Delusions – Perhaps Scariest Part of Schizophrenia

The symptom that I find the most troubling about schizophrenia is delusions. Before I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I didn’t know what a delusion was, and thus I had this stigma that schizophrenics had to be crazy off the bat. My logic was that just because I would hear voices, doesn’t mean that I had to listen to them. If they were voices, fake voices, then couldn’t I tell?

Of course, at that time I did not know how debilitating schizophrenia is due these delusions. The fact is that delusions essentially make it impossible for a schizophrenic to function in society. The craziest part about delusions is that you will easily believe something you had already perceived as false. Commonly, when I was delusional, I was still convinced that the voices I was hearing at the time had to be real regardless, while I already knew I was a schizophrenic. They just seemed too convincing to me. And they would give me excuses, such as saying that the medication that I was already on already repressed my schizophrenic psychosis, so they had to be real.

From my personal experiences, the delusions came about when I first started having auditory hallucinations, so the hallucinations never seemed odd. My first delusion was that I just could “hear” others really well, and that was why I heard people commenting about me. It came on gradually, and coupled with my stigma against schizophrenics, I believed my logic. Crazily, as the months progressed, I was suddenly “capable” of communicating with people “psychically”. Nowadays, I feel that if I stopped taking my medications and relapsed in a couple of months, I would again fall for any delusions that came in front of me.

In my book, I go over possibly every event where delusions had screwed me over, but I feel that it would just be too long to go over everything in that manner. Thus I will give a short summary of the worst of the worst:

• The one that lead to my first hospitalization was a series of events, the belief of a massacre going on in my community, where I called Emergency Services in the end because I thought my parents wanted to kill me
• During my first hospitalization, I suppressed my thoughts because I believed that I was disrespecting these people that were living in my head
• During my second hospitalization, I had a rather bad experience with the anti-psychotic aripiprazole, experiencing extreme restlessness – but I continued to take it for over a week, because I thought I was just going through withdrawal from being off another medication. It got to the point that on my weekend home visit, I was pacing back and forth, chewing a lot of gum, and the restlessness just wouldn’t go away.
• Between my second and third hospitalization, I walked through a creek in mid-March weather (maybe around 3-4°C) because I thought I was being chased into being forced into hospitalization. The craziest part of this experience is that I ended up admitting myself into the hospital the very next day
• I almost bought an iPhone 4 on contract, but luckily I was only 15 at the time, and I needed to be at least 18 years old to sign it (it was something I definitely could not afford)

These are the most stand out occurrences where my delusions and hallucinations took control of everything in my life. But the thing I am most scared about if I relapse is the loneliness that I get while being delusional. My auditory hallucinations come with delusions of paranoia, and so commonly I would ignore the people around me, and attempt to communicate just with my voices. Even when I talked with them, it just felt empty. As the days turn into months, the fact I talk to no-one just makes me more and more insane. Being in a psychiatric institution for the duration of the time just makes the situation even worse.

All in all, I believe the worst part of schizophrenia is the symptom of delusions. And those are the reasons why I believe that is true.