Schizophrenia

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I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the past.

In my opinion, my schizophrenia was the result of my first experience of heart break. 

In my university years, I met an exchange student from the USA and fell in love with him. Before he left Australia to return to the USA, he gave me a parting gift of Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist. He was the first man I fell in love with.  A few years after our meeting, S, as I shall call him, contacted me via Facebook and we got talking again. I suddenly remembered my love for him and fell in love with him again. He seemed friendly, so I thought he was reciprocating my love. I then remembered The Alchemist and the book’s ending, where the protagonist returns to Fatima, the girl he fell in love with ...and thought this was a message to me from S. I imagined that I was Fatima, and that S was finally returning to me. 

I began emailing S every day and every chance I had. Nothing came of my second experience of falling in love with him. Gradually S became more and more distant. He then blocked me on Facebook. He emailed me on rare occasions, and it always seemed he felt neutral towards me and was reluctant to get involved with me. I tried to build a sense of being a family with him, so I pinpointed his religion to Christianity, due to the Alchemist and became a Christian. I even travelled to the USA to meet him. He didn’t meet me at the airport. I took a greyhound bus trip around the whole of the USA, and he never met me. He became irritated then downright angry at me for emailing him and trying to contact him. He probably thought I was a crazy stalker and possibly just using him to immigrate to America. In reality, I was half-prepared to be rejected by him all the time, but he never told me in simple terms he wasn’t reading my emails. I thought he was just being nice and giving me the freedom to leave him, as he was disabled by the time I re-fell in love with him. But I was so in love with him I was delusional and thought we were a couple. Eventually I began a lonely journey as S’s imaginary soulmate and godly wife. This was the first sign of psychosis, and perhaps schizophrenia. 

Now I am not a stupid woman, I got a statewide university admission score of 98.05 out of 100 at high school, but I was not mentally sane then. All this time I was emailing S, and I was trapped in a one-way email conversation, not knowing if S was reading or loving me. I was getting nowhere and was starting to be concerned for my own wellbeing, so I visited a young women's drop-in counselling session at a community centre. I gave them a written account of my experiences. A counsellor saw me, then a specialist, and then they had me involuntarily hospitalised at a local mental health unit for 6 weeks. I began on antipsychotics, Zyprexa olanzapine, and was only released from the hospital after going through a tribunal hearing. I was diagnosed with psychosis.

All went well with a few years of regularly seeing a psychiatrist, until I became mentally unwell again. This time I was watching the news on tv and believing that the current events and famous people seemed to coincide with my own life, and that the universe seemed to be giving me a message that I was a very important person. I was also reading messages into signs like car number plates, and thinking the world was communicating with me about how important I was. I started to hear voices and hallucinate. I thought I was meant to be a saviour and heroine of the world. I realised I was crazy, again, and went to seek help. I was involuntarily kept at the hospital for a day or two. I was on antipsychotics, after going off medication on my own, this time Abilify, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since then, I have been on Abilify and seen a psychiatrist regularly for over 5 years in my mid-thirties, and now I am only seeing my GP.

I am now nearly 40 and survive on welfare payments and family support. I feel great, rarely hearing voices, with no hallucinations or delusional thinking, and am practising good personal hygiene again. However, I am told I may have to stay on medication for the rest of my life. I now no longer try to work in the arts industry, as I feel for me personally, that I would be nurturing an over-active imagination and I didn’t want to imagine anything unreal…I want my thinking to be as realistic as possible. Now I spend my time enjoying life with family and friends, writing about my health issues, hoping to help others as I have been helped by health professionals, the government, science, books, and online resources. If there is anything I have learnt that helps me to stay sane, it is that one should always seek the truth.