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.
