Next in the guest blog series is from Cรฉline, who blogs at Books Over Humans. Cรฉline has written about her experiences with schizoaffective disorder, the challenges of living with a lesser-known disorder and the stigma that comes with it.
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I think it’s only fair to first explain what schizoaffective disorder actually is.
Basically it’s a mental illness where you have a combination of schizophrenia symptoms and mood disorder symptoms.
There are two types: The bipolar type and the depressive type.
I have the depressive one.
Unfortunately there’s not a lot known about this mental illness so it’s less well understood as other mental illnesses.
I have to be honest, I try to keep it for myself as much as I can. Unfortunately as soon as people hear the word schizo(phrenia) they immediately get ‘scared’, I see their faces change as soon as they know. I get the typical questions then:
“Oh so you hear… things? You know, voices?”
Yes I do.
“You see things that aren’t there?”
Yeah I do.
And then my favourite question I get 99% of the time, “Oh but then you hear voices that tell you to kill people?”
No, I don’t.
I can’t really blame them asking that last question since whenever my mental illness gets in the media it’s always negative. But I’d like to say that 99% of the people with some type of schizophrenia do not have the desire to kill people.
Yes, we have a busy mind and are sometimes hard to love when we get into a psychosis but we don’t deserve to be seen as ‘dangerous’.
We don’t deserve it when some mass shooting happens and someone makes a comment saying, “Oh it’s probably some schizophrenic again.”
I live for the day where we are not seen as crazy.
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You can find more from Celine here: Blog | Twitter
I appreciate the sharing of something so personal and misunderstood. I honestly know “Boo” about schizophrenia. I can’t imagine seeing/hearing thi gs that aren’t there (how does one tell?) is pleasant.
Best of all to you!