As a child, I was a loner with self-esteem problems and was bullied into misery. I don’t know whether that would have an effect on would happen later in life, but it may have. I have no clear picture as to whether mental illness is in the family, but I suffer from paranoid schizophrenia that remained undiagnosed for a good 15 years.
My teen years were hard and both erratic. I befriended a lot of the strange people because I felt I could be myself among difference. I first noticed then, that I was having paranoid thoughts—thinking that people were persecuting me or talking about me. It used to bother me a lot. Though at the time, I did not know that these were paranoiac thoughts. I honestly believed that people had it in for me.
At the age of 22, I moved away from my parents in Brisbane to Perth Western Australia. I spent much of my twenties trying to hold down jobs and not succeeding. I was on and off social benefits and trying whatever jobs I could get. Like the unstable job situation so too were my relationships with boyfriends, which changed a lot over the period of my twenties.
Finally, at age 27, I decided to go back to study my TEE (Tertiary Entrance Examination) as an adult and failed miserably even though I studied hard. I went back to Brisbane for 6 months to look after my terminally ill mother who lost her leg. I found that people were not at all sympathetic to emotional reaction to the loss of my mother’s leg. I helped my mother until she could get a prosthetic leg, and once again I returned to Western Australia.
The next year, I committed fully into doing my TEE again, though this time I did not rely on one way to get into university, sitting the STAT (Special Tertiary Admission Test) as well. While at college, I noticed that I started having grandiose thoughts and fell for an older married man. I thought that I was having telepathic conversations with him and felt somehow that our relationship was divinely inspired when in reality, nothing was happening at all. I turned to the Baha’i religion because I felt that God was directing me toward some greater purpose. At the end of the year, I failed my TEE again yet did very well in the STAT.
I received a rejection letter from my chosen university based on my TEE marks and later in January, the contradictory letter came, saying that I had secured a place in Edith Cowan University in 2005. I started a Bachelor of Arts and was doing incredibly well much to my surprise.
In 2006, my mother died and I went home for the funeral and it was as if my emotions were shut off. I felt empty and numb. This is when I first started experiencing flat affect though I didn’t know it was this of course. I went back to university and resumed my studies as usual until finally in 2007 a neighbor smashed my lounge room window in for asking her to keep her noise down.
My boyfriend, at the time, was 10 years my junior and did not know how to handle this situation. I was close on 31 at this stage, and I started thinking that the girl had a plot against my life, that she was infiltrating me through electronic messages, and I became frightened thinking that I would soon die. It all seemed real and was the turning point in my life. I started believing that I could talk to God that provided some comfort and that I was once again on some divine mission.
My boyfriend’s parents never liked me. My boyfriend and I moved out and went down to Bunbury to stay with his parents. They were psychiatric nurses and I would have thought that they would have put their feelings aside and saw that I got help but they didn’t. I presented at the hospital by police escort as I was afraid I was going to do something serious to myself, so I called for help. While there, I was given a white pill (which I now assume was diazepam) and not admitted because my boyfriend’s mother worked there. I went around the GPs in Bunbury in a mad frenzy to seek help as I questioned how a pill could start to make me feel better. The parents had enough of me and sent me on a two and a half hour journey by train by myself in psychosis. I stopped the train multiple times and when the staff got into Perth they handed me over to security guards who were very caring and saw that I got to Royal Perth Hospital.
I was then transferred to Alma Street on a community treatment order because I was not being medication compliant and believed I was being poisoned by what they gave me. The hallucinations were so real that I saw blood flowing from my mouth and nose in the mirror. I was put into a locked ward for 2 days and became even more frightened when I had to contend with violent outbursts from other patients. I was then transferred into the open ward because the medical team thought that it was detrimental to me. I stayed in hospital a month and finally, the medication returned me to state of functionality. I was given weekend leave and had to borrow money off my father to pay the rent as my social benefits had been cut.
I returned back to a flat to find that my boyfriend and his family had taken most of my stuff including my clothes and furniture. I went back to the hospital and was told that I would be discharged. I left and only had a week until my flat was put on the market for rent. This would render me almost homeless. In a desperate attempt to survive, and get out of there because of my neighbor, I put all my remaining possessions on the verge. I cleaned the flat, handed in the key and went to stay with my ex-boyfriend’s parents to at least retrieve some of my stuff. While there, I told his father that I had paranoid schizophrenia and his mentally ill sister saw me as being manipulative to elicit sympathy. After the week was up, I went to stay with a good friend who’d stuck by me and flew out to Brisbane because I did not know what else to do.
My father had married again and my step-mother saw me as playing head games when I was just ill. I stayed there 6 weeks and returned back to Perth and stayed in a backpackers as my friends had abandoned me. I got a job and found a house within a week that was fully furnished. I lived there over the next few years and completed my undergraduate degree and honors year. I was a zombie and seeing community public health where the doctors changed every 3 months. Finally, I gathered furniture again and was granted the pension after losing yet another job. I moved into a house with friends and lived with many flatmates over the next 4 years while completing my Master’s degree. I was told by the community public health that it was not possible that I had done my Masters degree as they said each time someone has psychosis they lose intelligence quotient points. I left public health and started seeing a private psychologist and psychiatrist who believed in my ability.
Next, I enrolled in a PhD of Creative Writing and soon found a boyfriend who I am still with after 5 years. The psychiatrist still dosed me up on drugs to a zombie level, and I decided that I could no longer live like this so fired my psychiatrist in favor of a GP who listens to me. I reduced my medication and started functioning better. I am now on one injection of haloperidol monthly, a collection of herbs and vitamins and am functioning better now than I ever have. I still see my psychologist, GP and have a support worker. I have 4 casual jobs (2 of which are advocacy positions in mental health). I did volunteer work in the lived experience project while doing my PhD that led to my jobs in mental health that I start in 2019. I have just applied for a permanent position in mental health advocacy and hope that I will see an interview. November 2018 saw the submission of my PhD for examination. Now, I have a lot of friends, have lived on my own for 3 years, and actually look forward to the next chapter of my life. I have written a memoir on my schizophrenia and will be seeking out publishers in 2019 and also written an autofiction on someone living with schizophrenia in the community, which is my PhD thesis that I hope too will soon be published. I have come from adversity and looked up to Professor John Nash for inspiration. Don’t let someone tell you that you stop living because you are diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.