they are termed the same when their truth is not the same.

For example, people will talk about “bipolar disorder”. Almost no one talks about the fact that psychiatric drug induced mania causes people to be termed that way. It’s a nasty practice in psychiatry that has caused so many people problems. What then comes with that? People assuming they’re psychotic, people assuming they go up and down, people giving them examples of “successful people with bipolar disorder” which it is not their truth and is nothing but damaging to them.

Similarly, you don’t want people to define your suffering, but the psychiatrist who writes your prescriptions regularly does that. Individuals such as yourself who are happy to call themselves schizophrenics just reinforce all of this. I see a lot of your comments and none of them are specific. They are verbose and flowery. You don’t say what your suffering specifically is and what it is that you want. From what I’ve gotten though, you want people to accept the fact that the chronic hallucinations you face are real, wishing them away won’t make them go away, the pills help you and you don’t like it when people criticise the drugs that work for you and stuff like that. Most people will do all that anyway. Almost every psychiatrist you go to will accept your conditions. The real world is on your side.

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A comment section anywhere is an instant arena. An artificial podium lit stadium filled with the jeering of thousands if you say something wrong or if I say something wrong. For that reason it becomes more embarrassing to leave a riposte unsaid. A stadium brings more of a challenge to look like a winner not a shamed loser. The setup only deals in argy bargy bickering and not inclusion. The trade is inherently loveless.

I could come back with winning lines, criticism of bits of logic with yet more logic. But I prefer to be a creature of feeling and sit in a real meadow of flowers with you as my friend.

I am sorry.

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Which aspect of your specific illness does who lambast? And why do you care since you have no interest in reading comments written by people who haven’t been through the exact same thing you have? Even two people categorised with “schizophrenia” do not have the same suffering. You might visually hallucinate bugs crawling on your skin. Someone else might hear the TV talking to them. Both your reasons for experiencing that might also be different.

I didn’t tell you to go away. I asked you why you’re here since you are uninterested about what people have to say if they haven’t been through the exact same thing you have.

Again, what aspects of your specific illness do people lambast?

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Let me ask a question.
Are you telling this poor schizophrenic to go away? I thought this website is for ALL people in the world who experience colourful mental suffering. Will the world’s Soteria houses have a poster on the door saying open to ALL those who are not hallucinating schizophrenics who think a bit differently?

“Do not define my suffering” should be the logo on Soteria houses doors and perhaps it could be the logo of this website.

If, to quote you, the majority of people on this website do not have my specific issue why do they lambast aspects of my specific illness? A condition they admit to having little or even zero lived experience of?

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Most people here do not have whatever specific issue you have. Not the commenters nor the article writers. They have their own issues which can be just as painful as yours. Yet you choose to engage with content they put out, you still respond to them telling them “do not define my suffering” because you’re obviously interested in the fact that you think they’re doing that.

If the only people you want to listen to are people who experience hallucinations everyday like you do, why even be on a website that has a majority which does not have that specific issue? You should keep yourself to websites that have an entire population of only people who experience hallucinations everyday and not bother about or engage with what the rest of humanity thinks or writes (including whichever psychiatrist writes your prescriptions because he/she doesn’t likely have your issue either).

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You call yourself schizophrenic because you’ve never had it misused against you. You’re lucky. Totally understand the fact that the chronic hallucinations you experience are torture. So are chronic obsessive-compulsive symptoms, hoarding (for others around them), crippling depression etc.

Since you’ve dealt with hallucinations for 2 decades now, it’s possible you’ll experience them for a long time. A psychiatrist once stated to me though that the “natural remission rate for those with “schizophrenia” is about 30%” (and yes, I will call it “schizophrenia” even if you want to call it your schizophrenia). If it’s true, I hope you eventually end up in the 30% and not the 70%.

Best wishes.

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Apologies for my cheeky schizophrenia standpoint. I celebrate everyone being allowed their difference.

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Well said, Ann! I second it!

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When I was a young folk, putting younger people “ahead of the cart” would have been at least “naive”. 🙂

There were no human rights, no dominance/preponderance of minors rights, no protection for mothers victims of domestic abuse. No consideration of the needs, rights, wants, needs, let alone value and wisdom, of those that because of age, were “put” aside.

Not enough consideration for minors who had to run away from their homes because of family abuse. I saw dozens of minors living on the street “sniffing” glue and solvents to “ease the pain”. Even though they were tougher than some of us who had “homes” we didn’t had to “run” from.

Even if one time, I had to call the police on my father, without shoes, running on the street, hoping the police were there, to answer MY call. Just that one time. I couldn’t call 911, I had to run to the local police station, in the middle of the night.

No protection and recognition of the rights of LGBTQ+. As a priest said: “You were born male or female, and that was it”. And he didn’t meant it in a bad way, years ago…

Being “gifted” was seeing as an obligation, a “privilege”, and not as a disadvantage in some cases, as it is now.

In a mixed sort of way, it makes me somewhat happy, that the community sees, fights, argues about the current, let alone future situation of those who will be left here after we are gone. That didn’t happen often enough back then.

No one came to comfort me, even from my own family when I did that…

Times have changed, and I am happy for that. For some of us, gone, and still here, it would have being motive of that, I think, we really didn’t talk about. How could we?.

We, as MIA and it’s community, didn’t fight, and then some, in vain. I can see just on the interest of “newer” generations.

It might seem small given the “problems” ahead, but, taking literary license, we did tried the best we could. We still do…

Without me taking credit for ALL of that, just, I did try, I am sorry if I couldn’t do better…

Thanks, I didn’t thought I would live long enough to see that: 30-40% of the things people care the MOST, refers specifically to the younger generations. Without the distinctions, like having no shoes, had then,and then some…

I am gratefull for that. And I wish, regardless of the outcome, that you, the younger generations have the best.

Your really deserve it.

As I said every time I could, you are and will…be…better than us.

There will be no other way, regardless of the outcome, I hope you know you will be, you will be…

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