I guess I’ll just kick this off by going through the history of my diagnoses. Plenty of people with mental illnesses are misdiagnosed or don’t even receive a diagnosis until long after they meet the criteria. Some diagnoses come with more stigma behind them than others, sometimes because of misrepresentation in the media or extreme cases. A mental health issue can follow someone for their entire life and can start at any time, with or without warning. They can be very personal to people, like mine are to me.
I don’t really know when the symptoms crossed the line between what’s “normal” and what’s not. I would say it was 4th grade, but I wasn’t evaluated until much later. More to come on the specific symptoms and how they affected me. For now, I’ll lay out a rough timeline. Symptoms started in 4th grade.
In 8th grade, at 12, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, and I started on my first antidepressants.
I had a serious psychotic break in 10th grade, and just after my 15th birthday I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and panic disorder with agoraphobia, with the depression diagnosis being reconfirmed.
When I was 17, my diagnoses were adjusted to schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. I’m still learning exactly what the difference between this and the others is.
There is a lot of overlap in mental illness symptoms. One symptom could point to this, to this, or to that. That’s why a lot of people get misdiagnosed at first, and some never get the “correct” diagnosis at all. I had a doctor who, when I was 14, told me I was definitely not schizophrenic. The next doctor I saw was pretty much immediately certain that I was. Mental health is complicated, as it is related to the brain, and the brain is a complicated thing.
For a lot of people, accepting their diagnosis is the hardest part at first. Since I already knew that something was wrong and had my suspicions, and since I wanted whatever it was to be treated, accepting it wasn’t too difficult. I’d had physical health issues in the past, and in my experience, having any kind of explanation for it was better than none, as it made treatment plans a hell of a lot easier. But even for me, writing this post alone is a little difficult, mostly because of the associations people tend to make with schizophrenics and their diagnosis. That’s perhaps why I want to start this blog so much, for that alone. I don’t want people to see other schizophrenia victims as monsters, as the media likes to make us seem. And we’re not the only ones, either.
Hopefully, by making this blog about my own experiences with my diagnoses, I can help other people understand other diagnoses better too. Hopefully I can help people with these or similar diagnoses feel more comfortable with their own brains.
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