It was a family celebration, Christmas. The events were just starting to dwindle and friends/family were heading home. There was snow outside and it was very cold. I was sitting on the couch in my little festive dress, which my mother had purchased for me.

Someone had left the television on, and it caught my limited attention span. It was the story of a young (but older than me) girl and her favourite teenager babysitter. They were close friends and the girl adored her.

One day, the babysitter drives the girl and herself to her boyfriend’s house. While in the car, (alone) the girl (whom I assume now was experiencing a sort of jealousy) notices a knife her babysitter has sitting in a cup holder.  Her babysitter returns to the car, only to have the girl stab her in the heart.

I felt a pain of revulsion in my stomach , and at the moment, my heart leapt from my chest.  I swiftly got off the couch, a weird feeling in my stomach.

I knew of murder (The Lion King was still fairly new, but Scar was pure evil), but I hadn’t comprehended it.

I had plenty of babysitters, as my parents worked full time jobs. I loved my babysitters.

Instantly, questions swirled in my mind, questions  I had never pondered before. Questions like: “How could she have done that to another human being when she loved her?” “Doesn’t she miss her?” “Wouldn’t it have hurt her?” “She was young, like me!” “Everyone will hate her once they find out the truth!” “God will punish her.”

That’s where the fear was born and that’s when the thoughts would cling to me.  They would continue to haunt my childhood and eat me up even into my adult life.

I began obsessing over stabbing people. I thought, “What if I could do such a thing for such a silly reason? God would hate me, everyone would hate me! I would hate myself!”

I went to bed with uneasy thoughts that night and a weird pressure – what I presumed was me thinking I was just going to stab my babysitter. I went to sleep hoping the thought would be gone the next morning. I was wrong.

Not only was the thought there to stay, but it drastically distracted me from school. I would look around at my classmates and ponder, “Do they have the same fears as me? Am I abnormal and crazy? Am I bad because I’m having such bad thoughts? No one else seems to have these thoughts or seems upset.” My teachers took note of my behaviour and informed my parents.

My stomach hurt and the thoughts lasted for weeks. My babysitter would come over and I would wake up very early so I could play Super Mario Brothers and distract myself from the fear that I would stab her before school.

My babysitter was an elderly woman and, to me, much like a grandmother. She would make lunch every day and play with us (I have two other younger sisters).

Sudden flashes of me wielding a knife and my hand covered with the blood of my babysitter flashed in my head. I would close my eyes, but these thoughts and images were mental. Eventually, the stabbing thoughts not only surrounding stabbing my babysitter – but progressed to my younger sisters, parents, and friends, too.

After a few months, I could no longer take it. I thought for sure one day I would crack and grab a knife. I felt sickened and crazy and evil. I liked my life, but I thought myself to be undeserving. As a six-year-old, I was considering some pretty terrible truths. One day, late, around 12:00 AM, I received the courage to express myself to my parents. The nervousness I felt while explaining nearly made me faint.

“This is it,” I thought. “My life will be over soon. Mom and Dad will hate me for having such bad thoughts, and they’ll put me away. Everyone will hate me. But I don’t want to kill or hurt anyone, so this is the way it’ll have to be.”

“Mommy, I need to speak with you of something very important.”

My Mom sat up from her bed and looked at me curiously. My Daddy sat up, too. They both cast worried looks in my direction.

“Are you sick?” She said getting out of bed.

Dad got out of bed and picked me up. He placed me on the counter in the washroom. (The washroom was like their examining place for when we were sick.)

“Daddy…Mommy…I have to tell you something because I can’t take it anymore. I’m having very bad thoughts. I think I’m a bad person. I’m worried I’m going to hurt people with knives.”

My Dad gave me an odd look.  “Do you feel like you’re going to hurt people with knives?”

I nodded.

“God doesn’t like people who hurt others. It’s wrong. People who hurt others go to hell.”

My stomach fell.

“No. Ray. Is that all that’s wrong? They’re only thoughts. You wouldn’t really do anything. They’re just thoughts that are disturbing to you. I’m glad you told us. Don’t worry about them. We know you’d never do anything.”

I felt my stomach float. For a second, I felt bliss. Now they knew. I confessed and they weren’t going to send me away forever! My Mothers smile reassured me. My mother was a nurse, she’d know if I were crazy or not! Perhaps I was just over-reacting. Perhaps now that I confessed, it meant I was a good person! What killer would confess their dark secrets?

For a few days, I felt free of the thought. But it came back. I was wrong about the confessing to my mother. I decided that from here on out, I would fight the thought. I realized that when I was distracted (in school, ect), I felt normal.

Maybe I could fight off the dark thoughts when I was bored by myself. Perhaps if it was true that I wouldn’t act on them, I would just suffer silently. I deemed myself insane and abnormal, but I wanted a childhood and I didn’t want to ruin it because I was different.

