Part 2 I was taking the subway when I finally broke down. I wandered into a pizza place, and then cried my guts out. Cops came and drove me to the hospital. When there, I got a new diagnosis of Schizoaffective disorder with bipolar features. They put me on meds and sent me home. I [...]
It's high time I wrote about this... My much adored son has gone missing. He suffers from schizophrenia and has been coping with this dreaded illness since at least 2008 (when it was first diagnosed after he shot himself in the head). Deemed a "gifted" art student at a very early age (8), throughout school, [...]
I get asked a lot what it’s like to raise a child that has a severe mental illness. My son Tim has childhood onset schizophrenia, a rare disorder in that this mental illness usually manifests itself in late adolescence or early adulthood, and it is extremely hard to diagnose in children because the visual and [...]
You walk in to the old basement gymnasium. The silence is only relieved by the crawling ticks of cheap lighting and the desperate whine of a fly that followed you in from the cold. Lucky for you the fly leaves you alone and heads for the tiny snack table that’s covered with stale donuts and [...]
Carrying the Message By Bruce Ario With the onset of my illness, I felt I had a lot to prove. What it boiled down to is that I had to prove my self-worth. My ego required some kind of reaction to my diagnosis of schizophrenia. At first my reactions were private and clandestine. I felt [...]
I Have Schizophrenia, But Schizophrenia Does Not Have Me by Jonathan Harnisch My name is Jonathan Harnisch. I have schizophrenia with psychotic features, but schizophrenia and psychosis do not have me. I cannot distinguish what is real and what is not real. My thoughts, mood and behavior are altered, and they change frequently. Sometimes I [...]
Talking to myself This is hard to explain and I'm not really sure how to do it but I want to explain what it's like when I talk to myself. Everyone talks to themselves...well a little bit, but not like me. Not like how I do it. They don't feel like they're in different place, [...]
Getting Through an Episode The curtain opens. I am Jonathan. I have schizophrenia. I don’t want to make a big introduction. Perhaps some of you have read my work before. For me, schizophrenia is similar to what I have read. In the early material, from such turn-of-the-century psychiatrists as Kraepelin and Bleuler, there seems to [...]
Living with Mental Illness: Better Doesn't Mean Cured Sometimes, I feel that I don’t know what’s going on or that I don’t care about anything. I am confused by my feelings, because I’m not able to explain how I feel, except for the emptiness, and I feel that no one is really there for [...]
I recently watched 'Lars and the Real Girl' for the second time and once again was touched by the gentleness of this movie. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie is about a young man who thinks a blow-up sex doll is his real girlfriend. What is so poignant about the movie is how [...]
