I spent a day with people w/ SCHIZOPHRENIA

schizophrenia a mental disorder in which a person interprets reality abnormally typically resulting in a combination of hallucinations like hearing voices or seeing things that aren't there delusions consisting of debilitating paranoia and disordered thinking that impairs daily functioning the oldest evidence of a disorder closely resembling schizophrenia can be found in documents dating back to egypt in 1550 bce early theories assumed that this mental disorder was caused by evil possession of the body and the appropriate treatment was exercising the demons today schizophrenia is known to affect about 20 million people worldwide with symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions usually first showing themselves between ages 16 and 30. my name is anthony padilla and today i'm going to be sitting down with people who have schizophrenia to learn the truth about this heavily misunderstood disorder do those living with schizophrenia simply have a unique perception of the world that usually goes without hindrance or are the hallucinations and delusions that accompany this disorder far too intense and incapacitating to to find a moment of peace forcing these individuals to feel isolated and shunned to the dark corners of society [Music] hello cecilia hello jorge hey what's going on cody hey there thank you so much for coming on here and teaching me about the world of schizophrenia thank you so much for having me how would you describe yourself someone with schizophrenia someone who perceives the world a unique way i would describe myself as like wary of what's going on around me i say this just to myself i consider myself neurotic that's something that only you could call yourself yes a person living with schizophrenia a person with schizophrenia a schizophrenic a psychotic a person with psychosis i answer to all the above in general what does schizophrenia entail i deal with visual hallucinations auditory hallucinations paranoia and delusions and those i think are the four main components of schizophrenia i'm someone who sees hears and feels things that aren't there for me i hallucinate different characters one of my most common that i hallucinate and the one i'm hallucinating for the longest is a clown very similar to the older adaptation of stephen king's head let me just say wasn't a fun time when they made a remake oh yeah you were like you were already dealing with that and then you had to see the billboards everywhere you went i laugh at my life like a dark comedy like when you see a clown 24 7 you kind of have to i mean they're supposed to make you laugh but i'm sure sometimes it does not make you laugh no no are there different types of schizophrenia recently schizophrenia has been recategorized as a spectrum whereas when i was diagnosed it was like three to five different types undifferentiated schizophrenia basically means that i showed symptoms of more than one type some people who have schizophrenia uh live with delusions uh which is having a false belief uh the difference with a delusion versus a hallucination is a hallucination is more of a a sensory type of thing so again like seeing or hearing or feeling something but then a delusion is believing something that is not true when i talk about hallucinations people are like oh you know i have a voice inside my head tells me what to do and right my conscience people don't realize that when i have auditory hallucinations it's more like it's happening around me so like a voice will be right here next to my ear or across the hall or in another room i'm yelling whispering and it's something i register as a sound it registers to you and your brain as if it's an actual sound and not not a thought exactly you hear things in your in your ears when i say in my ears i mean like you hear things like auditorily that aren't just in your thoughts it feels so intense and so distressing it feels like an external force is coming in and telling me these things i have like these associations where i turn into different people there's like there's ones that are like very protective ones that i feel like are dangerous ones that i feel like just don't know where they are and they just ask like they literally will have this blank face and be like where am i who are you and it distresses everyone so you'll see these different types of people i see them here like right in front of me it's like a gallery view like on mobile phones or something but like it's like it feels like it's behind me is it almost like you have a vr headset if you've ever tried one of those on and you see it like displayed in front of you floating yeah kind of do you remember how old you were when you first started experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia and do you remember what that felt like my first hallucination was a very shadowy figure that my parents would refer to as mr blob man it was this shadowy figure that would come out of the closet at night and i didn't think anything was like uniquely different with me or whatnot and neither did my parents i mean what five-year-old isn't scared of the closet right yeah people are like oh it's the boogeyman everyone feels like they see when i got older in high school these the what i was seeing the shadowy figure started becoming more realistic ended up morphing into what is now the clown and also i started hearing staticky whispers in my ears as well one of the other uh characters that i just need is a young girl for example and she holds a knife and sometimes i i would feel her stab me with a knife as well you would actually feel it would it feel like as real as anything else in reality it is something that is very jarring i know in college i would struggle particularly when i was taking tests when with these hallucinations because stress really induces psychosis and sometimes i wouldn't even be able to see the paper in front of my face because i'll be hallucinating too much and the stabbing also will become very intense it'll be a very sharp pain and it'll be localized i was in the front door and i heard this voice just telling me you're gonna do great today and you're you're fine you know just go to bed and you'll be fine and i was probably like 12. it felt comforting at first