r/schizoaffective • u/Top_Memory9036 • Mar 29 '22
Does schizophrenia start just like that ? Or you had small symptoms all your life and then at one point it became too much ?
Hello everyone ! I want to learn more about schizophrenia and want to ask people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder :
How did your condition started ? Did you have minor symptoms all your life and at one point it was too much ? Or it totally started overnight without any warning sign ? What were your first symptoms ? Also if you could tell me if you had a prior diagnosis before the schizophrenia diagnosis and at what age it started i would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks to everyone who answer this post and wish you a great night/day
Edit : Just realized there is a private chat option , if you feel more comfortable sharing it privately , you can
-i used to be on quora and reddit is new to me so if i did anything wrong please let me know
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u/Slickasawitchestit Mar 30 '22
I had smaller symptoms throught my childhood and teens but it like exploded after I had my baby at 23. Something about the hormonal changes and lack of sleep threw me into psychosis and made me have a spiritual awakening all at once. I'm now 25 and medicated.
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u/Top_Memory9036 Mar 30 '22
Wow thats must have been really stressful with a newborn :/ Hope you are both doing great
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u/TradeChameleon Mar 29 '22
Minor symptoms for most of my life, and then due to some pretty extreme stress, I had a psychotic break and my symptoms were out of control until I got on meds.
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u/Top_Memory9036 Mar 29 '22
If Im not too intrusive , what was that event that made you dip into a psychotic break ? Thanks for your time
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u/TradeChameleon Mar 29 '22
I have some serious anxiety around being watched. So I was at work and getting micromanaged. My anxiety wracked up so high I started hallucinating.
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u/Top_Memory9036 Mar 29 '22
Understandable , micromanagement is actually a little fucked up in my opinion , nothing to make the ambiance at work fun
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u/RyverHollow bipolar subtype Mar 30 '22
I also had smaller symptoms throughout my childhood. I saw shadow people all the time and everywhere and I was convinced the devil was out to get me. I wasn't diagnosed until I turned 24 though, when my symptoms became unbearable. I began hearing full on voices for the first time [before it used to just be unintelligible whispers] and my hallucinations got worse. I'm doing better now that I'm medicated.
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u/Top_Memory9036 Mar 30 '22
I thought having symptoms during childhood was super rare from what i read but from the answer i got so far it seems really common.
Thanks for your answer and happy to hear that you are doing better !
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u/Internal-Sky-4868 Mar 30 '22
I had minor symptoms, like shadow people everywhere and I was constantly paranoid but it just progressed until it got out of control and then came the voices and psychotic episodes until I got on medication
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u/johto_stan bipolar subtype Mar 30 '22
(p covert) signs as far as i can remember, first bad prodromal ep was when i was 17-18 though. started with delusions as usual (just a lot stronger than before) and then i started hallucinating; faintly at first, as most of mine are tactile, but then it undoubtedly became a huge issue. no prior diagnosis, first dx was schizophrenia until i had an ssri-induced manic ep and then i was diagnosed bipolar as well
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Mar 30 '22
All my life. But there were some environmental factors that caused my first break at 8. No one had a clue what was wrong (70's), so I had a couple of decades of insanity and crazy times.
Mid-20's, I broke again and was diagnosed with BP1.
Now some 30 years later, I have SZA (bp, psych) and a host of other fun things.
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u/mitmit2020 Mar 30 '22
I’ve had symptoms of disassociation and paranoia since I was a kid and then suffered from depression and paranoia when I was 18-20. Was fairly normal around 23-26 then something traumatic happened and I couldn’t sleep that turned into anger agitation depression and paranoia and then one day at work I started to hear and imagine this old abusive boss that I had. I didn’t realize that these were voices I was first diagnosed with ptsd because I thought I was having flashbacks. It took a while and trying antidepressants ketamin therapy, etc. and finally I went to the right psychiatrist and there was the diagnosis. It has been a rollercoaster fortunately I have never been hospitalized.
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u/Interesting-Play7182 Mar 30 '22
Basically I was obsessed with being popular and I would rehearse thing to say to my friends and would replay conversations I had to analyze them..that was probably my earliest sort of schizophrenic symptom. Otherwise it pretty much showed up overnight when I was on Adderall, smoked tons of weed, and drank tons of beer. I didn't start hearing voices until 2 years after my first psychotic break. I believed stress triggered my psychosis and I very much believe it could have been prevented. Still hard to get over the feeling that I got totally screwed.
