Background

I guess to properly lay the foundation for my various true life experiences, bizarre as they may seem, it’s necessary to briefly review significant factors and events that (likely) may have contributed to my state of mental health as an adult.

It’s my understanding that the several phenomena associated with Schozophrenia can have their basis in early-life brain injury (including prenatal, intra-uterine and post/natal injury or infection), genetic predisposition, and significant stressful experiences during extreme life conditions.

While I can’t speak to any predisposition with which I may have been born, the fact remains that I was born with a severely crushed skull, having an extruded eye and evidence of cerebral bleeding consistent with a major stroke. Thus, according to literature I have reviewed, I was born with major neurological injuries that suggested a high vulnerability to Schizophrenia at some point in my life.

I suppose the most convenient and interesting way to proceed is to relate my experiences and their attendant consequences as they come to mind. So my apologies for the seemingly haphazard chronology of events.

I also think it’s best to divide my journal as much as possible into single installments for each experience, with a minimum of exceptions.

To set the stage properly, let me lay out the overall course of my schizophrenia. In my younger years (primarily age 13 through 17) I experienced some audible hallucinations, and more disturbingly frequent command hallucinations that directed me to engage in several dangerous, high-risk activities. I believe I also experienced visual, more sensory hallucinations and delusions as a younger child, but I’ll stipulate that such remembrances may have been, at least to som extent, normal phenomena for a child’s or adolescent’s brain.

I also became aware that I engaged in perseverant behavior. It is unclear whether a few more vivid experiences were actually attributable to elaborate hallucinations and resultant delusional beliefs.

With adult life came more florid hallucinations, which built upon the already existent command phenomena. It was in response to these more disturbing experiences that I seriously sough professional help. That process began over twenty years ago, and has progressed uninterrupted since then. While symptoms are improved, they nevertheless still persist. This narrative is further developed under a separate entry, a higher-level summary of the condition’s history (see post at March 31, 2023).