Support and belonging

I am a brand new member to these boards so first off I'd like to say hello to everyone. I am a 28-year old with schizophrenia and temporal lobe epilepsy.

While things get painfully difficult at times, fortunately at the time of my psychosis and the beginning of my treatment, I was surrounded by loving family members and was lucky enough to get good help quickly. This was 9 years ago, and since then I am on medication on a daily basis, and most likely will be for the rest of my life. I keep close touch with my psychiatrist and doctors, yet I doubt how much they are doing for me at the moment except signing off my prescription.

I do get awfully lonely at times, partially due to isolating myself as well as being on the wrong end of some simply uninformed people who shy away from me as soon as they become aware of my illness. It seems like I have to hide things from people, because I have lost too many good people in my life who seem to turn on me once they find out about my problems.

Further to this line of thought, I find it pretty hard to find somewhere where I can fit in and even harder to make friends, people who understand what I have, people who aren't afraid of it, people who aren't about to stigmatise me.

My daily work has been instrumental in keeping me under control, but throughout the whole time I have been quite alone and armed with the right tools am keen to remedy the problems I have with making friends and getting the things I want in life, while hopefully helping others who have schizophrenia deal with it, and those who don't to at least understand it.

I guess why I am posting this, is to say hi to everyone, introduce myself and hopefully get some responses about what successes sufferers and carers/families have had in diluting stigmatism and ignorance among their peers and even strangers and how they did it.

Hi, Bienc,
You do, admittedly, have what they call "a hard row to hoe."
There certainly is a social stigma to what you've got going.
The national Mental Health Assn is committed to fighting that stigma.
Perhaps your white pages will reveal a local chapter.
There are also numerous chapters of NAMI (Natl assn for mentally ill) around the country - to support patients, ex-patients, and their families.
Really worth checking out.

I mention those not to take away from the helpfulness of these forums, but to point out that there may be local groups in your area that can help with fellowship and by addressing specific situations that you might face in your locale.

Others here may have other suggestions.
Let us know how you're doing!
All the best,
—LQ

Welcome!

If you don't mind me asking, how well does medication work in treating your condition?

Hi Bienc. I too have schizophrenia and temporal lobe epilepsy. I know how you feel; I have lost a few friends either because of their ill-informed ideas of what schizophrenia is, or because in spite of understanding the illness simply can't deal with the crap when I am unwell.

I'm lucky in one way; I do have three friends who like me for who I am, who care about me adn who are not scared off by the schizophrenia. Even then I sometimes find actually being their friend is too much and I am bad at keeping in contact with them.