like at first it was good i was about 19 when it started happening and it's really weird going your whole life and then you've learned what reality is and then all of a sudden these things start completely altering your perception of reality absolutely and i think that's why it's so easy to be delusional because you're like well it's happening now so why you know why would i believe that my reality just changed all of a sudden i was so delusional that i thought i had a superpower i thought i was actually reading people's minds after my car accident i had a delusion that everything happening around me was actually part of a dream i was having in a coma was that kind of like a sense of derealization yeah everything around me felt fake and then the voices would add to that by trying to tell me that you know i wasn't really where i thought i was and that my mom and wife were waiting for me to wake back up it was also the time where they tried to convince me that the only way to get back to my real life was to end this life did you worry that there might be something seriously wrong with you when you started experiencing these things to be quite honest my first thoughts was i think that i was possessed and the reason why i thought that i was possessed is because well young young children aren't taught about psychosis early on and that's why we need to be teaching about mental health and brain health and talking about having those difficult conversations about psychosis much earlier on because i could have gotten treatment earlier and i wouldn't have felt so scared or misinterpreted my hallucinations as being possessed so when you realize that you weren't possessed were you like oh it's just schizophrenia that's great i don't think anyone said the phrase just schizophrenic yeah yeah oh just schizophrenia can you recall your most intense schizophrenia related experience i was walking through central park and i saw like these two heads one was named earl and one was a nicola earl was like the gruff sort of like batman figured one and it was like terrifying at some points it felt like like a demon was possessing me or something like that that eventually led to a paranoia of like the outdoors the trees would talk to me the plants would talk to me if it was a big tree it'd be like i'm gonna fall on you and i'm gonna kill you it's just the general feeling of anxiety when you're like anything could happen at any given moment and if a tree falls on you and it kills you that's pretty bad so you know let's let's put that thought into your head you would see these things that could harm you and then you would hear them telling you that they were going to harm you there was this one occasion where the faceless people that i was seeing regularly one of the faceless people came to me and handed me a pair of scissors and told me to use it to take my own life and i had the scissors in my hand and that's what i remember i look back at that and it's so surreal because i know that the scissors weren't in my hand but i do not remember getting them i don't remember anything past the the faceless person bringing me the scissors you don't remember picking them up they might as well have handed it to you literally the thing that frightens me is looking back and not being able to be like well of course you got up you know like there's no recollection in my brain before we continue learning about the world of schizophrenia if there are two people standing in front of me one of them is a hallucination i can't tell which one is real or not the only thing that i have a difficult time differentiating if it's real or not is i hallucinate spiders as well i hallucinate large spiders i just wanted to take a moment to say that i really appreciate all of you keeping the comments on these videos so empathetic and for encouraging all the guests in this series to feel so comfortable sharing their extremely vulnerable experiences in front of millions of people this series would not be possible without you and if you want to see me talk with others with misunderstood disorders conditions and syndromes like dissociative identity disorder borderline personality disorder and tourette syndrome i'll include some links up in this corner for you right at your fingertips now back to the world of schizophrenia how accurate do you think those schizophrenia simulation videos are that are floating around youtube as i'm talking you're going to hear voices in the background and i want you to try to pay attention to what i'm saying i think that the audio uh simulations are probably more accurate than the visual ones it's just very difficult to really show what uh it's like to have visual hallucinations you can't really simulate the feeling of not knowing if it's real or not how real do hallucinations and these feelings seem to you can you easily differentiate between reality and hallucinations the best way for me to put it is that if there are two people standing in front of me one of them is a hallucination i can't tell which one is real or not oh so you'll see the same details in their face and their eyes and expressions and the way they speak to you and the way they respond to you that's actually changed for me before medication i used to see things like faceless people and what i would call demons and like shadow people and like really frightening things more of what you'd see in like a horror movie exactly yeah and like for that it was almost easier for my brain to be like okay well maybe like that doesn't fit there you know for me my hallucinations are a bit stagnant so sometimes they stay in one place for too long or they glitch out as well the only thing that i have a difficult time differentiating if it's real or not is i hallucinate spiders as well i hallucinate large spiders those are i can tell aren't real because also a lot of my hallucinations don't belong in everyday life you know like you're not going to see a giant spider walking down the street that's not something you know you see in your typical day like see a lot here in new york but you don't see that do you typically tell people when you're having hallucinations and describe it to them or is that something that you kind of reserve i don't typically say when i'm hallucinating or where i'm hallucinating