The unavoidable

Got this email from someone who I have not heard of for the longest time.... telling me that she was severely ill.

The last time I spoke with her really, I was listening to her and I saw myself.

I told her.

"You might not want to believe it but you need to see a psychiatrist.  I don't know your diagnosis but you are psychotic because I am one."

Like me at the onset, she did believe it and, I suspect, neither did the people she knew.

Instead of going to see a psychiatrist, she chatted with this acquaintance of her who was a school guidance counselor in training and cooked up the diagnosis of some kind of personality disorder.

Today, it is my belief that...

Coping is difficult.  Granted.

At points, you falter and you get back to the cuckoo's nest.  This mostly has to do with the fact that symptoms morph and they morph.  In other words, simply because you are aware of the fact that you are psychotic doesn't immunize you... otherwise, I would not have gone back to the psychiatric ward for the second and third time.

And, honestly, today, I have eventually moved to a stage within which I am not even gonna entertain why so many of us have to go through similar process yet needing to find our own way home....

However, the most difficult part, in retrospective, is living with and through the onset.... especially when... you and the people you know simply can not believe that you could be one of them.... psychotic.

(Think about this... how guilty might you feel trying to even conceive the notion that... so and so is having a psychotic onset....)

After I heard from her, I felt a bit guilty because... what if I have tried harder to persuade her to see a licensed doctor instead?  Would that have helped her to prevent the worsening of the symptoms?

Then, I realized that it was a nonsensical thought.

First of all, it is not like I am her family and there is anything else I could have done about it.

Second, patients need to have enough of I don't know what you might call it and knows that they need help.

Rethinking the onset...

I actually was seeing a psychiatrist and my psychiatrist actually told me point-blank... "you are delusional."

I walked out of the clinic, getting back to work... thinking... "He is part of the conspiracy."

Luckily, some time later, I eventually walked myself into ER voluntarily on that Saturday afternoon and told the people on duty.  

"I need to be locked up."

So I shipped myself into the psychiatric ward for the first time because I realized that I was losing control over my ability to concentrate...  8-O (Still lack of insights I guess... Yet, enough of insight for help seeking behavior.)

So I think... ouch... ouch... ouch...

All the advances they speak of in science etc.... onsets still pop up left and right all over the globe?!

Could it be... the unavoidable--- the unavoidable.

And, how could it be?  The unavoidable remains the unavoidable?!

What could help?

One thing I am pretty sure is that... since even in person communication didn't seem to help at all, this blog... What help?