schizophrénie

2022 07 24

We may be schizophrenic.

Hell yeah!

we have delusions and auditory hallucinations. We think that’s awesome :) we’re psychotic!!!

note to the reader: we use “psychosis” to describe the state when delusions and and hallucinations are working together to make our lives hell. From our understanding, psychosis is technically a thing our brain is, in general, and what we use it to describe could also be described as “psychotic episode”. We prefer calling it psychosis :) it means more to us.

what is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is, we think a neurotype: it affects your perception and interpretation of the outside world, and alters how your brain functions compared to other neurotypes.

schizophrenia is made up of hallucinations (seeing/hearing things that aren’t real. like when lights in a lamp hue shift inexplicably! cuties), delusions (firmly believing things that are not real), and a lot more less well known stuff.

The most sensationalised aspects about schizophrenia, which involve being unable to tell what is real, is because of psychosis, and Schizophrenia is a type of psychotic brain thing, with some extra stuff on top.

for the most part, we use schizophrenia in this article to talk about the psychotic elements of it, since most people think of schizophrenia as the psychotic neurotype without even knowing there are other aspects to it, and because we find calling ourselves schizophrenic happier than other labels. We talk about this more at the end!

origin

for therapy, we were writing a document that lists all kinds of things that we wanted to talk about, so we could remember! this is an amazing thing for our brain.

when writing in this document, we suggested that we didn’t think we were schizophrenic! and we also specificed that we didn’t think internalised trauma was saying that, like for other things. we also said that we were unsure!!

a couple hours later, we had a wonderful conversation with our 💜partner 🎀. We told them that we may be schizophrenic, and they asked us soft and awesome questions about what they meant, etc.. we don’t feel comfortable or have enough spoons for going into much detail about our conversation 😊

before we had this conversation, we watched a video by the public broadcaster :) about schizophrenia, and this was also before we wrote in therapy document. It had schizophrenic people and people with psychosis answer cute questions and give examples. We think one of the people they had talk on the video was autistic and we liked that a lot, we liked listening to them talk the most.

The show (uwu!!eeeeek,uwu🤍💝) helped us learn :) what schizophrenia was like, and helped us internalise it. It was really accessible. yay! elysia.

The show people talked about their experiences, and shared some examples! these helped elysia.

voices

a lot of them talked about, we think auditory hallucinations. One person described them as “intrusive thoughts,” and someone (may be same person) also gave an example we really understand, in fact, we could predict what they were going to say!!

What they said was, basically, “it’s the middle of the night; go to this field far away, or else horrible things will happen to your loved ones. You don’t need to do anything once you’re there, you just need to be there. I know if you will be there or not.” We predicted the second to last sentence. Holy shit

we’ve had these words in our head for a long time. Hearing them described as intrusive thoughts, and also learning that they are almost always manipulative and destructive, also gave us an amazing frame of reference for the kind of thing those hallucinations were, and we’ve absolutely had a lot of intrusive thoughts like this!!!

other schizophrénie media we’ve been exposed to never put things into tangible or make sense ways like this before!! it is mostly all medical, and more focused on segregating minutely different things and being exclusionary.

like oh my god that pretty wonderfully puts into perspective our feelings. We’ve always called this being held hostage by our own self, and it’s especially bad with executive dysfunction. We’ve used a lot of cute analogies to help describe this happening to others, like court trials and justice systems.

For some reason all of our memories of these analogies are tightly tied with imagery of an outdoor chasm between two cliffs with bridge in front of a hall in the first area of The Last Story game for Wii. Perhaps it is related because we played this game in full in nearly one play session, and it is a 20 hour game, so we were really unhealthy and so we may have had more destructive mental health and been more vulnerable. We think it’s awesome because we like The Last Story so this is good association. Our version has eggnog spilled on the cardboard case.

Basically all of these voices in our head are destructive and cruel to elysiae, and often very arbitrary. This lines up with the descriptions of people in the video!!!

We’re able to recognise that they are a part of us, even if they don’t feel like they are our own expression. We know they are coming from our brain and are intrusive, and we’re able to push back against them accessibly. We don’t have them frequently, and they are usually minor and easy to overcome immediately. They started happening a longg time ago.

