Schizoaffective Disorder

it might sound crazy but at the end of this I just want to survive why would you say that because sometimes it feels like I'm at war with myself I feel like a prisoner trapped within my own skin my mind is my captor and I'm at the mercy of my thoughts as they spin around me bethenny Boyk had many demons and many false diagnoses and they were all working against her how do you fight when you're not sure who the enemy is schizoaffective disorder when the enemy is yourself this week on my healthy mind let's talk about it welcome to my healthy mind I'm Michael hunter to most people the term schizoaffective disorder is probably a new one what is it what are its consequences to Bethany Boyd schizoaffective disorder was also a new and unknown term although she had suffered from the disorder for more than a decade today schizoaffective disorder is diagnosed more frequently than in the past because it is better understood yet still less than 1% of Americans have been diagnosed with this complex mental illness and it may never be known how many sufferers have gone undiagnosed or worse misdiagnosed schizoaffective disorder is a unique disorder that is a combination of both psychotic features and mood disorder so specifically it's a version of schizophrenia mixed with either severe depression or bipolar manic kinds of behaviors and experiences and that's why it's sometimes difficult for a practitioner to be able to diagnose it accurately because they misdiagnosed it is sometimes panic disorder if they come in anxious about what's going on sometimes if they're being more into their psychotic features they'll see it as schizophrenia now call it schizophrenia or if they're having the bipolar manic kinds of behaviors or severe depression they will see it as either depression or bipolar disorder it's less important to be able to put a label on it it's more important to try and figure out what the process is so you can treat it accurately and help them recover and have some kind of a meaningful life today my colleague Elizabeth Atkins speaks with Bethany Boyd who shares her long frightening struggle with and ultimate triumph over schizoaffective disorder so I understand you grew up in a very dysfunctional family drug-addicted parents alcoholic grandfather living with relatives and friends rather than your own parents what was it like growing up growing up I was the only child of two addicts and you know I lived in poverty you know with my mother half the time we didn't have any food to eat and it was just chaos it was pure chaos all the time my mom was a severe binge drinker and at nighttime she would just explode and I just prayed I prayed and prayed and prayed for her that she would be okay that we wouldn't get kicked out of where we were when I'd ask her about what happened the night before and if she was okay she'd be like Bethany are making up lies and to just be quiet so I had to hold a lot of secrets for a really long time it just it hurt me because I started questioning my own self so in the midst of all this chaos did you start to notice any symptoms about yourself I did I actually started getting panic attacks in second grade and so I was a 7 year old and I was feeling like I had no air left I was hyperventilating I felt like I was going to die so I got taken to the doctors and the doctors like oh yeah she must be having asthma attacks so let's give her inhalers so for many many years I was misdiagnosed as having asthma but really I was having full-blown panic attack since I was seven so you were only able to understand the concept of panic attacks in hindsight correct yes okay but and you knew something was wrong I knew something was wrong you feel like you were in crisis um I did it wasn't until later I would just start shaking uncontrollably and sobbing for no reason no trigger and I'd be at school and this would happen and I have to run out of class and go to the guidance Center and they let me sit well lie down in a room that was dark I laid on the floor and I literally shook and sobbed for an hour hour and a half no one knew what I was going through so your teachers are watching you have these meltdowns at school and there was no counselor called or nope it wasn't until maybe 10th grade and I was in a science class and I got a 77 on this test and I just freaked out I was like I can't be like my parents I have to be perfect I have to get everything right to succeed and I just started banging my head against this lab table this very hard lab table over and over and over because I wanted to knock myself unconscious that was when my principal told my mom you need to get your daughter some help because something is wrong with her you know and if you don't do this we're going to call CPS and then what happened did your mother get you somehow my mother took me to the doctor and they said you know you have like major depression and anxiety disorder insomnia and so they put me on all these medications how old were you 13 and I started to feel a little bit better but at the same time I was still experiencing other symptoms I was at band camp and I started hearing voices for the first time and I had no idea what was going on I was basically talking to my friends and we were playing you know I was playing the marimba and the bass drum and we were rehearsing and all of a sudden I just kept hearing Bethany Bethany Bethany over and over and over and I'm like looking around and I'm like who was talking to me like who's talking to me and I start yelling I'm like who are you like what are you doing like it's not funny can you please stop and everybody just stopped what they were doing and