August 07th, 2023

 Tales from the Madhouse

Inside the mind of schizoaffective disorder

August 07^th, 2023

The stink of Raid is killing the ants crawling down from the top corner of my gram’s ceiling. It does little to kill the ants crawling inside my brain— there are many. My latest psychotic episode involved thinking my dad and grandma molested me when I was little. It is scary how the voices can take on the people you love the most. Of course, I know now it was another one of schizophrenia’s tricks. The illness thinks of it all like a game where I have to play through till the end. Less than 2 months ago I was sitting paralyzed in the bed of my gram staring at my hands as they stayed frozen. I remembered false memories of the “assault” including how my hands were held and I was forced to sit as my family molested me. In the memories I stared up at a clock and I remember thinking this is why certain random household things felt evil and wrong all my life. The Black kitty Cat clock with its searching, perverse eyes wasn’t evil. It was the people who were.

Now if you digested the first paragraph okay, then I’d say, you are perfectly fine to be reading the rest of my story. I am writing along as you read where I will journal my adventures working as a District Pharmacy Tech living with schizoaffective disorder. On paper it doesn’t sound very pretty or exciting. What is schizoaffective disorder, even? It is categorized as a combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia where you have psychotic episodes outside of mania. My schizophrenia (I use them interchangeably) is with me all the time. It is with me every time I taste food. I can tell you why that is, too. The metabolic system in schizophrenia has issues within the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) where dopamine and serotonin are thrown haywire. I read an article today on PubMed about how the disruption of cerebrospinal fluid flows through the olfactory system. I am certain the olfactory system is dysfunctional in schizophrenia and it is responsible for my changes in taste among the coding for taste receptors. Now, I’m going to use a lot of big and complicated words in my journal and you don’t need to understand them. In fact, you should know that I am in college and I am 25 and I am not a medical professional (yet). I am just a girl with a disease who wants to understand herself.

I experience tactile hallucinations much like the ants crawling down my ceiling. Those ants are there because I left an ice cream out (a leftover from my anxiety and night eating.) My night eating may be responsible for the loss of my ex-boyfriend, potentially. “Night eating” is just as it sounds. I get anxious and I eat food in my bed and it calms down my anxiety. One time, my ex described it as this: “if I knew after a first date you would eat bread in bed I never would have dated you.” He was quite the charmer. I will refer to him as ex throughout my journal, and by the end of this, you will have all the hot gossip regarding him.

So yes, as I was saying, I experience tactile hallucinations. They can be tingles up my arm, they can be the sexual sensation of feeling horny out of nowhere, they can be my taste buds making a normal food taste weird, they can be related to temperature, and they are absolutely fucking with my 5 senses 24/7. I never asked for this. I never asked for any of it. I didn’t want to grow up fearing Elmo kept a knife and was hiding in my closet to kill me. All I want is to be… okay. Just okay. I’m not asking for much.