My Coping with Schizophrenia

I am a person with Schizophrenia. I have been diagnosed as schizoaffective, and have had no psychotic episodes for many years.  I have kept my family from knowing this for many years and because of the embarrassment of it all, I have very little contact with them for fear of their reaction to my state of illness.  Very few of my friends know this, those that do suffer from sordid types of mental illness, though they are not professionals of any type, we still keep in contact with one another, sharing information about how we live and how we see the world, caring about one another in this society of the twenty-first century.  I recently read a paper written by a doctor, who at the age of 25 was diagnosed with schizophrenia who is now a psychologist who works with people who are mentally ill.  He has done a number of presentations on coping with schizophrenia and has conceived ideas in lieu of his experiences with the illness, his patients and his own personal thoughts on the “Twelve Aspects of Coping for Persons with Schizophrenia.”

His ideas being so simple, staggered my mind, and I began to understand that I was not perfect in what I believed of myself, my own thoughts or my own beliefs.  I never once since my first hospital stay believed anything was wrong with me, yet as this doctor stated, “We accept that which is logical, that which is rational and reasonable.  That which is crazy is dismissed.”

It wasn’t hard soon after reading on-wardly, that I needed to learn acceptance and I needed to understand that I may be ill for the rest of my life, if, I wasn’t already living a fact of denial about having a disorder at all and denying to myself that it exist.  I read on, examining the author’s course on acceptance and his journey in understanding and saw my own experience of the illness of which was more spiritual than it had to be, tied to by the disruption of the biochemical side of reality I lived within my own mind.

I began to understand I had no special senses to see, or hear the world with and my insight to judge others, only a whim of judging myself.  I had no control over the rational side of myself; I was only daydreaming with other chemicals inside my brain, and I saw myself wishful thinking which gave me cause to partially deny, true logic, only as the author put it, living with “poetic” logic.” 

Written by Donald S.