A lot of them described voices as external, which is scary. we think when we first started having voices they did also feel external but as a part of self care we began trying to internalise them as being definitely ours, so that we could try to recover. this probably would not have been possible if we were able to associate them with other people! we do not have hallucinations with other people’s voices.

visual hallucinations

we also learned both that, not everybody has visual hallucinations, and that for some people they are less common than voices.

they also talked about psychosis we think. psychosis looks strange in fixed width font uwu.

we remember beginning having visual hallucinations in december 2021, although it’s somewhat likely it happened before this, but wasn’t something we think much off. by this point, we understood more about mental health broadly and about our own mental health, and recognised that the hallucinations and fears we were having were something we thought was schizophrenic!

we wonder if there’s a way to uncover our full history and memory by using a phrase we would’ve used to describe other hallucinations and feelings previously, like how intrusive thoughts unlocked our ability to recognise how long we’ve had destructive, not our own voices in our head.

this is the same time we began considering if we were schizophrenic! we didn’t feel comfortable expressing that, because we didn’t know if that was appropriation and harmful prejudice of what schizophrenia is, since we knew we didn’t know much. We also felt that, there was certainly other things that could cause us to hallucinate and see things that aren’t real, and we understand that the intense negative feelings were probably triggered directly by trauma.

most of the visual hallucinations we can remember clearly (because we wrote about them after they went away) all happened in the same context: immediately after waking up, filled with an intense fear of being watched, tracked, followed, and that someone (unknown) is seeking to kill us, and that they’re quite close to us physically. We think it’s strange (and funny!) that we focused entirely on the hallucinations part of these experiences and not the fears of being murdered and stalked, which is exactly what a neurotypical person will talk about when you ask them what schizophrenia is, every single time.

hallucinations are always accompanied by stalking/being nurdered fears, and we’ve also felt them on their own in the day, usually triggered by some unstable mental health, unstable living situation, or general vulnerability, like in littlespace. we think they dovetail well and make sense in those contexts!!!

We’ll look out the window to the street, trying to hide our body from view from the outside, fully confident someone is watching us, because we believe they will begin charging for us if they know we aren’t looking. sometimes, we do see someone, dressed up in intimidating and scary clothing, staring directly at our window; someone who hates us and will kill us. we’ll open up all the interior doors in the house and check all the full body hiding spaces, to ensure there is nobody already inside, waiting for a chance to strike, or to hopefully screw them out of an opportunity to attack us (our brain internalises that, if someone knows they’ve been found, they will be thwarted. rationally, we dont think this is true, though). we feel that we need to keep looking behind our back, or a hostile body will appear in our blindspot behind us. The more we talk about this the more it feels really strange that this is not the reason we began considering if we were schizophrenic.

it’s really distressing and we’re happy that it seems to be predictable and also relatively easy to resolve, just waiting usually is enough to make the feelings go away, if we can distract ourselves. spending time with safe people helps us, and so does constructive creative stuff and things to help convince us of our statistical safety. these things are delusions, which means we really struggle to actually!! genuinely believe in those statistics. the main reason we feel better is by having our feelings calmed with soft and safe things, and by being distracted by those things as well, and not by being convinced to change our mind.

putting it all together to write this blogpost, and from our conversation with our partner, is a lot. 😭 /positve

The amount of terror we feel is really upsetting, and our intense negative feelings and thoughts don’t go away quickly unless we can engage with and focus on somebody we love, or do something else that engages our brain positively.

Last Feburary when it was -30° outside and we heavily wanted to be with our partner and couldn’t, we woke up early in the morning in psychosis and dealt with it by writing a short journal entry to recognise our feelings, playing a new video game that stimulated our brain in positive ways (they bleed pixels), and in a safe environment (not distracted by other things on the computer; turned all the lights in the house on so we couldn’t mistake shadows for things or other fear stuff).

This is a positive memory.

they said that visual hallucinations, and psychosis in general, isn’t common for everyone, and that was really significant to us. We no longer assume that what we feel immediately after waking up, is definitely a schizophrenic thing, but learning about voices made us realise!! we’re probably at schizophrenic (psychotic) regardless!!

realisng

we doubted it initially, partially because we thought it was somewhat frequent and happened in more scenarios.

The video, combined with our self reflection while talking to our partner and while writing this blog post, made us realise that, it’s very likely that we are schizophrenic! we learned about our feelings and recognised them, and gave them more validity and ground than we had previously, and considered them all together. it mkakes us feel euphoric when we do this, since it gives us the confidence to use new words to describe our feelings accurately and because of the reflection and self care we did to recognise this in the first place makes us happy too.

we’re so happy.

we’re probably schizophrenic and that’s really positive and empowering. we are awesome and love ourselves. we’re fucking awesome.

and, if we are schizophrenic, that also means that we’re incredible at taking care of ourselves! we’re really strong and do what is best for ourselves, even if we don’t know what its for!!! and we’re really powerful and safe.

we are scared that this realisation will make the way we take care of ourselves through voices and hallucinations worse, because of our perception. we’re worried we won’t care for ourselves as well or will get stuck in our own brain and trapped in thoughts. we’re scared that the video will inspire our brain to come up with new ways to hurt us that we don’t experience, like thinking other people are talking about you when they aren’t in real life.

