July 06, 2004

The Beginning's Of Schizophrenia...

Schizophrenia...I'll refer to it as SZ....was VERY noticeable by the time my son was finally Dx's. At first the Dx was SZ affective....but within weeks it was changed to SZ. I felt like I was losing my son....and I was...to an insidious mental illness. Now, instead of seeing the usual things one does.... my son saw all kinds of odd and terrifying things. It really makes me wonder if the brain is wired differently, if it's chemical...or what. My son would think he was some sort of super comic character and that he could go around blowing up buildings by just looking at them. Of course he "blew up" the building/part of the hospital he was in!

He would see 8 ft. long snakes following him. He believed he was on a quest to rid the world of insects and for one summer was busy either buying or using bug spray. I can't tell you all how much money went down the drain on that one.

He would also see "bigfoot's" following him. At one point he said he was abducted into an alien spaceship, sexually abused, and had homing beacons drilled into his teeth so that "they" could always know where he was. Nothing anyone said could dislodge this belief that this most likely did not happen. To my son ...it was real..it happened and "they were always following him.

At this point we, my husband and I, had to give up our dreams and hopes we had for our son , he was so very mentally ill. Much of the time he didn't even realize who he was or where he was...he was just "out there"....somewhere. He couldn't finish the rest of high school ( he was 16 at the time)...driving a car was out of the question. He wasn't showing the usual attraction towards any females....but was not gay either.

We did get one big time break. After being on countless anti-psychotic meds....none of which worked on him....he finally qualified to be tried on clozaril. Clozaril is a very tightly controled drug used for the most severe cases of psychosis. Taken with other anti-psych meds it fiinally began bringing a little of our son back to us. He took quite a few meds. Two different anti-psychotic meds, one to control the seizures that clozaril created and several anti-depressants.

Posted by Kathy on July 6, 2004 01:19 PM