stared at me and I looked around and no one was talking but I kept hearing the voice did you tell the doctor who was giving you all these medications I did and she gave me an antipsychotic and it's um was normally used for bipolar at the time that I got it and I took one pill and my kidneys almost shut down so I ended up at the Children's Hospital for seven days and it was a horrible experience then what happened was your medication changed my mom stopped taking me to the doctor's because she didn't believe in it and she was mad at them and said that they were making me worse so I went back to school I tried to act like everything was normal and I was okay but I still got really suicidal like I started writing my suicide letters to people and then one of my family members had passed away and I had to go to the funeral and I went to the funeral and I just started sobbing and people were like wow she's really affected by this and I was thinking in my head I'm not affected by this at all I want to be dead I want to be the one that's in the casket after that I went back to my mom's house and I attempted suicide and um at the same point that I attempted suicide I had my first psychotic break I started visually hallucinating religious things and figures and I got so excited I was like you guys Jesus is here and we're changing the world and we're doing all this stuff and he's going to help me and you know I'm not going to be depressed anymore and I just had these delusions that of grandeur and of like religiosity that weren't real you know at at the time I thought everything was real but my doctor told me no after that like my grandma took me back to the doctor she says she told me when you said that you were having you know those religious moments I knew something was horribly wrong with you schizoaffective disorder has often been misdiagnosed as one of a variety of other mental illnesses including panic attacks paranoia and bipolar disorder all of which are frightening but not knowing what's wrong was more frightening for Bethenny than any of those will learn about Bethenny's first steps towards wellness when we return stress depression and severe mental illness can happen to anyone team mental health services has been helping those struggling with these conditions in southeastern Michigan within 24 hours of reaching out to our team members receive psychiatric evaluations and begin the necessary treatment for recovery towards the sixth court date I finally stood up and said I can handle this process the rest of the way and it was all because of the motivation and encouragement I got from team mental health staff team mental health services because we care and you can magformers he set sold separately batteries not included so this disorder tends to develop early in adulthood between sixteen and thirty typically is age of onset it seems to stem because they're not really certain but so far the evidence seems to indicate that it comes primarily from some kind of family history or genetic endowment so that you're more likely develop it if you have that family history welcome back to my healthy mind Elizabeth continues our conversation with Bethany who shares with us her long and painful battle with schizoaffective disorder and what it took to come to terms with it so now you're in high school were there any teachers there who helped you um yes I had one teacher basically tell me that you know hey Beth this crap that you're turning into me as homework is crap it's nothing you are so far behind it you have sloppy handwriting like what's going on what's wrong and I kind of let him into my life and told him a little bit about what was going on and he's like okay well you know if you come before school you know I can help you get your grades back up and we can try to do these things together so um he helped me um with that and then things just got worse and worse I kept having suicidal ideations throughout high school I had a lot of you know just weird mental health stuff you know hearing voices not knowing if they're real or not not knowing if people are really spying on me or not and I had told like some of my friends I'm like you know guys like does this happen to you like what's going on and they're like Bethany no don't say that like you need to stop talking about it because no one's going to want to be your friend and I'm like yeah you're probably right and my grandma took me back to the doctor they immediately put me on antipsychotics and it made me very tired you know I was a 3.0 3.5 student and my grades went down to a 1.7 because all I did was sleep in school the medication made me so drowsy and zombie-like I started not hanging out with friends as much and I just started backing away and isolating myself and I wasn't I wasn't you know showering brushing my hair I stopped doing all that stuff and just became this zombie and I remember I had this one of my best friends at the time she was um she self-harmed and she said she got so much relief from it and I was like really that's all you do is cut yourself and it goes away the pain goes away and she's like yeah it's so easy so I got really excited I'm like this is gonna work I'm not going to have any of these spots anymore or here any of these voices you know so I went in my shower and I just started cutting my inner thighs with a razor just and I'm like watching the blood go down the drain and I'm sobbing because I'm like why why isn't the voices stopping why is this not working and I stopped cutting myself and I just remember curling up into a ball in my showers just sobbing myself because it didn't work it didn't work we'll have more when we return