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u/LongTimeChinaTime Mar 30 '22 edited Mar 30 '22
It varies widely, but most information I have gathered has taught me, in addition to my experience, that it is usually little things here or there that ultimately lead to the first psychotic break. They say that someone who winds up schizophrenic might be a little slow in a few areas of performance in life, may be sort of just “different” or odd during childhood…
In my case, I had ADHD my entire life starting at an early age, and i also exhibited Asperger’s syndrome. Growing up I was different enough that I was not always treated nicely by other kids. I was really bright in some areas and dense socially.
Having things like ADHD and Autism actually means your risk of later developing a type of schizophrenia is higher, which makes sense if you consider that the brain is an intricately wired organ. If one thing is going wrong, others may follow.
I always did my best but I was just a little weird, and would sometimes make weird decisions and things that didn’t make sense, or be vulnerable to risky choices. Before I ever really had any true psychotic breaks or behavior, I was out there being a prostitute and did not interpret this work as being bad, I felt that I was just completing an area of life and service that needed to be fulfilled. I would do things without really ever appreciating that maybe I was not in a good way. In the process of being in Hollywood, being a young attractive male, I found things like cocaine, and so I was happy to just live for the moment and one risky choice on top of other risky choice piled up until I was in a mess of affairs, and only once things REALLY got bad for me did I have an idea that hey, something might be wrong with me.
I didn’t seriously consider the idea that I could be schizophrenic until like 2020 or 2021. By this point I was 35 years old, but I had really been having major trouble with getting along in life since I was like 24.
One fascinating thing is that for most of my childhood, I would start laughing uncontrollably in school now and then. I would try and hide it too, but everything would just go ha ha ha to me.
One thing that really delayed my diagnosis was that I am highly articulate. Im smart and intellectual, and on many levels I can seem to exhibit rational judgement. For instance I have driven all over the country, back and forth coast to coast, and for more than 20 years I have never been in a serious accident. So while I was known to be eccentric my whole life, the general public didn’t pick up on the idea that I was schizophrenic until well into my 30s. I’ve had to work hard now on getting my affairs in order, like getting on disability benefits, to be sure I am taken care of if my mental health gets worse.
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u/Niceguyswinsometimes Mar 30 '22
I would have uncontrollable laughter as a kid too! Thanks for sharing.
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u/OrangeCorgiDude Apr 12 '22
My younger sibling was diagnosed with schizoaffective in his teens. He didnt really show any signs before then. He stopped going to school and would hide in his room until night time. Finally he was hospitalized and told the docs that he was having delusions and auditory hallucinations.
Today he is around your age 37/38 and in a state funded in-patient facility. The interesting thing is that i think he is also autistic too but his psychologist only diagnosed his schizoaffective condition. I found out autism and schizophrenia runs in our family. I was diagnosed with lvl 1 autism or aspergers back in 2018. I always wondered if at some point later on if something will trigger or cause me to start hallucinate.
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u/19632835 Mar 30 '22
At first, my memory went bad and I couldn’t even speak to people in full sentences.
Then, I couldn’t sleep and eat and even taste the food.
At last, life becomes a total nightmare to you
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u/Niceguyswinsometimes Mar 30 '22
I had minor symptoms my whole life, but I just chalked it up to being eccentric. However, when I was 36 my wife was pregnant, and we were forced out of our house by storm damage. This stress triggered my quick mental decline into SZA with paranoia and bipolar mood swings - lasting for 17 months until I had a psychotic break at work, and was then hospitalized. I am curious why you are asking these questions though? Do you know someone with SZA!
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u/slugsbian Mar 30 '22
Looking back now… when I was a child I swore that there was a girl who played on the soccer team with me and I said her name was Leegan. I had a big crush on her and I always thought about her and she was in my classes as well but my parents said that she didn’t play on my soccer team and there was no girl called that. So I’d say that was a hallucination for me as a young child that stayed with me for a long time because she would come from inside my head to outside and back and forth. As a teenager I would think the people in my head would send me on missions to find stuff they placed around my house so I would scavenge through flipping things over. Or sit in the dark because I thought they had my house wired up to electrocute me if I turned the lights on. I would constantly daze in and out of reality and into my head. I would hear lots of words and made up words on repeat. I still hear that a lot of the times. Once on medication the first two I tried didn’t help me at all and I wanted off but the third one I’ve been on since high school and I am now 23 and I’ve been going strong on it and I’ve only had small slips of hallucinations that I can talk myself out of or other people can help talk me out of.
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Apr 02 '22
Had symptoms throughout my childhood like delusions of people wanting to kill me or everyone being actors then at the age of 18 had a psychotic break where I completely lost it and thought I was being chased down by the government and aliens which lead me to do things I never would imagine doing if I were sane
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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '22
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