I was living at my parent’s house in 2007 when I had my first psychotic episode. Earlier that year I had been working as a hotel receptionist in London but had been experiencing social exclusion from my group of friends because of a relationship I was in with a man 20 years my senior. Both his friends and mine disapproved of our relationship and some even refused to speak to me because of it. Things just weren’t right there, and I had run out of money, so I decided to move back with my parents. 

I remember I was at home reading a Ben Elton book when I first started hearing voices. At first, it was like a flood gate had opened and all these voices appeared along with hallucinations: I saw ships, and the ocean, and I saw a scary monkey standing at my window, scraping in my zen garden. I tried to catch what the voices were saying by typing them in a Word document and then typing my response back, filling pages upon pages. I called it being introduced into “the world of thinking of minds”. I typed with my mother’s voice, my father’s voice, my ex-partner and his mother and sister, sometimes until 4am. “It was a secret”, the voices told me, and “we are not allowed to talk about it”. 

It eventually escalated to a point where my two realities collided. Until that time, I had suspected that it was really my ex who was using his computer to send me these messages as a practical joke but when I went to visit him in London, I realised that maybe this wasn’t the case. I didn’t know how to tell him any of this, so we ended up fighting instead. To this day I don’t know if he knows what really happened to me. 

My parents had an inkling of what was going on. In 2009 I had become abusive towards my mother just out of pure frustration from the psychosis – I didn’t know how to communicate to anyone about what was really happening to me. By that time, I had been getting nightmares from the hallucinations and had experienced ‘thought broadcasting’ – where you believe that your thoughts are being broadcast outload so everyone can hear – especially in busy places. I remember I went running one afternoon and I kept hearing a female voice and it drove me crazy, so I screamed and hit my head. When I got home, I sat at the table crying, head in my hands, and told my dad something was wrong. 

My parents took me to see a GP and I told him what I had been experiencing. He diagnosed me with paranoid schizophrenia and referred me to the NHS Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) team where I was given a care coordinator, was put on meds and my family was given support. No one in my family has ever had schizophrenia, so they determined that my condition was situational rather than genetic. Even so, when I was 26, I decided never to have children because I’m dead scared it’ll be passed on and I can’t risk having a psychotic episode with a child, so it’s a no-go zone for me sadly … very sadly.

I can’t think of many positives of having schizophrenia, but it has taught me to be more understanding of other people’s situations, and to listen with an open mind…