I am someone who has been hearing voices for most of my life. I also see visions. I guess this falls under the diagnosis of schizophrenia, but that is something I am coming to terms with through organizing my thoughts and writing this blog. Someone else, a doctor, told me that I have schizophrenia. Throughout my life leading up to my diagnosis ten years ago, I had this nagging thought in the back of my head that I might be schizophrenic. The thought was not pleasant and I was most concerned about getting into trouble for the voices that I hear and being locked away because of them.
For this reason I did not talk about my voices much until just before I was diagnosed and I was at a tipping point. At the time leading up to being diagnosed, there came an emergence of “trickster” voices and for the first time I experienced horrible, cruel and sadistic voices that could then switch to charming at the drop of a hat. This was very confusing and made me very angry. Up until then I had only had neutral to benevolent voices. With the tricksters I could not trust what they had to say, they could say anything and were way beyond good or bad. Whenever I would pull away from them they would get even louder, more violent and agitated. I felt as though I needed to pay a bare minimum of attention towards them if only to have them be relatively behaved though still quite polarizing.
This built up for about a year, with the last six months being particularly acute in symptomatology. Then I was hospitalized. Medicated for a few weeks and found a Therapeutic Residential Community to live at for the next ten months. That all happened ten years ago now in 2015. It has taken awhile, but every day I feel a little better, a little more stable and capable of making moves in my life that can lead to further levels of wellbeing.
To this day I have the diagnosis, but I wonder still what factors other conditions may play into this psychiatric state. I feel like a person with a bunch of paper labels wrapping me up making it difficult to see clearly. I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome which is a collagen deficiency from what I have studied about it. It affects all the connective tissues apparently and can have some psychiatric comorbidities. I feel like a co-morbidity sometimes, but I know that humans are made of many things and language can help us in many ways; it is easier said than done to not get fixated on language, but I try. Also I find myself wondering if I have toxoplasmosis even though I haven’t had a cat in 15 years. Possible compiled sources aside, I hear voices and see visions and that is what I am basing my identity as someone qualified to write for this subject on.