Hi, everyone. I need help from someone who knows about the psychiatric system, and how to deal with them. I’ve been chronically psychotic for the past 5 years, and it ruined my life. I went from living a reasonably normal life with friends and boyfriends, to being completely isolated in an apartment that often smells like garbage, due to the fact that I’m too scared to get out. But due to my diagnosis, I don't get proper help. How can I convince the psychiatry that they are wrong?
This post will be quite long, so I’ll just state from the beginning, that an extended description of my symptoms is at the bottom of the page. The rest is just my experience with the psychiatry, and how they repeatedly refused to help me.
My psychosis is slowly disappearing, but I'm still dropping out of school because of it, and given my misdiagnosis as asperger’s, I’m quite sure that I won't get the help I need.
I’ll just start at the evaluation that gave me asperger’s to begin with. So, before my psychotic symptoms started, I had a couple of years where I just felt stranger and stranger. I would feel completely isolated and unable to concentrate, I would nearly die several times because I daydreamed so much that I never realised there were any cars, and though my social life existed, it suffered because I suddenly couldn’t speak properly, and nothing felt real to me. I was dead inside.
Those two years were hell, but when I finally seeked help, none of the psychiatrists seemed to take me seriously. Because some of the symptoms had always been there - just less severe - and they had some quotes from teachers about me when I was a child, the psychiatry just slapped an asperges’s diagnosis on me and called it a day.
The thing is, I was checked twice by mental health professionals as a child, and they all said I was “strange, but normal” - and all the quotes they had to prove thad I had been aspie from the beginning all had the same statement in different variants; just that I was quiet and withdrawn. I was also always a bookish, intellectual kid, and I was artistic as well. Nothing savant-like, but enough to be noticed; these interests were not really unusual and/or not shared with my friends, and they only got out of hand when I felt the need to hide due to abuse.
I’d still say these are quite mild symptoms, especially given the fact that I was severely abused emotionally and physically every day at home, and bullied every day at school. I’d admit that I was a complete basket case at 15 years of age because of this, and from 12-15 couldn’t function normally before I got to boarding school and learned that the world didn’t hate me. I can’t begin to list the ways my parents treated me differently as compared to my sister, but these are wounds that will never heal, no matter how much I whine about them. The pain never, ever goes away.
Needless to say, my parents described me in demonic terms as usual, which didn’t help me in the wrong diagnosis department.
So, their only treatment plan was that I got someone to help me with “social skills”(in my journal, they listed "flat affect” as in issue; that was it). Of course, "the helper” told me that I wasn’t asperges’s after first meeting him, and that he’d call the psychiatry for reevaluation. They dismissed him.
About right afterwards, my psychosis came out in full bloom, and in the three times I sought help in those five years, they all dismissed my obvious paranoid schizophrenia in various ways. They never had enough basis to diagnose me with asperger’s themselves, but would become bewildered that I never fit into any diagnostic criteria, and then become relieved when they found that I already had a diagnosis.
I’ve read what they wrote about me, and none of them describe me as socially awkward,(save for flat affect) none of them says that I had repetitive behaviour, and none of them talk about having weird interests. Their entire basis for asperger’s was my 1) constant complaints about being paranoid,, 2) that I couldn’t sustain any relationships anymore, and 3) that the world felt so unreal that I often could not even speak to people, 4) disorganised speech, concentration issues. The explanation? Good ol’ asperger’s girl just can’t read social cues and is "stressed out".
Of course, even I didn’t know that I heard voices the first time I sought help; I just wanted help with my social phobia, so that I had confidence to go out again despite all the harassment(hallucinations) I constantly experienced. But the second time? The second time I was freaking out because if I looked at my hands too long at night, they world start to change form; that I knew that my fear of friends being malicious and out to get me were wrong, because it was just not logically possible; and finally, that I had heard my neighbour harass me and talk bad about me for months, only to angrily confront him and find out that he couldn’t speak my language at all to begin with, and was a Syrian refugee.
