i didn't have persistent schizophrenia until i started using drugs. i remember before ever experimenting, i remember playing guitar and thinking police radio was being played over my amp when i had stopped. i thought it was radio waves for a while until i realized that's not really possible.
other than this i only really remember thinking people were outside my house waking me up, but i never really thought much of it. it didn't happen very often i realize now they were probably some of my voices though.
now in my adult life after twenty or so years of using drugs, whether i'm using or not, i can't go more than a few minutes with out hearing voices or some kind of banging or beeping. the voices usually become more enjoyable when i get high though.
i wonder if i never used drugs, how i would be now.
What drugs, exactly, and how are your symptoms now?
I know when I first started smoking weed at 17 something went completely wrong. I had the most extreme depersonalization/derealization ever. It was like living in a nightmare. I didn't recognize my reality, anything, myself, I felt like a ghost, like I wasn't real, and I had immense brain fog. I could only describe it as "perceptual amnesia" as everything which was once familiar to me was no longer.
This happened at one point for a few days and went away, that's where I should've stopped, but then I was like hey, it must've just been a passing thing. Then I got weed laced with cocaine and I was back to square one... I think it wouldn't have mattered either way. The stuff me and my friends were smoking was way too strong. The first times I'd smoked mids, the high was way more manageable. But everyone was getting medical imported from Cali and such all over the east coast at the time.
Just a year or two prior you wouldn't have been finding weed that good. I would have insanely weird closed eye hallucinations. Shapes, patterns, colors, things that shouldn't happen from just a joint, and I'd often be speaking gibberish. Oddly, these images triggered early childhood memories. Ever since then, I almost daily have sudden flashbacks to my early childhood, or dreams I may have had. It seems all memories that escape eventually find their way back, and why this happened to me I really have no idea.
I self-medicated by continuing to smoke weed to make it "make sense" that I'd feel all strange like this. In some way, this ended up working. This was occurring the summer into my senior year. I kind of surrendered to it at one point in the hopes that it'd get better. I don't know if it ever fully did, I know I'm certainly not the same as I was before this happened.
So it was mostly symptoms of psychosis I suppose, but I grew up hallucinating my closet coming alive around the age of 3-4 (thanks to my parents feeding me Benadryl all the time because of allergies to our cat). They no longer suggest to give Benadryl to kids that young at all. I'm on the spectrum, which may have made it more complicated, but I also seem rather sensitive to DPH.
Similar to Jerry, I had a period where weed would make me unbelievably paranoid. I'm dying, that helicopter is after me, my fingernails are purple, there's a tick eating me somewhere, just a weird time. From 2013-2015, just a huff, one puff of a joint could get me so unbelievably gone and paranoid it didn't even make sense. I'd resort to booze in order to enjoy getting high.
Nowadays I don't really show psychosis symptoms. I do have C-PTSD so it's natural for me to dissociate at times, and in retrospect well before I used any drugs, this was a prominent thing for me. There's day dreaming and then there's totally detaching yourself from reality. I never recognized it because, well, I was a kid and going through a lot of changes in high school.
Personally, flower makes me show symptoms of psychosis for some reason, while concentrate does not. Last year in particular I'd notice when I got super high, well, actually for a few years, I'd get this impulse to speak in complete gibberish. Sherga dornog, vorbuloni alagoni, just had this compulsion to want to say these things. That's how it started when I was 17 actually. My friends got a kick out of it but in reality there was something seriously wrong. Ever since I switched to dab pens, I never get things like this.
I don't think I have schizoid type symptoms necessarily, and maybe you don't either, maybe it's just psychosis in general that can pass. It was a miracle by the start of my senior year that my brain fog went away and I was starting to recognize myself, my reality. Things still felt very surreal for awhile which could be a bit uncomfortable. That's when I got really into The Beatles, especially their psychedelic stuff, and it seemed to be a nice medicine for that feeling.
It was once I started indoor track that fall/winter that things were really improving. "Life is going back to what I want it to be" I'd written in a mini journal I was keeping at the time, where really I'd just jot down something the first day of the month. I still have all of them. I'd actually really wanted to take LSD around this period because I was inspired by The Beatles and honestly, I'm fortunate I didn't find any, because that probably would've been really bad given I was only months out of feeling more normal again.
I don't think I'm at risk of developing schizophrenia, I did DMT for a month straight last summer and had a very strong mushroom trip in early August (which was actually very bad, had mild HPPD resembling my hallucinations for almost 3 months) but they weren't like, getting in the way of my life. It'd just be like "woah... that looks like those skulls."