especially when i'm giving talks i've realized when i started my advocacy and giving talks people would ask if i was hallucinating the clown and if so you know where is the clown and unfortunately i would realize that if i said the the clown wasn't like in a certain corner of the room well everyone's head will turn to that corner of the room yeah they want to know if they see it too yeah yeah but that's that's very dangerous to do for someone's psyche because then you have real life then interacting with your hallucination and that's that's why i don't tell people where my hallucinations are anymore when you experience hallucinations and schizophrenia-related symptoms is there anything that helps you get through those moments i drown a lot of the voices out with music i'd like touch the walls i'd always like touch railings on stairs almost like you have to feel something in reality to to kind of ground yourself yes i use my phone to identify visual hallucinations so i was talking to someone for about 30 minutes one day out in public and i pulled out my phone to look at the time but i had my camera pulled up and the person was in front of me but not on my camera it didn't translate to the device exactly it's and i still use this all the time and not once has it trans like transferred onto my phone so i found this to be a really successful tool and there's been some awkward situations where i end up recording people who are actually there but um yeah yeah but like that's a really good way for me to tell because you know people always ask me like well just you know go shake their hand or something and for me there's been awkward situations where i like grab someone's arm and they've been real and i'm like oh you have to describe that to them now usually what happens is i'll grab someone realize they're real and run away out of embarrassment because i can't i can't explain what's happening in that time when were you diagnosed and how did you react to finding out that you were officially diagnosed with schizophrenia i wasn't diagnosed until i was about 21. but now i've kind of really embraced the diagnosis getting the diagnosis meant getting medication and getting treatment and getting a psychiatrist and getting the help that i needed to be able to do this to be able to talk to you today to be able to talk to hundreds of thousands of people on social media you know what are some common reactions you get when you tell people that you have schizophrenia people get scared i've even talked to people for a couple weeks before telling them and then once i tell them they're afraid when i was first diagnosed and i first started talking about schizophrenia i used to treat it like that skeleton in the closet and then it was like this big deal when i would tell someone but now it's more of like a you know a matter of fact type of thing it's it's not the thing that defines me it you know it i don't want to lessen you know the weight of having schizophrenia but not not treating it like this it's a big scary thing when you're telling someone it makes it maybe the person hearing it thinking of it less of a big scary thing right almost the more casual you are about it the more casual they feel about hearing that right right are there any terms that are generally found to be offensive in relation to schizophrenia i remember back in elementary school people would throw out the word schizo like it was nothing when people are usually referring to someone as the psycho or a schizo they're saying in a derogatory way referring usually to if someone is being erratic or being scary or being violent and that's part of the reason why i don't use the words psycho or schizo when i in my personal advocacy do you ever feel like people underestimate what you are capable of because of your disorder all the time and often we're underestimated or our very valid ambitions are pushed off as delusions of grandeur or person not getting that support or being taken seriously just because that they have schizophrenia we have dreams and hopes just like everyone else we're people too are there any dangerous aspects to having schizophrenia people need to realize it's more dangerous for the person than other people around them there's this idea in the media because when you see a schizophrenic person in the media what are they doing harming other people oh yeah they're almost always violent it's way more likely for a person with schizophrenia to hurt themselves than to hurt someone else not that it's impossible because when you're delusional and scared anything could happen and like you said it can be dangerous but i think more for the person experiencing it than the people around them everyone asks they're like would you ever attack a hallucination or have you ever harmed someone because you were trying to attack a hallucination and my thought process is if you saw what i hallucinated you would not ask if i would try to attack it why is that before when it was faceless people or demons like yeah i'm not gonna try to punch a demon or like like what am i what am i gonna do i'm way more likely to be fearful than dangerous right you're gonna go hide in the corner not go at it face to face i i would consider myself a decent fighter like i box a little bit but ain't no way i'm gonna throw down with a demon like no no day am i going to try to run away exactly exactly how do you wish society would perceive and treat people with schizophrenia i already have paranoia as it is that like someone i know is going to watch this and be like that's not true you're full and then like someone else that i don't know and then it's just like a bunch of other people and then even the voices in my head are probably gonna be like you shouldn't have done that you shouldn't have done that you are deserving of speaking about your experiences and people want to learn from your experiences they're not looking for cold hard scientific facts people are watching to learn about how you feel and your feelings are always true i want to talk about something that really affected me and made me feel really down at some point was the youtuber etika because like he he you know about his story right yeah he um distanced himself from his friends and started to distance himself from the from the