Hi. I (20F) wanted to share my story, because since getting on medication I feel like a fraud. I think back on my symptoms and think; ‘was it really that bad?’. So I thought that maybe writing my story would make me realize that I actually am sick. So, here goes nothing.

I have always been an anxious child. My parents actually took me to the doctor at nine years old to see if I had any diagnoses. In the end they didn’t find anything. That was in third grade. 

At that time I would sometimes experience bouts of paranoia. It manifested in the form of thoughts that nobody in the world except for me were real. Everybody was robots. The thought made me really scared as a child especially because when you’re scared as a kid you automatically gravitate towards your parents to protect you except I didn’t feel like they were real. This would always make me very sad and even more anxious. These beliefs wouldn’t last for long, maybe 5-7 minutes, but they were frequent and would come randomly and I would fully believe them. I never told anyone.

When I was playing at the playground in school I would hear people shouting my name when nobody did. That too happened several times but only happened at he playground so looking back on it I always doubt whether it really happened or not. But that went away and I never experienced anything like that ever again.

Fast forward to when I was fourteen and got diagnosed with an atypical eating disorder and Asperger syndrome. 

When I was 16 I graduated from school and moved on to start in a new school. At the new one you didn’t have an assigned classroom like at my previous school and you instead moved classroom depending on the class (much like American high school). This was a stressful change and This is where it gets complicated.

I struggled socially and had a hard time making friends and developed agoraphobia with panic attacks. I started skipping school and socially withdrew. I started having less energy and became isolated. My close friends all went to separate schools or, because of exchange programs, were a year below me. 

At the time we saw all of these symptoms as the effects of my Asperger diagnoses. When I got the diagnosis I was in a school with a set schedule and one classroom only. I had friends and overall my environment was stable so I didn’t really experience any repercussions of getting the diagnosis or what it meant having Aspergers.

I still sometimes had thoughts that nothing was real. I felt as if earth and everyone on it were fake and I was the subject of an experiment where everyone were keeping watch on me. When those ‘episodes’ happened I became guarded of my thoughts. Not because I thought people could read my thoughts but because they had access to certain thoughts and would know if I knew of the experiment which I wasn’t allowed to or something bad would happen. These episodes were rare, maybe once a month if I’m being generous and didn’t last for very long. Maybe 5 minutes.

After getting diagnosed with agoraphobia and germaphobic OCD at 17 i got transferred to the psychiatric department for adults. I got assigned a nurse as my medical practitioner. I told her of my inability to make decisions (ambivalence) and she said that wasn’t common for anyone with my diagnoses and she gave a bunch of papers on Schizotypical personality disorder to read and see if I recognized anything. (A very unorthodox and unprofessional in my opinion way of diagnosing someone, but okay) 

I was set up with a meeting with the head doctor of the department. The day before my meeting I had an another ‘episode’. This one lasted 30 min to an hour. I got really anxious and scared not only because I was actively thinking of the “experiment” (which I wasn’t allowed to) but because when I tried to distract myself from the anxiety by putting on a podcast I was so scared they were talking about me. I ended up not putting it on. I thought if I did, they would say stuff like; “she knows. She knows we’re not real.” And that frightened me out of my mind. 

I ended up telling the doctor about these ‘episodes’ and he sent me to another doctor from another department that specializes in schizo-diagnoses for a second opinion. He diagnosed me with paranoid schizophrenia with the reasoning that I had bizarre delusions and thought disturbances (probably not the right word for it in english, but It basically meant I thought people could read my thoughts).

I got on Abilify 15mg and the delusions (as they called them) went away even though they weren’t very frequent in the first place and my ambivalence got significantly better.

As I write this I realize what I was experiencing wasn’t normal but it seems so minor compared to what other people experience. I wasn’t psychotic to my knowledge (or maybe I just don’t what psychosis really means). It makes me feel like a fraud. Like i made up everything despite knowing that I didn’t and these things really happened. I’m thinking of going off my meds because it makes me feel bad that I’m on them when I obviously don’t need them. I feel wrongly diagnosed like my symptoms aren’t significant enough for a diagnosis. It makes me feel like I’m tricking the doctors and taking advantage of the welfare system. It makes me feel bad, like I don’t deserve being on medication. I don’t know how to explain it.

I sometimes feel like my current therapist knows all of this. Like she knows and talks about me with her colleagues behind my back. I’m afraid they’re ridiculing me and making fun of me because I don’t really have schizophrenia. It makes me not want to open up to her.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and sorry for the whole essay. I don’t know if I’m asking for advice but I would like to hear your opinion on all of this. Obviously you can’t tell me whether I was wrongly diagnosed or not (I understand that) but I would like your opinion all the same on the matter. Does this really sound like schizophrenia or am I just being dramatic?