My Life With Schizoaffective Disorder: How It Started

it started with a laugh I was getting ready for the day in my room at that point in time I was in therapy and I was seeing a psychiatrist for depression anxiety and I was on medication and so I was getting ready for the day in my room I was home alone no music on no TV and from the back corner of my room I heard a man Snicker at me just this mean laugh it was so brief but crystal clear and I panicked thankfully I really trusted the psychiatric nurse practitioner that I was seeing so I told her about it and she made her notes and we talked about it in therapy and carried on and then more things started happening there was the sound of a guitar being strummed just once again home alone no music no TV no explanation from there it moved on to footsteps up and down the hallways the sound of horse Hooves outside of my window creaking sounds music all sorts of things like that and it became so overwhelming all of these just different symptoms that were so unexplained and all of the doctor's visits and pharmacies and new medications and things like that that one day I was just trying to decompress and so I was over at a house where I was pet sitting and I'm lying on the couch watching TV with the dogs and I've got my arm hanging out the edge of the couch and I feel a cat sniffed the back of my hand I just feel the breath in the whiskers and without looking I reach out to pet it and I can feel it sort of back away and we go back and forth with me not looking still about three or four times before I remember that they don't have a cat I panicked and I called my doctor and it was at this point that my doctor's language started to change she started talking about it and how we can approach it and different methods of treating it and finally my mom and I who was sitting on the couch with me leaned forward and we asked what is it she said it's looking to be schizophrenia in the office I was actually very calm because this was actually in a way great news to me because this meant that this wasn't something that I was just some bad person who had something horribly wrong this was an illness this was something that other people experienced too this is something that was treatable and I was excited to have an explanation for these weird symptoms but when we got in the car to go home internally I just fell apart because in all of my knowledge of schizophrenia I didn't know a single story about someone who was diagnosed at 17 right before their senior year of high school and then they started high school and everything was great and they went on to be you know a state-ranked high jumper and they were valedictorian of their class and everything was just fine going to a great college and all of that you know all I knew were stories about people who were spending their lives in hospitals or lived with their families or you know couldn't work couldn't have meaningful relationships and I just panicked because I didn't know what was going to happen to me I was stable enough that they offered me inpatient but did not force me into it and I said no because I didn't want there to be an empty desk at school and have people start talking because I went to a very small high school and I was afraid that rumors would start to get out and that then people would find out that there was something wrong with me and so then they offered me home Hospital which was a type of independent study that my school offered and again I said no for the same reason and this kind of backfired on me because instead I floundered in front of everyone I struggled because I didn't know that schizophrenia also comes with disorganized symptoms where my thigh my brain would make weird connections to things and make things that didn't make sense or that my thoughts would get jumbled up or be completely inaccessible sometimes I didn't know about the cognitive issues that come with it I didn't know that I would have trouble with focusing with processing with memory and that suddenly I would go from being one of the top students in my entire school to struggling just to memorize a formula in math class I didn't know about the negative symptoms or the fact that sometimes I would be unable to feel the feelings that logically I knew I should be experiencing and that I felt logically but didn't feel in my body or feel emotionally I didn't know about any of that and so I struggled immensely and I probably would have struggled even if I had known that but it was extremely difficult not knowing that even though we bought books and we did our research I didn't know what to expect and that was really really difficult and I don't think anybody knows what to expect I don't think you'll ever really understand it until you experience it for yourself but I wish I had a little bit more education on it going into things by the time I got the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis I was seeing shadowy figures peering in my windows and around my doors at night I was experiencing paranoia that people around me could hear or read my thoughts and I was also experiencing a lot of disorganized thoughts and having just these weird connections that didn't make sense like thinking that one day when I was out riding at the barn and I was jumping the horse and then afterwards I was hosing the horse off because it was a hot day and I saw a bit of white residue on her hoof and I thought that's where the price tag was you know like when you peel off the sticky price tag and there's a little bit of residue left over and that made perfect sense to me at the time what I didn't realize until over an hour later was that it was actually just white paint from a jump that we had nicked now the diagnosis was later changed to to schizoaffective disorder depressive type because of the fact that though my depression had gone away at a certain point during The psychosis it did come back and so because I had periods of psychosis for over two weeks without any sorts of mood symptoms but the Depression Did come back and I had depression with psychosis and without the psychosis that was why my diagnosis was updated to depressive type schizoaffective disorder I've also never experienced Mania or hypomania and so that is why I was not diagnosed with bipolar type schizoaffective disorder which is the other type of schizoaffective disorder now after the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis I felt even worse honestly at first because here's you know I just come to terms with the schizophrenia diagnosis kind if I hadn't fully come to terms with it but it was it was on the way there and now suddenly I have this new diagnosis that I'd never heard of in my life before and that nobody around me had heard of how was I supposed to deal with this when I had just come to terms with this other one and so it it was really really depressing it made very difficult to deal with and it wasn't until probably at least a year later that I was able to really accept it and come to terms with it and it wasn't until my sophomore year of college maybe my junior year of college when I first spoke publicly about it that I began to feel really comfortable with my diagnosis and okay with the fact that I had depressive types schizoaffective disorder so that's a little bit more about my initial experiences with depressive types schizoaffective disorder thanks guys

Channel: Not Like The Others

Views: 25,426

Keywords: schizoaffective, schizoaffective disorder

Id: 6mQ-IeHM2-I

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023