about schizoaffective disorder and Bethany struggle with the disease and the treatments please stay tuned welcome to my healthy mind the show that dares to talk about mental health matters that touch nearly every family each week you'll meet guests who share their stories here from local experts and learn about resources that may help and so I was in a committee meeting at the House of Representatives and I realized that my daughter had autism we need to take the stigma away from the mental health issues no topics about mental health and wellness are off limits on our show let's talk about it on my healthy mind the issue of treatment usually involves an application of some kind of medication if the person is showing primarily with their psychotic features of hallucinating and having delusions and loose thinking and they're mostly depressed you would give them an antidepressant but you might also at the same time give them an anti-psychotic medication which is affecting a different process in the brain the other forms of treatment are cognitive behavioral therapy with the therapist with a psychologist oftentimes a case worker to sort of follow them to make sure that they're staying on course about you know taking the right kind of medication and using their resources that they have in their life to help guide them through because it's very difficult for them to make an adjustment in life we're back on my healthy mind looking into the struggle with schizoaffective disorder why it has traditionally been so difficult to diagnose and how to deal with this often baffling condition Elizabeth continues with Bethany so let's talk about what started to work for you when did you get a correct diagnosis and a proper treatment when did that start well I got rediagnosis was 19 as having bipolar disorder and I thought that was the correct diagnosis but it wasn't so I as I as I went through college I had more symptoms and exhibits of like social withdrawal and isolation and I went to a new mental health clinic to get a second opinion and my doctor took one look at me looked at my records and he was like you have schizoaffective disorder you have a form of schizophrenia and I'm like everything just made sense in that moment so Bethany were you familiar what schizoaffective disorder is and how is it different from schizophrenia did he have to explain that or did you already suspect um i well affective disorders you know they correlate with mood disorders so I feared it was like some form of schizophrenia with a mood disorder and that's exactly what it was and he told me that and it made sense because of all the symptoms that I was having they correlated to this this disorder it made sense so once you started being treated for skin so effective disorder you were still hospitalized tell us what happened with that yeah um I was just trying new medications and some of them didn't really go with me that well and I became extremely suicidal and while I was having paranoia and hearing voices and so I ended up hospitalized twice in a row and they finally found the right medication combination the second time I was in the hospital so they changed all my medications and I was like thank goodness because I had been on over 35 different medications 35 medications yes I have an example of all the medications I've taken in the past 13 years whoa and this doesn't include all the different combinations of these medications that I've had to try in order to help you know fix my mental health issues how do you feel when you look at all those bottles I feel like I'm a survivor like I chose life and I chose opportunity because no matter what a doctor has told me or said to me you know that could have like pushed me down I just kept trying I was like the little engine that could I never gave up and I kept pushing forward until I found that right combination so how do you maintain your recovery while I take my medication because that's the number one thing and then I use coping skills that I've gained so we talked about reality checking and so I can do that with another person or I can do that by myself so when I'm having either psychosis or paranoia I basically talked myself into reality so I am experiencing you know these non reality situations you know and I'm just checking every little thing like okay there's a bird flying around the house how did that happen no one opened the front door there's no windows open this bird cannot be real do get therapy as well I do yep I go once a week to therapy and you had nowhere to turn to get more no no you couldn't go home your mother father grandmother they didn't know what to do right yeah I had no I had no biological family support I had support from my found family as I call it I formulated a group of friends who I live with who care about me who know what to do when I am in crisis and who are the most amazing individuals I have ever met and I truly believe that you know they their gifts from God and they helped me out so much it's really special that your friends don't judge you or make fun of you or feel afraid of you I know yeah I'm blessed I'm very blessed they are incredible people I can tell them anything in the world and they'll just look at me with love and try to help me out and really there's there's nothing to be afraid of because I'm just a regular person I just experienced life in a different way than most people stress depression and severe mental illness can happen to anyone team Mental Health Services has been helping those struggling with these conditions in southeastern Michigan within 24 hours of reaching out to our team members receive psychiatric evaluations and begin the