Mental Health How does schizophrenia start?

[Space__Kitten]

I searched all over the internet and most sources are from text books (positive symptoms, negative symptoms ect) or from family dealing with loved ones.

My mom is schizophrenic so I already know how it looks first hand from the outside but what's it like going through it? Do you just wake up one day hearing voices thinking it's normal?

I'm just so worried I'll get it too sense my family had a history of it and it's genetic. My mom has a college degree in psychology actually and she should have spotted the symptoms in herself but instead she thinks it's normal and talks to celebrities and angels in her head and tells me how she she is the chosen one and all this stuff. She's totally different than the mom that completed college and took me to France for a year as a child.

I have 3 years of psychology in college too so I understand the disorder well, just as she did though. I have been prescribed antidepressants for my depression recently, which isn't a big deal, I'm open to any help of I ever need it (she always refused any medications) but I'm still worried that what if it turns into something else?

So if anyone can shed some light on what they went through it would really be appreciated. I would hate to do to my family and my daughter what she did to me, in my teens telling me she would burn me alive in our house because I didn't believe her about the stuff she was telling me. So yeah.

Also, for back info, she had trouble in her teens which I didn't but then cleaned up but later had a stroke and got into drugs for a couple years but she was already pretty gone by then. I do abuse substances sometimes but have maintained the same job for 11 years without it affecting me, have a fiancé and a baby and am about to turn 28. My mom started going crazy around 33, had issues before that but wasn't talking to voices until then.

 

[herbavore]

I can only imagine how the terror that you mom's illness caused you as a young girl follows you into the present. While there are certainly genetic factors in mental illness one very important thing to remember is that the extreme states that characterize mental illness can be treated very successfully through a combination of treatments (not just medications but learning one's illness and how it manifests in a particular life, what the triggers are etc). Awareness at the onset puts you ahead of the game.

Treating depression with anti-depressants has become an unquestioned standard practice, often with no other concurrent treatments. Learning yourself through talk therapy, CBT, mindfulness, personal writing, spiritual practices etc. can be the best way to create a flexible and healthy mind that can ride out periods of extreme emotions and take the fear out of them.

I heard voices in two extremely difficult times in my life(a period of years). This is now so far in the past that I can remember it only in the same way I remember early childhood--as pieces of a narrative about me. I am telling you this because, while not common, it is actually not rare. So even if you were to begin to experiences states you associate with schizophrenia don't fall into the anxiety trap that says you will become your mother and that the illness will play out in the same way in your own life.

Read Elyn Saks great writing to at least get a different perspective on how mental illness, in particular schizophrenia, can be dealt with. The kind of life a person with support and understanding--both internal and from those around her--can lead is very different from someone who is given only the choice of zombifying dosages of drugs or a chaotic and terrifying life of delusions isolated outside of the reality of others.

 

[Space__Kitten]

Thank you for your reply. What I worry that a lot about is about lack of awareness and loosing touch with reality that tends to go hand in hand with scizophrenia.

Loosing touch with reality is the definition of a psychosis. Yet if I just heard voices but knew it couldn't be real I would not be in psychosis I believe because I'd be in touch with reality enough to understand what I was going through isn't real?

So many who go through this are not only hearing voices but have the even more powerful delusions that tend to go hand in hand with scizophrenia. Self awareness is only as strong as you are well. Like where does the self analyzing stop and you just give in to the disorder?

I am ok with medications...but antidepressants are a whole different ball game compared antipsychotics which are crippling in themselfs.

I just keep going back to how my mother who had a bachelors degree in psychology and was a counselor for a good many years of her life can't recognize the illness in herself.

I'd like to think I'd be different because I'm so aware of the possibility for me to get this disorder.

I am going to read Elyn Saks writing now to try to gain more perspective.

 

[herbavore]

Yes, this is exactly what Saks addresses: the need to let others around you that are close to you know what you are dealing with (in your case what you are frightened of) so that they could reflect back to her when she was starting to become unbalanced--thus heading off a full blown event that in her past would have required hospitalization. She also talks about what I was trying to touch on--the need to understand your own triggers and just as importantly to develop personal strategies for addressing extreme states in a way that can minimize them. She talks about this in the TED talk. Because of the stigma associated with mental illness, giving other people (in her case her law colleagues and her husband) in your life that power can be frightening so trust is a huge issue.

People can and do live with schizophrenia in vastly different ways depending on the support they have in their families, the philosophical outlook of their doctors, country, region, etc. This diagnosis is not one generic experience for all people.

Again let me reiterate that I really can empathize with your fear. I am of that generation that is now starting to see many of our own or our friends parents develop dementia. I find myself second guessing every forgetful or clueless thing I do as the early warning signs of Alzheimers. I have to keep reminding myself that I have been a forgetful space case my whole life! My point is that it isn't improbable (genetics in your case, demographics in mine) but looking for symptoms of something can often lead to seeing it when it isn't really there.

 

[Brody5150]

I'm a psych major too but I'm just starting. During an internship I was told by a psychiatrist that it usually is triggered around the first couple years of college when there is a lot of stress. Have u tried talking to your mom about the once a month shots so she won't have to take pills? Or she refuses it all completely?