We also are scared because this realisation helps us grift ourselves. Diagnostic criteria is inherently exclusive and highly categorising in ways that don’t make sense. if we feel invalid, we’ll often feel the need to fit an authoritative description to feel validated, and to do this, we’ll intentionally de stabilise our mental health and prioritise destructive decisions over healthy ones, in order to make us have more frequent and more severe psychotic episodes. We are ruthlessly effective at doing self harm, and we know it is very likely for us to be heavily destructive and force ourselves to relapse. we love ourselves and are trying to get rid of internalised stigma, and instead, be inclusive.

we’re pyschotic, and we know this nearly certainly, but we’re grifting ourselves for not being psychotic enough because authoritative descriptions describe heavy instability.

they are a lot of medical labels to describe different brain things that have pyschosis, schizophrenia is one of them. just using schizophrénie to describe ourselves makes us feel uncomfortable, because we’re scared we are not, and that our words will make schizophrenic people unhappy!

simultaneously, we think that, us taking care of ourselves is more important than taking care of others, and we are doing our best to internalise this with concrete self care strategies. a label should make us happy firstly, and be important to us, and only after that can we bother thinking about if it’s hurtful to others.

at the moment, we really like schizophrénique!! it communicates that we are psychotic really well and is word most people understand, and that feels good to say. labels are guide posts, not fence posts! and we’re currently exploring them 💖

we’re strong, and awesome.

cutie pie hair 🌸💝

thinking about being schizophrénie is really positive and euphoric and empowering

cause?

we’ve begun thinking about what may have triggered this. we don’t know if schizophrénie psychotic stuff is something that can triggered from an experience, like plurality, or, if it is something that is intrinsic to your brain, like being autistic.

If it can triggered like plurality, we think it is caused for the same reason! trauma!!! specifically, our fears of being tracked and hunted are probably from being conditioned to expect the worst, and to feel unsafe around others because of prior abuse. (uncomfortable using more specific words)

Hallucinations seem heavily heavily related to those fears, and often (but not always) we have them immediately after having a nightmare where those fears were centre!! also, we have a faint thoughts that tell us that we began having intrusive voices at roughly the same time that we became traumatised from physical abuse. we don’t have memories of this, so it may be fallacy.

while we’re here! we do not think all of our, all of our intrusive thoughts are voices, we think there is a very hard distinction between them. We don’t know how to describe this.

conclusion

we know we are psychotic. We know we are psychotic.

We’re scared of taking that away from ourselves.

We’re so focused on being inclusive for others and also clinical definitions that we aren’t focusing on our own brain! yuck! we’re downplaying our own feelings because we don’t think we’re valid for having minor symptoms.

Because we don’t have frequent or severe psychotic episodes, we’re really vulnerable to being exclusionists to ourselves! very yucky!

We’re talking to ourselves, and trying to tell ourselves that these are okay, and that they don’t invalidate us being psychotic. We’re also encouraging ourselves that we’re allowed to use the label that we feel the closest to, even if we don’t fit the diagnostic criteria for that. Because diagnostic criteria is largely bullshit and filled with pseudo science.

Like, a psychiatrist who says that you can’t be something because youre this identical thing instead is like a language professor telling an autistic person that their parentheses should be light and brief. It’s categorisation and distinction for no good reason, and makes no sense.

Currently, we don’t know what we like the most :)

we really like psychotic on its own, and also really like the “schizo” prefix, and think schizophrénie is fun to say! we think that, in culture, “schizophrenia” and other things with schizo prefix are more heavily associated with psychosis than psychosis itself (which seems to have been so heavily bastardised that it no longer had any meaning!)

These are not personal justifications, these are for other people. We think they’re helping guide us to labels, and also contributing to our thoughts positively, rather than restricting them to make sense to others.

experrience

this experience of learning so much about our brain so quickly, after being prompted by things we heard in a video, was amazing.

there are so many different pieces to our cute brain and, we can connect those pieces to make a beautiful picture! understanding ourselves clearly lets us take care of ourselves and love ourselves, and the process makes us feel euphoric!

previously, we’ve had realisations about what being autistic means, and what being plural means. in both of these cases, we discovered we were these things naturally, through diagnosis, and through mainstream knowledge of these things, but, we were unable to understand what they meant to us! it took us a long time, but in both cases, it was also really gratifying and awesome feeling! and that explosion of self love and understanding has changed our lives and put us in a direction to continue loving ourselves and trying to learn more.

learning about schizophrénie happened all at once: we discovered we were and learned about major ways that effects us at basically the same time! and really quickly! it feels great, and we’re sure we’ll learn even more about this, and ourselves, in the future.

meeeooiwww cattram surfing