necessary treatment for recovery towards the six court date I finally stood up and said I can handle this process the rest of the way and it was all because of the motivation and encouragement I got from team mental health staff team mental health services because we care and you can in terms of treatment once the person is discovered as what is really their problem and how to try and best give them the support and treatment that they need it's important that they follow this through the rest of their life because this is not normally a condition that somehow you can fix or cure as much as you can help them better manage it and that management requires probably a lifetime of being on some kind of medication once you get the right regime the right balance and mix of which ones but mostly it's important that they have both family support it's so important and also other community support the caseworker can sort of help them make sure that they stay plugged into that because it's exceedingly difficult for these folks to be able to manage their life and they need that extra support in order for them to be able to get through all those schizoaffective disorder can be a very difficult mental illness to diagnose bethany has proven that with the proper treatment this terrible illness can be managed so you went to this doctor who recognized what was happening to you after 12 years of struggling with wrong diagnosis and incorrect treatments tell us how you felt when you finally learned that you have schizoaffective disorder a correct diagnosis it was incredible it was an incredible moment I felt like a rock lifted from my chest and I could breathe it was like having a breath of fresh air like for the first time in my life I felt like you know people had said so many negative things to me oh you're crazy you're a lunatic you're going to amount to nothing you're a wacko all these things to someone giving me a proper diagnosis for what I was living with yes I have this illness this is how it affects me I'm not going to let it take me down and I'm just going to do everything in my power to learn about it to research it and to exceed with it and did you do that how did you research it I did I bought books from you know online different books on schizophrenia for dummies different family therapy books like for people that lived with loved ones with um schizoaffective disorder how to help them you know learn to cope with you and your you know problems and I I researched research researched until I knew everything I could about the illness and then I integrated everything in my life around that and how to help myself so Bethenny you struggled for so many years with wrong treatments misdiagnosis what's your advice to people who are going through that and they know something's wrong they're not getting the right treatment what would you say to them keep trying different doctors keep trying different medications and never ever ever give up I remember you know there have been certain points of my life where I was you know I attempted suicide three times so there was two other times where I attempted suicide and at that point in my life I thought there was nothing more that could help me and those times were the most inaccurate times of my life but it's really not giving up and that's the hardest thing to tell someone who literally feels completely hopeless mm you know what do you do when someone is just like I I have no hope left and you have to tell them you know you feel like this right now but I I swear to you if you keep trying something is going to budge something will budge and you know one day you're not going to feel like this you know pain ends and I didn't know that for many years I didn't know that the pain goes away Elizabeth what a great story of perseverance and triumph over things that people especially children should never have to endure you know Michael for people who struggle with schizoaffective disorder knowing what's real and who's on their side can be difficult but it's great to know that with the proper diagnosis and treatment this disorder can be managed to help you on your quest for mental wellness we've put information and resources on our website my healthy mind calm please take a look visiting my healthy mind calm could be an excellent first step toward learning more about schizoaffective disorder and we'd like to hear from you about topics you'd like us to discuss on my healthy mind we mean the tough topics that are so important to talk about openly to help remove the barriers on the path to well-being so reach us on our website my healthy mind comm on Twitter and my healthy mind or on Facebook thanks for watching we'll see you next week for another edition of my healthy mind let's talk about it and now we'll leave you with my healthy minute my healthy minute covering breaking mental health news legislation discoveries and resources Oakland County Community Mental Health Authority work of individuals with developmental disabilities mental illness and substance use such as bipolar disorders autism alcohol or drug usage and we basically assist individuals in getting a grass in a hold of the challenges that they are dealing with in life our goal is to basically a system and to inspire hope in their lives empower people and by doing so we were able to strengthen communities by allowing these individuals to have access to services and treatment that they would normally not have you

Channel: MI Healthy Mind

Views: 164,411

Keywords: Schizoaffective Disorder, bipolar, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia

Id: yE3lNvJ8nlA

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2016