Only this last time that I sought help, would they offer me anti-psychotics, and that was because I asked for that, specifically. This was after an episode where I confronted(read: aggressively screamed and shouted at) a fellow student on why him and his friends kept talking about me, filming me, and sharing the files of embarrassing videos of me(that does not exist) via USB to the other classmates. I realised when I saw his reaction, that it had all been a delusion.
I still have asperger’s, though. I asked my psychologist why, and she said that you can’t be a paranoid schizophrenic, and an aspie at the same time. It is impossible. And she still clings to the diagnosis(god knows why, I have no symptoms of asperger’s that doesn’t also coincide with schizophrenia) and every time I tell her about a problem, she speaks to me in the way you would to a person with asperger’s. These are usually problems related to psychosis, or other known schizophrenia-traits. I’ve read about both diagnoses, and I’m quite textbook schizophrenic, or at least schizotypal.
She knows that it has lasted for five years, yet she takes it incredibly lightly and seems more interested in how I can organise my daily life(aspie problems) than how to make the voices go away.
She says that it is not schizophrenia, because the voices don’t come from inside my head; I do not hear a voice tell me what to do; the only voices hat constantly comments on me, are from existing noises, like actual people or the wind, or at least what I believe to be existing noises(ha ha.).
I simply have to get another diagnosis, or I won’t be taken seriously, ever. I’ve only been able to crawl my way through college because I was lucky, seems to be a bright person, and got good grades, so they ignored that I was only there a few hours a week(those hours were there were almost no people on buses and in school, so that I wouldn’t hear so many people mocking me). Now I’m dropping out of an actual, real education, and when I have to receive social services, all I’ve got to show them is asperger’s. I know they won’t take me seriously, or try to help me. They never did before.
Psychotic symptoms...
For five years, if there are any people nearby talking, I will immediately hear it as being about me; I constantly hear the neighbours commenting on my acts, and everyone seems to know everything about me and film me with their phones. Up until half a year ago, I thought this was because - and this convoluted plot probably won’t make sense - I kept involuntarily doing stuff in public that were embarrassing, and thus, people slowly found out, started filming me, and were having little groups on Facebook - or wherever - just about me. In short, I’d be the village freak, though I thought the knowledge of me had spread to the entire country. When I moved to a new city, the voices would sometimes disappear for a while, until people found out more about me. When there were too many people who knew, I had to move again because the harassments reached unbelievable heights, and this always made me severely suicidal.
I never knew what embarrassing things I had done, before I had been eavesdropping on other people for long enough. Just closely observing those people who would stalk me, laugh at me constantly, honk at me with their cars, and imitate me.
The neighbours are the worst, because every time they talk it's about me, and that's why I always listen to music and/or watch television, so that I can tell myself that whatever bad words I hear about me, are just hallucinations from the music or the TV. Of course, the TV once talked to me, so that is not foolproof.
While I always had a conspiracy of a certain embarrassing act of me being known more well than others, I also had mini-conspiracies for every other embarrassing thing that I’d ever done. To take an example of how ridiculously demeaning these delusions are, I once did some exercise at home with black curtains completely covering the windows, and that exercise involved squatting. I thought “This looks ridiculous, I’m ridiculous”, and the next morning, I saw a distant group of people where one of the guys squatted, and it was clear on his voice that he was mocking me. They all turned, and the guy pointed at me, and shouted “THERE! THERE SHE IS!”. When I tried to walk away from them, every person I passed I could hear faint giggling. This caused a panic attack, and I skipped school the rest of that day. And this is a mild example.
Several times I’d fall in love with a guy, and he’d like me back in the beginning, but then I’d hear him and his friends start talking about me, and all of a sudden his face would seem more mocking to me. I would of course avoid him then, embarrassed that he had found out my secret(the thing I did without knowing, that made people film me).
With new groups of friends, I’d just start to have ominous feelings that they were just using me, or actually trying to hurt me. I kept thinking that they were planning to do something, like they only wanted to be with me because they planned to steal my money later on, or other things. I always had severe creepy feelings of danger, should a person start to get too close emotionally.
23 May 2017, 7:11 am
