Sexual and violent thought infection

I hear violent and/or sexual voices about women. Sometimes it’s that woman's voice - saying inappropriate things that I don't want to hear. 

I brush them aside but they are persistent and they conjure up images in my mind like a virus causing you to get sick. Like if someone says "pink elephants" and you automatically picture a pink elephant.

I hear my voice too, but it doesn’t seem to be coming from me – as though it’s being injected by someone else.

What do you do? - Schizophrenia - Claiming benefits

I am in still recovery after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia nearly a decade ago. As of yet I have been unable to hold down a job – though not through lack of trying. I hate having to rely on benefits but I have no choice except to do so at the moment.

I don’t deal very well with stress because, as a mechanism for coping, I have shut myself out of my head so that I can only process things by talking to others or sitting down and writing them out. Couple this with the emotional and thought numbing effect of the anti-psychotic medication and you can see my problem.

At the moment stress comes in many forms but the funny thing is that it affects me without it consciously playing on my mind. By this I mean I find myself getting so worn out that it feels as though I’ve crashed into a brick wall but I have no idea why.

When I get into this state I have no energy left to deal with the barrage of intrusive images and thoughts that accost me, telling me (amongst other things) to harm or even kill myself.

Having to be extra cautious not to get into such a state means I am severely limiting what I do day to day. I want to be capable of doing a job now but the reality is my recovery is what’s most important at the moment. 

A psychotic theory

What if the intrusive thoughts and imagery are the things that I am trying to avoid (without even realising I'm doing so)? It's recently started to happen that I physically stiffen up and am unable to walk to places. However the reason for this hasn't been clear to me so far.

Traditionally I've either made it to wherever I'm going and experienced intense anxiety and panic whilst there or more often I've succumbed to them on the way. In the case of volunteering at the charity shop, I was ok for a good few weeks before I experienced resistance of a level I was unable to surmount. Then, after I failed to go in that once, I didn't feel I could face the manager again (even though thinking about it now she'd probably be really understanding!) 

It's true that I find the intrusions distressing so it would hardly be surprising that I'd want to avoid them - even if it's on a subconscious level. Now I wonder if the anxiety (to begin with) and the stiffening up (more recently) are in fact simply my body trying to make me avoid going into situations where there is an uncomfortable threat of intrusions.

In the past I haven't been able to single out any thoughts that could have caused the anxiety. I had images in my head of being in the situation but never knew why they were so distressing. What if somewhere inside I was worried that it would be distressing to experience intrusive thinking around people? 

Intrusive thoughts explained

Hot coffee over a baby's head

It happens in a sudden flash so real that I react bodily. It feels as though I'm actually experiencing the normally violent or sexual intrusive thought in that split second. It is horrible and I still find it very distressing even though it has been going on for a long time.

Then there's the voices. Sometimes they speak in my head as though it is me thinking, although I know that it isn't me who is articulating them. They don't tell me to do things, but because they pretend to be me and go on and on for months and years they almost become second nature.

It may sound odd but because they are so frequent and ongoing I get used to them and although I can usually fight them off, when I am tired or not feeling myself, I struggle to counter them and they end up overpowering me.

Intrusive thoughts explained

It happens in a sudden flash so real that I react bodily. It feels as though I'm actually experiencing the normally violent or sexual intrusive thought in that split second. It is horrible and I still find it very distressing even though it has been going on for a long time. 

Then there's the voices. Sometimes they speak in my head as though it is me thinking, although I know that it isn't me who is articulating them. They don't tell me to do things, but because they pretend to be me and go on and on for months and years they almost become second nature.

It may sound odd but because they are so frequent and ongoing I get used to them and although I can usually fight them off, when I am tired or not feeling myself, I struggle to counter them and they end up overpowering me. 

Anxiety

“I don’t know how”

“Anxiety never killed anybody” my doctor told me; “you’ve just got to push through it and when you come out the other end you’ll see that it isn’t so bad”. I am not a generally anxious person; my anxiety only arises in certain situations. I have recently gained a grasp on where my anxiety stems from which I’d like to share.

It all dates back to when I was younger; I’d struggle to leave the house to go to school but couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I ended up making all kinds of excuses so that I could stay at home. I found it very confusing: “How come everyone else deals with this problem (I assumed they all did) so easily?” In the end I logically concluded that I was just weaker than them.

It wasn’t until six years later that I was diagnosed with clinical psychosis, so for that period my family and I were almost completely in the dark. Now, six years after my diagnosis I have a new handle on the anxiety.

It all has to do with ‘shutting down’. When put into a situation that I find overwhelming, I can almost hear my mind saying, “screw this I’m out of here!” as it packs up, leaving only the surface thinking – I literally become an empty shell; unable to look inside.

For ages I found this experience to be very disturbing; I’d find myself out in public but I wouldn’t know how to be there, which made me feel very exposed and as a consequence the anxiety inevitability prevailed.

It was only in understanding what was happening when I shut down that I became able to develop a comfort with it. It no longer distresses me because I can say to myself that it’s ok, this is just how your body deals with an overwhelming situation.

