Schizophrenia Diagnosis Changes Everything

Schizophrenia at the best addiction treatment center in Lahore is a blog composed by a married mother of four about her new "emerging." Her Ignite digital book, Getting through Schizophrenia: A Story of Sound and Fury, is available at the following location. It's also available at willingways.org and amazon Europe. People also want to go to The Experience of Schizophrenia. The psychologist says that She's got a great cover, a pastel portrait-like photograph of mother and child. Shades of my own deconstructed Paul Klee image, but pinker and prettier. Here she writes about her second hospitalization, six years after her first, her entry into a day program, which is when, for the first time, she is told she has "schizophrenia."

I, on the other hand, have nothing to do. Nothing. I am not smoking now; I have stopped in the hospital again. So I can't even do that. After a couple of weeks of almost total inactivity, I am visited by a community psychiatric nurse. She asks me what I want from life now that I am out of the hospital. I reply that I want something to do and friends to spend time with. And so she refers me to a day hospital, Hahnemann House, in Bournemouth town centre. Here I am to learn to build my confidence and become a worthwhile member of society again.

At least the immediate worries of how to survive have receded. I am on Social Security benefits, and the council pays my rent. I am not smoking and can't drink with the medication I am taking, and anyway, I am too embarrassed to meet up with my old friends. So I live cleanly and cheaply. At the day hospital, I am given a hot meal each day.

I have been going to Hahnemann House for close to 30 days, and I trust that things might get to the next level. There is no pressure here. We patients are given a little education by the nursing staff on the nature of the mental illness, and some half-hearted attempts are made to motivate us into activity, but most of the time, we are left alone. I feel safe and relaxed.

But then, one day, my life changed. The doctors call me in for a meeting. There are at least six people in the room – nurses and doctors of various descriptions. And they break the bombshell to me. I am suffering from Schizophrenia. I am schizophrenic. This has been on my records for six years already – I was diagnosed when I was just nineteen, at the time of my first breakdown, but at the time, it had not been thought appropriate to inform me. It is a great deal to accept. For the last six years since my first breakdown, I have considered myself normal – nervous, OK, very nervous, but essentially normal. I have completed my degree, held down jobs, and functioned in society during this time. It has been a struggle, but by and large, my life so far has been a success. Yet now I have learned that I have had a disabling illness all this time. These people knew about it all along. I have confirmed it by breaking it down again.

I am very scared. I am a freak, a social outcast. I am an unknown quantity. A maniac. A person with Schizophrenia. The 'Team' then tell me that the prognosis is bad. I ask what a prediction is. They say I have no future. I will get worse as I grow older. I can never expect to be normal. I must accept this, I am told. I should confront the way that I have no future.

I lose all hope at that point. My only comfort is in the medication they prescribe, which induces a sort of stupor in me. The drugs affect my state of mind to such a degree that every action becomes an effort. I decide that it is just not worth making that effort. I switch off now, recede into an almost trance-like state and refuse to take any real part in life. And at Hahnemann House, nobody seems to expect anything of me anyway. I can drift along and lounge half asleep on the various saggy and stained sofas provided. Occasionally I attend one of the rehabilitative talks that are supposed to be my primary reason for being there. Still, even here, nothing much is expected, and I sit in my chair, eyes half open, closing, closing... I start smoking again because everyone else at the hospital does so, and it seems a not unreasonable sort of way to pass the time.

The nurses do try to educate us about mental illness. I learn that Schizophrenia affects one percent of the population. That people with Schizophrenia are not aggressive and that they are, in fact, far more likely to hurt themselves than other people. I am told these things, but nothing distracts from the fear that is contained within the word Schizophrenia and the prognosis that I have been given. My life is effectively over.