(personal story on when my illness developed)

I remember when I first got sick, it was like I woke up and decided I wanted nothing to do with the world anymore. I had just turned 15. I was at boarding school and none of my so called friends wanted to throw a party. My mom came to the school and I hadn't even known, she dropped off a painting of an angel watching over two kids on a cliff. Well that's just how I felt at the time, I was the girl on the edge just about to fall.

 I didn't want to pass by the people who never respected me, didn't want to sit with them and eat and feel like I was a part of something that I wasn't. I stood in the snow, I stood for hours just staring at the mountain in the distance trying to see if God would appear because I wanted him to. It was his last chance. The teacher finally came out, and a student told me she couldn't help me repeatedly.

 I went and explored the greenhouse of the school. All the sudden I realized that it was the end of the world ...it was like all the sudden a screw went loose and I lost all sense of control. It could have ended, maybe, maybe my mom wouldn't have gotten so offended when I cried to her over the phone and reached out to them. Instead they came and picked me up from school. It just got worse and worse. I went to sleep in the hotel, for one delirious night I heard voices--like disembodied people I knew. I felt really feverish, and exhausted. Like I was going into a dark place I would never return from. The teacher talked about how her friend shot himself, I heard the shot ring out in my head.

When I got home my parents wanted to wait before they did anything. I would lay in bed, feeling feverish, like everything was super loud. My mom put on Sarah Mclaughlin, and I would listen to the CD and song World On Fire repeatedly for hours on end. But it was like, I couldn't feel from her voice- couldn't grasp the logic behind those words. Everything felt like it had lost reasoning.

 I didn't seem to comprehend that I was supposed to be trying to get better. I don't think my parents really told me that, maybe they did. They brought me food and warm tea and I just lay in bed feeling stuffy and tired. I just wanted to sleep forever. Then after all that sleeping, I needed to wake up. I crawled out the window and sat on the roof like I always had, and overlooked the neighborhood. But my mom looked up and started screaming. Please don't jump! She cried. She then called the hospital and told them I had been on the roof. I don't remember, but I think this is when they decided to hospitalize me.

I was in the hospital entrance when I told my dad how beautiful it was--that I could almost smell the flowers when I thought of them, the paintings I was imagining. But when I saw the white walls, white floors, bleak and terrible prison-like corridors of the hospital I felt betrayed. My parents said they wanted to talk to me, they had come to see me and I asked to be taken inside and didn't look back. The huge metal door slammed behind me and I felt like I was going into a cave and never coming back. The nurse came into my room every night with her pills and said I needed to take them. I had a dream about paintings found in the drawer, I thought the van gogh painting on the wall was a window, we were overlooking Paris.

But then I started taking Risperdal. I started having strange dreams, and I woke up night morning laughing like I was someone else...I tried to summon the creativity--but it wasn't the medication, it was the more I stared into the white walls, the sad people, the feeling I was a prisoner. I started scribbling my art- like I was reaching to another world, a place where people really cared. Everything was ugly, but it never hurt as much. I remember one man was asked what his family was like- or his life. He said he didn't remember. He stared blankly ahead. I don't remember anything- he said.

I came home...but I don't know that I felt quite like myself yet. Then I woke up, and decided I needed to get away from all this. I walked outside and lay in the snow until my dad came and picked me up, I asked to go for a drive. Suddenly this madness overcame me, like a switch went off. I felt paranoid, persecuted- like this would never end and they were trying to brainwash me. I grabbed the steering wheel and tried to hit a tree.

My dad grabbed it, and swerved to the side. I tried to get out and he locked the doors, and then I somehow managed to get out. He tried to fight me down, I'm not going to let you do this, he said. Then I ran into a feild that had been flooded, and the water was freezing. I almost killed myself that way, running into the water- the doctor said any longer and I would have frozen my blood. A construction worker came and coaxed me back out of the water, and I got back in the car with my dad.

But they had to hospitalize me. It just wasn't what anyone had expected. My dad fought to get the insurance to pay for what he expected was a better place than the other hospital, the adult unit was full of some people that he didn't think I would be ok around. But at the other hospital, the people there were abusive and cruel. They were mean because I was paranoid, and I didn't want to take the medications. They isolated me for hours and hours just for being catatonic and refusing medications. It wasn't like I felt they were cruel, they were definately being cruel. My hand went numb from an injection- I was told this was a delusion. Everything they did made it worse. I didn't even hardly speak, and I guess that was what angered them. I was so quiet, so they constantly put me in the quiet room. And it only increased my fears.

But I somehow submitted, and at last took the medication- none of the six medications worked, except the newer atypicals the doctor had me take. I went home, and all the people in the psychiatrists office said that I was really not well. That I barely blinked, and that I seemed very catatonic. I got better after that, but the abuses in the hospital made it very hard to know who was helping me anymore. Just trying to put back the broken pieces of myself has been hard for me.

Right now it helps to write this--because I need to focus on when I was sick, I am losing ground again and feeling like nothing makes sense. Maybe the best way to describe schizophrenia is that you stop being able to define anything. You look for pieces, and they dont fit...and everything else is a memory. Logic escapes you like a liquid running through your hands...the truth burns like one million suns..but you can't feel it because it will kill you to know...