# Schizophrenia Diagnosis for 14 years. I think it's wrong.



## Millie (May 1, 2016)

This past year or so has been a really strange one. When I had those blood clots in my leg/lungs things went a bit titshaped. I thought I had a psychotic episode in the hospital, but now I'm thinking it was something else. And that my diagnosis for the past 14 years, all my adult life, has been wrong.

Part of what I've been doing this past year, basically since I was in hospital was trying to form some method to express my craziness and also to let it escape me and impact on the world. To find some form of release, and peace, through expression. It really hit home last week, when I was editing, and named one particular photograph in my series based on my mental health.

I was working on a series that tried to express my anxiety. The way, sometimes, I can't make eye contact on the streets. The idea when you look at people, when you make eye contact, and they look back, they'll see something else. They'll see the madness in you, the "other." Part of expressing that was focusing on downward directed photographs. The idea of focusing on the ground, so you don't make contact with people. With being disengaged from people, with that separation. Part of it as well is how surreal things look when I'm like that. As though colours are more vivid, or textures and fine lines are more intense. Similarly it's how bright lights, and reflections off the ground or street furniture can be intense, and blinding. Or even how colours become washed out, and faded.

I was working on one particular photograph and I named it "Dissociation." My separation from the world. My sense of being removed from reality, shown through a photograph. And that send me into a whorl of activity, and mild insanity, or at least it feels like it.

I don't think I'm schizophrenic. First off, I never believed anything that I thought was happening. I was getting paranoid, but I knew it was paranoia. I was reading messages into people's actions, TV shows, stand up comedians, billboards, etc. but I never thought they were secret messages directed at me, I always knew it was a weird way I was interpreting them. That I was creating these signs from what I saw, and heard. I knew it was madness, and never thought of it as some form of truth. I became obsessed with my thought patterns. How we think, how we interpret things, how we come to conclusions and how we understand things. I started thinking about internal monologues, and whether thoughts were heard or said in an internal voice, or whether they came in other forms. I likened it to hearing voices, but I never heard voices. I just had my own thoughts that I couldn't control, or direct, or understand. It was always me doing this to me, and I couldn't understand it.

After realising, from naming the photograph, that I was dissociated, that I was feeling removed from life, and alienated, that I found it hard to connect with reality, and couldn't really understand things at a deep, intrinsic level, outside of my own rationalisations, I started to look at alienation, and dissociation, and that brought me onto depersonalisation and derealisation. A very real diagnosis, often brought on by stress, drugs, or a traumatic life event. All things that happened to me when I was about 15 and this started happening. It's often confused for schizophrenia, especially as the patient feels like they're losing grip on reality, and doctors easily misdiagnose it.

I never hallucinated, I just felt like I could be. I never heard things, I just became obsessed about the nature and form of our own thoughts. I have often felt disconnected from reality, and from myself. I feel like things become unreal. If you imagined the world as an animation, I would be seeing and experiencing things with frames missing. Sometimes things become hyperreal, or too intense; colours, and textures especially. Sometimes it's as though I'm talking to my body, which is not my own, as though my mind and thoughts, physicality and the part of me that is me are all separate. Sometimes it's like there's a pane of glass between me and the world. Although the pane of glass is invisible, incorporeal, and has no substance except to separate me from reality, even to separate me from myself.

This all seemingly fits into DP/DR. I was sexually assaulted when I was 15 (and I don't blame her in any way) and I can distinctly remember this feeling happening as I left her that day. I was sent to a therapist soon after, and couldn't open up due to the fear of judgement, and shame from my sexuality and gender identity, from not being able to reciprocate the advances of a girlfriend I thought I loved, and I remember these feelings happening as the therapist questioned me. Like the colour was draining from the world, and I was getting tunnel vision, and I was moving through treacle, having to push hard against reality to have any impact.

I told doctors this. I told them it was "like" hearing voices, but I wasn't. I told them it was "as though" certain things were happening to me, but I knew they weren't real. All that seems to have been ignored. I went to my GP a few days ago, and all he could do was send me on to my psychiatrist, who will see me whenever. Most of all I'm really angry. There's a possibility I've been misdiagnosed, and mistreated for my entire adult life, ever since I was 17 and asked for help. This makes far more sense to me, and I imagine it would make sense to the one or two other doctors who have already doubted my schizophrenia diagnosis, one of whom actually asked for an entire review of my situation but was told to fuck off because he wasn't my primary care doctor, and only a therapist (with a PhD and certified by the APA no less.)

If I'm correct about this, and I really think I am, I don't know what is going to happen. For this to be deemed correct by my doctors, it will mean they have to admit they got it wrong, and three other very senior psychiatrists looking after me also got it very wrong. They'll have to admit that I've been treated incorrectly for my entire adult life, by them and their colleagues. I want to throw it all out the window. I want to go to someone who will actually listen to me, and not base everything of a hastily dictated letter by a fundamentalist christian psychiatrist. I want to go to someone who won't write, "Hears voices," when I say, "It's like hearing voices." And most of all I want to start working on this, on what actually might be effecting me after 14 years of no improvement. I'm tired of all this, and I want it to stop. And I want my doctors to actually listen to what I say.


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## Millie (May 1, 2016)

Autonomic Space Monkey said:


> I have a similar story; was misdiagnosed with Schizophrenia, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Mood Disorder, Personality Disorder etc (depending on what Doctor/Shrink I saw). None of those labels accurately described what I was actually going through, & I slowly came to realize that they were a load of crap; just somnones ignorant opinions. I too stumbled upon Depersonalization whilst researching something else, & when I did it all started to fall into place. Read this now!
> 
> The biggest problem with certian professionals is that they seem to have difficulty distinguishing similie & metaphor from literalism, hence the incorrect diagnosis.
> 
> Welcome to the forum Millie, & all the best in your quest to get to the truth of the matter. These FAQ's might be of some help in that regard.


Thanks for the welcome message. 

I don't think you meant to link to that fairly gory image though (which I'm very glad I found out is make up.)


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## Zed (Jul 25, 2015)

Millie.. I'd recommend finding new support. Far too often mental health patients are incorrectly diagnosed and incorrectly treated. It's not fair at all. In fact it's unethical and immoral...

I'd say go with your gut instincts and walk away from the people who are not helping you. They're plenty of good people out there who can help, you just have to find them. Psychologists generally spend much more time with their patients and they're less likely to throw meds at you the minute you walk in the door!

The best thing I ever did was turn my back on the whole mental health system and found proper support... that's when I truly started to heal.


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## Surfer Rosa (Nov 27, 2015)

The more I complained about depersonalization, the more they labeled me with schizotypy and called my anxiety "paranoia." It was not considerate, and it was not scientific.


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