reality that like he was just going he was going out of line of his of his usual self and he had mania he probably didn't have schizoaffective disorder he had mania for sure that's something that i can really relate with and that's something that really it really makes me sad that oh wow it really makes me sad that that happened because like we really need to talk about mental health and we really need to talk about how we really need to talk about how people are told like you can't cry like i am right now you're told that you can't express yourself when you can't have feelings that you can't there can't be anything wrong with you it's not true or that being manic is the crazy disorder or something like that like you look at an etika and all the things he was saying you look at how he was obsessed with the number nine i was obsessed with the number three you look at how he's like you look at like um how he was trying to put connections and things and how he was trying to talk about the issues that was really affecting him and people took him as a joke and then there's the people that were formulating things about him and talking to for him talking for him i think that's really really strong of you to say that and talk about how mental health needs to be discussed more and how we shouldn't shun people for for expressing a cry for help and we shouldn't push people away when really people like you when you're experiencing these things just want to be listened to and understood yeah sabrina wants to know how you like people to help you when you're having an episode i like the person to stay calm you know don't overreact so my response to that is not to overreact also be there for the person uh a lot of times when i would open up about my hallucinations earlier on people will want to know exactly what the clown looks like all right where it was and all that make sure you're focusing more on the person instead of like the trying to visualize what they're visualizing and remember that even though the things that they're experiencing like the clown or a delusion hallucination or not even though that's not real the fear and the commit and the confusion and the frustration that's real so my wife has had to live with me now for so many years with this diagnosis and what she's realized helps me the best isn't pointing out that i'm hallucinating it isn't trying to justify the hallucination it's distracting me so instead of saying like it's okay don't worry it's gonna be it's better off saying like treating things as if they're normal and it helps bring you back up to normalcy yeah i would rather someone act like what i'm seeing or hearing isn't even there because when people do that if there's even a moment of clarity like if i'm delusional and i have even a moment of clarity i'll be like wait why aren't they acknowledging this other person if there's anyone watching who thinks that they might have schizophrenia but are too nervous to talk with anyone about it due to the extreme negative stigma surrounding it is there anything that you'd want to say to them schizophrenia is not a death sentence it really isn't you could have a beautiful wonderful fulfilling life and still happen to have the diagnosis of schizophrenia it hasn't taken away um the things that i the things that are beautiful in life and yes i've had to take quite a few different detours in in my life because of schizophrenia i've learned a lot about myself but i am very very grateful to myself as well especially as someone who has survived a suicide attempt in three new year attempts that i'm so grateful that i didn't give up because it did get better what do you think the biggest misconception is surrounding schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder that everyone sees and hears things all the time and it's like you're crazy and you're like nightmare nightmare nightmare but like it's not it's not like that all the time if you take the right medication if you take if you have the right therapy it can just be mitigated to a minimum and it's like you feel like a normal person people really oftenly confuse schizophrenia and did which um you've done an episode about which is disassociative identity disorder which used to be known as multiple personality disorders so and i think that's where the confusion comes you know when we first started the episode i was talking about how people always said you know the voices are in your head where i had to explain the voices are more external and i think it comes from that idea that people think you know the voices are happening in my head are alternate personalities and so there's there's still a lot of confusion between did and schizophrenia so i think you know you doing two separate episodes it's gonna really really open that up to a lot of people so i appreciate that all right you got five seconds to shout out to promote anything you want directly in the camera go on tick tock and youtube and be sure to check out my motivational speaking website codygreen.com follow me at nikola thousand follow empty on low socials and donate to the trevor project if you want to learn more about students with psychosis follow us on instagram and facebook thank you so much cecilia i feel like i understand the world of schizophrenia just a little bit more thank you so much for having me and helping giving a voice for our community after spending the day with these people with schizophrenia i've come to understand just how much some people's perception of the world may be different from ours and how imperative it is to consider this before assuming everyone's reality is the same as our own see you later bye guys press a like [Music] me and my wife aren't organized i don't have scissors in the place they're supposed to be i wouldn't i would i would have had to rummage like me and my wife own a house now and even even with our lives more put together i still don't know where the [ __ ] scissors are at all it's in the middle drawer maybe exactly one of the six drum drawers we just bought a house there's six junk drawers in my house like it could be in any of them

Channel: AnthonyPadilla

Views: 1,365,064

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Id: K8mpJuB4RDs

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020