My Story

An account of my initial schizophrenia episodes.

In my opinion, my schizophrenia was the result of a combination of my upbringing and my first experience of heart break. I have a degree in the arts, and was raised by a single mum, so I was always a very sensitive person, forever buried in books, painting artworks and daydreaming ...in short very creative and imaginative as well as high-strung.

The first episode.

I am Australian. In my university years, I met an exchange student from the USA and fell in love with him. Before he left Australia to return to the USA, he gave me a parting gift of Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist. He was the first man I fell in love with, and I thought he was too beautiful for me. A few years after our meeting, S, as I shall call him, contacted me via Facebook and we got talking again. I suddenly remembered my love for him and fell in love with him again. He seemed friendly, so I thought he was reciprocating my love. I then remembered The Alchemist and the book’s ending where the protagonist will return to Fatima, the girl he fell in love with ...and thought this was a hidden message to me from S. I imagined that I was Fatima, and that S was finally returning to me. I began emailing S everyday and every chance I had. I was in my mid 20s by now and had already fallen in love with another man, B, as I shall call him, between meeting S and re-falling in love with S. Nothing came of my second experience of falling in love. Gradually S became more and more distant. He then blocked me on Facebook. He emailed me on rare occasions, and it always seemed he felt neutral towards me and was reluctant to get involved with me. I tried to build a sense of being a family with him, so I pinpointed his religion to Christianity, due to the Alchemist. I read a manga, Red River, because the two protagonists looked like him and I. I rented and worked hard in Sydney, thinking he was delaying his reunion with me because perhaps he wanted our "family " to be based in Australia. One night I got drunk on a drink he liked and fainted, hitting my head on a table in public, cutting open my right temple, and had to be rushed to a hospital in an ambulance to get stitches. I even travelled to the USA to meet him. He didn’t meet me at the airport. I took a Greyhound bus trip around the whole of the USA and he never met me. He became irritated, then downright angry at me for emailing him and trying to contact him. He probably thought I was a crazy stalker and possibly just using him to immigrate to America. In reality, I was half-prepared to be rejected by him all the time, but he never told me in simple terms he wasn’t reading my emails. He did, I think, tell me he didn’t love me. But I thought he was just being nice and giving me the freedom to leave him, as he was a little disabled by the time I re-fell in love with him. But I was so in love with him I was delusional and thought we were a couple. Eventually I chose to become Anglican, for the King James bible was supposed to be the most beautiful version of the Holy Bible, and I began a lonely journey as S’s imaginary soulmate and godly wife. At one time, I was so full of delusional love, religious beliefs and compassion that when I was travelling in Shanghai and went to a toilet at the Bund, I used my finger to touch the squatting toilet bowl to smear my fingertip with some of other people’s urine and toilet germs and then licked my dirty finger. Why? Because I felt so sorry for even the tiniest germs on earth and was giving them my love by taking them into myself. This was the first sign of psychosis, and perhaps schizophrenia. This act could have resulted eventually in self-harm had I contracted a disease from it, but I did a STI test back in Australia and was thankfully told I was clean. Now I am not a stupid woman, I got a statewide university admission score of 98.05 out of 100 at high school, but I was not mentally sane then. All this time I was emailing S, despite my mum warning me it was futile, and I was trapped in a one way email conversation, not knowing if S was reading or loving me. I have almost always lived with my mum at her home. I was getting nowhere and was starting to be concerned for my own wellbeing, so I visited a 16–25-year-old female drop-in counselling session at a community centre. I gave them a written account of my experiences. A counsellor saw me, then a specialist, and then they had me involuntarily hospitalised at a local mental health unit for 6 weeks. I began on antipsychotics, Zyprexa Olanzapine, and was only released from the hospital after going through a tribunal hearing when my mother, who was visiting my grandparents in China, came back to help me. During the hearing, I renounced my religion and said it ultimately caused my psychotic episode. I was diagnosed with psychosis.

Second episode.

All went well, with a few years of regularly seeing a psychiatrist, until I became mentally unwell again. This time I was watching the news on TV and believing that the current events and famous people seemed to coincide with my own life, and that the universe seemed to be giving me a message that I was a very important person. I was also reading messages into signs like car number plates, and thinking the world was communicating with me about how important I was. With these delusional ideas, I contacted B, the second person I fell in love with, but he was by now coupled with another woman and a father, yet I still asked him to start an affair with me because the universe seemed to be sending me messages about how B and I were meant to be together. I started to hear voices and hallucinate, and see things. I thought I was meant to be a saviour and heroine of the world. At that time, my mum owned a property in a suburb that I suspected had many terrorist links, and I was terrified, and so in self-defence, I tried to swear allegiance to the USA, because I thought they had the greatest military power. I looked up the work Yank & discovered a reference to a historical fact that Yank rhymed with Tank, and so Yanks were derogatorily called Septic Tanks. I thought then I should be more American, more tough, more like a septic tank, and so one day ate a bit of my own faecal matter. After doing this disgusting act, I realised I was crazy, again, and went to seek help. I was involuntarily kept at the hospital for a day or two, and then my mum got me out again. I was on antipsychotics, after going off medication on my own, I think, this time Abilify, and I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I had also been eating food thrown out by other people on the streets, and being paranoid and neurotic and unhygienic, which I thought was veering towards self-harm. Since then, I have been on Aripiprazole and then Abilify and seen a psychiatrist regularly for over 5 years in my mid-thirties, and now because I have recovered so well, I am only seeing my GP.

The aftermath.

I am now nearly 40 and survive on a disability support pension. My mum sold that property which had so frightened me. I still live with her. I feel great, hearing no voices, seeing nothing unusual, with no hallucinations or delusional thinking, and being hygienic again. However, I am told I may have to stay on medication for the rest of my life. I now no longer try to work in the arts industry, as I feel for me personally, that I would be nurturing an over -active imagination and I didn’t want to imagine anything unreal…I want my thinking to be as realistic as possible. Now. I spend my time enjoying life with my boyfriend, my mother, and friends, writing and creating online content about my health issues, mainly FH (familial hypercholesterolemia) and schizophrenia, hoping to help others as I have been helped by health professionals, the government, science, books, and online resources. I am also learning to drive and teaching myself music. If there is anything I have learnt that helps me to stay sane, it is that one should always seek the truth.