Description

By Mark Ellerby

ISBN: 978-1-78382-6094
Published: 2021
Pages: 59
Key Themes: Mental Health, Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, Personal Experience

Description

This book describes some aspects of living with schizophrenia in terms of key themes like my psychiatric history and the symptoms like paranoia and the associated voices I have, the long term anxiety this causes, delusions of grandeur, hospitalisation as confinement, side effects of psychiatric medications including sleeping all the time and how frightening they can be. Much of life with the illness means trying to get through the illness until you either die or recover.

One point here is that I have a positive view of hospitalisation which contrasts with an essay in another book of mine which was critical of it. Although the confinement made some of the symptoms worse this became more balanced by that the fact of being unable to function outside the hospital so in that in the end it was better to seek help even so.

As for the symptoms something had to be done and one approach I had was to have a constant battle was trying to control my mind to stop it putting me in danger with the voices and to stop my thoughts causing harm in world events. More than this I believed it was harming people I knew. I had to distract my mind from thinking paranoid thoughts like that but couldn’t get rid of them completely.

It was my reptile brain that was triggering these thoughts off and i had to find a way of stopping the amygdala from clicking back. This was difficult because the paranoid delusions were system overload and I need to reprogram my mind with help to be able to confront the voices and delusions and not to run away.

About the Author

My biographical history is very much dominated by schizophrenia which began at age 21. I had just graduated from university and starting a PhD. course in political philosophy. I had to give up my PhD. after a five year struggle with the illness due to a lack of information to hand about what hearing voices actually is.
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