I learned to shut down on a subconscious level in order to shut out the paranoid ideas and intrusive thinking that was so distressing to me. I have become so good at suppressing them that I no longer honestly know whether those thoughts are still waiting in the wings, trying constantly to break through.

For now, I must continue to push my boundaries and learn how to be again.

At the moment I still find my inability to do certain things (because I have shut down) to be very frustrating. I scare myself on these occasions because of the violence – which is directed entirely towards myself – that wells up inside me. 

Does it ever feel like things are spiralling out of your control?

“The world is too big”

It’s become a real struggle lately to get through the days. I don’t seem to have the capacity to deal with everything that’s going on. Yesterday my brain got to a point where it decided to pull the covers over its head, shut its eyes and clamp its hands over its ears. I was left in a largely vegetative state; I was in no way anxious or unhappy, I was just numb.

My sister took me for a walk to see if that would help me feel more myself. Although I could look around and focus on the scenery, I couldn’t focus on it in my mind. The same went for my thoughts; I felt empty. There was no articulation going on in my mind except the intrusive loop of song lyrics. I felt like a blank canvas.

Song lyrics have become particularly oppressive recently. They never really bothered me before but now they are bad enough as to drive me to insanity. And they are not alone. The intrusive thoughts and images seem to be getting worse. I put this down to the lower antipsychotic dose I am on now.

CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!              

It feels like an uphill battle at the moment, like I’m straining to survive. It would be so easy to let my guard down and allow the intrusions to rule me. That does worry me quite a lot. What if I start to go along with those thoughts and ideas? I know in theory that they are my thoughts and ideas because they originate from my mind but I have to keep reminding myself of that.

When I’m tired the intrusions are particularly strong and unfortunately tiredness has become a feature of late. This I put down to the meds also. I heard that people with Schizophrenia have to work twice as hard as people not afflicted to deal with their thoughts. It’s no great leap to see how even a 2.5mg reduction of a 20mg dose could make a lot of difference in this respect.

There is nothing wrong with you – get over it!

Things began to go pear shaped around the age of fifteen. That was when I started to struggle going to school. I had no idea what was preventing me from doing so at the time so I found myself having to make up fake excuses not to go in. I remember being perplexed because I assumed that my school mates were all having the same difficulties as me but were coping with them just fine. I must be weak.

I am very pleased now to have the diagnosis of Schizophrenia. However I still live in fear that someone is going to come up with a test that determines whether or not you are ill and prove once and for all that there is nothing at all wrong with me and that I AM just weak.

But then I remind myself that I do hear intrusive voices and see intrusive images and I speak in a fractured way and often completely lose the train of what I’m going on about. I have also experienced hallucinations and deluded thinking in the past so I think that there is definitely something going on.

It would be nice not to have Schizophrenia; to be able to work and not get exhausted all the time by being ‘on the go’. However I do perversely find myself becoming very defensive when I imagine being told that there is nothing wrong with me. Surely I’d welcome that evidence. Why on earth do I hold on to my diagnosis so tightly?

What would happen if it was proven once and for all that I was as able as any other person to hold down a job? In the past it has been panic attacks that have prevented me from being able to do so. Now that my antipsychotic dose has been lowered a bit I have found that the anxiety too has lessened.

I used to believe that everyone was against me and that they were all seeing into my head. Classic paranoia I guess. One day a while after starting the medication I realised that I no longer entertained that psychotic idea. Now I was faced with the challenge of living in a world where everyone ISN’T conspiring against me. It probably sounds like this new world should be a lot easier to exist in. It is certainly a lot more comfortable, but it is taking a bit of getting used to.

Apparently only around 12% of Schizophrenics in the UK are in employment. Of course this isn’t surprising as Schizophrenia is associated with poor executive functioning. When I first started dating my now fiancée I told her that I was a lot better than I had been. At that time I assumed that I would continue to improve as time went by. I thought it was a matter of taking small steps such as beginning by doing voluntary work for a couple of hours a week and then gradually increasing it, eventually moving on to paid employment. But as Jack Nicolson puts it, “Is this as good as it gets?” - have I reached the pinnacle? I’d like to think that I can get even better than this.

So far things aren’t looking promising. But maybe I’m just going to have to accept that I will need to tread a different path.

I learned recently that emotional numbness can be a symptom of Schizophrenia. Does this mean that I am damaged goods? Am I not able to love my fiancée as much as another could? Or is it all relative? The first thing I noticed when I had my dose lowered was the heightened emotional range. They say you have to find a happy medium with the medication but maybe that means finding a mid-ground between the emotional numbness of the Schizophrenia and the emotional numbness of the medication.

It’s difficult as me to certify that there is something wrong with me. I have not experienced what it feels like to be someone who doesn’t have Schizophrenia. I am told that this thought is deluded and this is paranoid; that the thoughts are all mine and I don’t have to agree with them. But how can I know that they are deluded or paranoid? The fact is that they occur inside me and are so are very tangible.

Again, what if it was proven that I didn’t have Schizophrenia? What would this mean when it comes to these disturbing thoughts? The fact is that it hasn’t been proven that I have Schizophrenia. I have simply taken the leap of faith of trusting in the doctor’s diagnosis. You have to believe in something after all, don’t you? You can’t just sit on the fence.