Living with Schizoaffective Disorder (Experiencing Psychosis, Paranoid Delusions and Hallucinations)
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: Special Books by Special Kids
Views: 12,400,383
Rating: 4.963254 out of 5
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Id: GU8VmJsX6-s
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Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)
Published: Mon Sep 09 2019
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I've been hospitalized twice for manic psychosis from my Bipolar Disorder. Really fucking traumatic shit, and there's a lot of bleedover between what he's describing and what I experienced.
When they were discussing the "talking about the delusions reinforces them," I can completely relate to that. When I describe what I've experienced to other people, I can feel my anxiety increase, and it starts to feel like it's all happening again. I still regard a lot of what I experienced during my psychosis as 'real,' even though I know they are delusions or hallucinations. I'll catch myself thinking back on those memories and trying to rationalize them.
It's really hard to separate those delusions out as 'not real,' because there's no discernible difference. The shit feels like it's actually happening.
I really feel for this guy.
"In this moment, even though you communicated it to me that you know it's not real, do you still believe it to be true?"
"Yeah. But I'm working on it."
Now that's some resilience.
The level of resiliency this man has is amazing. respect to this guy.
I had a best friend growing up. All the way from when we were 13 to when we were in our mid 20’s. He started acting strangely one night when we were at a theme park when we were both about 16. I thought he was being silly and messing around, because he was saying strange things that didn’t make sense and his sentences were essentially just random words mixed together. We would often act silly or weird around each other so I thought nothing of it, except he was still acting that way hours later. I was scared and confused, but he was back to normal the next day. Over the next 6 months this started happening more and more, one second he was normal, the next he seemed “out of his mind”. We were smoking lots of weed every weekend, so eventually his mom thought he must have smoked some “laced weed” and damaged his brain. She cut him off from all of his friends and sent him to a rehab, then eventually he was sent to all sorts of different doctors and hospitals.... about 2 years after the initial theme park incident he was diagnosed as schizo-affective.
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Eventually, once his mom realized that weed hadn’t caused this she sort of chilled out and started letting him see his friends again. I hadn’t seen him in about a year at this point and we had only spoken online on RuneScape, which we both played often. Sadly, I was really the only friend who came back because everyone else was sort of scared away. It was really hard to watch because he had always been really popular, really good looking, really funny, lots of girlfriends and lots of friends in general. Now almost everyone was gone.
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But he was still my best friend so we continued to hang out. Over the next the next couple years his doctors put him on all sorts of different meds to try and get him back to normal, some of them worked but had absolutely horrible side effects that didn’t seem to be worth it. This whole situation started getting extremely hard for me as a teenager because sometimes I felt like my best friend had died, but I couldn’t grieve because I would see glimpses of his old self or he would be back to normal at days at a time.
I started seeing a therapist so I could process the feelings I had about all of this and so I could try to be a better friend too. I was the only person he had left, but we still had lots of fun together.
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Eventually after high school and as I started working through college his mother bought a small condo for him to live in. She didn’t want him to be alone, so she told me that if I would live there with him and help him out she would only charge me $300/month. Things were great for the first few years! It was a total “bro-pad”, video games, computers and TV’s everywhere, our fat cat on our comfy couch and my best friend, all in a really nice condo that neither of us could have ever afforded in a different situation.
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Things were looking up for us, his meds were working really well, he was now normal (or back to his old self) about 80% of the time and my career was going great, I was making good money for someone my age and my friend was even able to get a job down the road. Eventually things started getting bad again though, my friend lost his job because his meds just stopped working one day and he couldn’t maintain his composure at work (this sometimes happens with people on anti psychotics, a medication that’s worked for years can just stop one day). After he lost his job he started hanging out with some really sketchy people that I didn’t feel comfortable having in our condo. This was our fun, safe little cave... and now these sketchy “unknowns” started hanging out there at all hours of the day or night. This made me very uncomfortable. Eventually my friend started doing harder drugs, I never complained because I did drugs too and it never really became an issue... at least not until he tried meth.
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Once he started smoking meth I felt like I lost him and the whole thing became too much for me. You think meth heads are hard to handle? They’re nothing compared to someone with a serious psychological disorder smoking meth. The meth and his illness mixed together to create a horrible, barely lucid condition that he was in almost all the time now. He wasn’t making any sense at all, the fact that I couldn’t understand him started to make him angry. One time he got extremely upset and threw a glass blender at me. My face and leg got cut.
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He started having all sorts of random people over, even more than before. Really bad people, people he didn’t even know. There was days where I had to be up for work the next day, I wake up at 2am to the TV blasting at full volume in the living room with 6 people there that I’ve never even seen, all smoking meth. My friend wasn’t even there. I threatened to call the police and got them all out.... but it never stopped, he kept bringing people over, the people didn’t even care about him. My friend was too nice of a guy and these people could see he was desperate for friends, it was easy for them to take advantage of him to find a place to crash or smoke meth. Stuff started going missing or would be broken when I got home some days.... I had to install security cameras around the condo and put a deadbolt on my bedroom door. I stopped keeping any valuables outside of my room. I was constantly kicking random people out of our condo and my friend resented that.
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The last straw was when he started stealing from me. He sold all 18 of my PS4 games to gamestop, he didn’t even get $20. He stole cash. He stole vintage action figures from my collection. He stole my weed or broke my glass bongs/pipes. He stole my new tablet, he broke my computer, he shattered my antique black panther statue during a meth binge.
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It was too much for me. It seemed like my best friend was now gone and wasn’t coming back. Even if hevwas, he had eventually stolen or broken over $2,000 worth of my possessions. I got home one day and saw my quilt sitting outside in the mud, torn and stained. This quilt had been in my family for over a hundred years and was made by one of my great great grandmothers. It was very important to me. No one was even supposed to use it, let alone take it outside for “camping”. He knew this. I couldn’t do this anymore, I didn’t know what to do. I tried to be a good friend to him, I tried to stick around, I tried to take care of him the best that I could. But I was done. I just didn’t know how I could help anymore, I’m not a psychiatrist and I was way out of my depth now. I moved out a month later. We didn’t speak for a couple of years and I promised myself I wouldn’t talk to him again until he got off meth and started paying me back.
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Now a couple more years have gone by. His mother sold the condo and sent him to live in Colorado with his father. This got him away from the meth. His dad is a big hippy that owns a store that sells kitchen appliances. His dad got him to start eating good, healthy food, taking vitamins, got him off the drug and back onto his medication...he started getting better and started contacting me again. Since then he’s apologized to me, got a job working for his dad and has started paying me back slowly. It’s a long road ahead but we’re trying to fix our friendship. But things are better now, things are good.
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All of this is so difficult for me emotionally. I’ve continued seeing a therapist because I still need some help processing my feelings about this. It took me a long time to process. I didn’t know how much was actually his fault due to bad choices and how much was caused by his condition and out of his control. He’s still different now. But deep down he’s a really intelligent, fun and kind person. My beat friend is still in there. I’ve forgiven him.
Compression can be very comforting for anxiety and using one of those hugging monkeys on his arm is a smart way to achieve that. I feel like I learned a new self-care method.
This YouTuber is amazing. Check out what he does for special needs kids!
Fuck I wanna give this dude a hug
My only friend other than my wife has this sometimes, but he is on full disability from schizophrenia.
Sadly, when he was diagnosed most of his other friends split.
Pisses me off, so much stigma on mental illnesses.
Gawd Damn, I need help cause a lot of that stuff scratches too close to home for me