“All I want is my childhood. That’s all. Then I will confess my dark obsessions to the authorities and they can put me away.”

And that’s how I grew up. Every day, flashes of images of me wielding a knife would pop into my head, sometimes when I was at my happiest.  I still to this day cannot watch any gory movie, I still suffer from intrusive, unwanted thoughts.

The thoughts have evolved, too. I have obsessed about shoving friends into incoming traffic for no good reason. I started not enjoying public swimming, as I feared I would hold people’s heads underwater and make them drown.

I have had thoughts surrounding sexually touching my younger sisters or other children, despite having positively no sexual interest in doing so. I’ve had thoughts surrounding if I said something horrible to a friend that would result in them committing suicide. I have had religious thoughts in defiance of God during Church.

I developed an obsession while learning to drive at 16 surrounding a fear that I would purposely drive pedestrians over. Because of this obsession, I refuse to drive, which makes life difficult.

I worry I’d choke or drown younger children or the elderly, so I refuse to babysit babies and I refuse to be around old people alone.

In an effort to fight these thoughts, I developed mental rituals (or sometimes physical), like saying, “No!” to myself out loud or in my mind, over and over again. I’ve tried to think of nice images (like a deer in a forest or my parents) to override the bad thoughts. I try to be extra nice and giving, thinking that perhaps this will make the guilt subside.

I’ve had physical compulsions, too. While younger, I developed a fear of germs and over-washed my hands until they bled. I pulled out my eyelashes and was forced to be monitored by a doctor because I could have eventually lost my eyelashes. I like to pull out strands of hair sometimes and I rub my nose. I scratch books because I like the feeling of scratching the pages – a habit which results in my family and boyfriend going insane (as it produces an screeching noise)!

I’ve never acted on any thoughts. I am now 21.

I’ve taken every sort of anti-depressant I can think of. While a few have worked and freed me from my thoughts, I did not enjoy their side-effects and am now in the process of dealing with the demons medicine-free. It’s not working too well.

No one who looks into my eyes would ever guess that at that one moment, in my head, I may be having an intrusive image of me stabbing them. I appear normal. I appear pretty friendly and down to Earth. I’ve confessed to a few close friends, but I keep the secrets of my dark gruesome thoughts to myself, mostly.

It’s a silent war waging in my head as I fight to relax myself, as I fight to free myself.

Balancing my life and these thoughts takes up a lot of energy. These thoughts distract me and cause me to distance myself from others. They distract me from school work. They keep me unorganized. But I still manage to maintain a seasonal job. I still have friendships. I still have family.

I’ve never known what I a normal life may feel like. I’ve battled these thoughts over and over to a point where this is simply my reality. I look enviously at most people – their heads clear, their perspectives and ambitions not over shadowed by intrusive images. And I realize how good of an actress I am. After all, it’s not easy multitasking these distracting thoughts and managing a social life.

Sometimes, I catch myself thinking; “Are they all acting too?”

Click below to order Check Mates, the first ever collection of fiction poetry and artwork about OCD

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By Katherine Walters

NOTE: This story contains brief sexual and violent references that some people might find upsetting – though the outcome is inspiring.  We aim to be honest here, so we have included the story in full.  Please only read if you feel comfortable with this sort of material.

People want to kill you.  There is a person right on the other side of the door waiting to shoot you.  If you go outside, you will get kidnapped.  In your bedroom is a man who wants to rape you.

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was 20 years old, but really, it started when I was 17.  I would hear voices mumbling, as if they were right on the other side of the wall.  I had terrifying hallucinations, once seeing a man with an axe attempting to chop down the canopy around my bed so he could get to me.  But I kept it secret.  Not only was I afraid of my hallucinations, but I was afraid of admitting that I had them.  I also became increasingly paranoid that people were out to get me; people wanted to hurt or kill me.

When I was 20, I finally saw a psychiatrist about these symptoms.  I was withdrawing from people and having trouble functioning.  My performance in school and at work was declining.  At the end of my first appointment with the psychiatrist, I asked her what she thought was wrong with me.  She could only tell me that she had a few ideas but needed to understand more of what I was going through.  A couple weeks later, I showed up at the local psychiatric hospital to be evaluated because I was suicidal and very paranoid that absolutely everyone was out to get me.  I was admitted to the hospital for an 11-day stay.  I was in the midst of my first psychotic episode and my psychiatrist was struggling to find a medicine that could help me without producing too many side effects.

I spent my 21st birthday in that hospital.  Then I spent St. Patrick’s Day in the hospital, followed by Easter, Memorial Day, and Independence Day.  That year, 2009, I was hospitalized 11 times in three different hospitals.  I was constantly suicidal and constantly hallucinating.  I had, as I was later told by my second psychiatrist, a string of psychotic episodes that summer.  I was also told that at the time, the doctors in the hospital treating me weren’t sure that I would ever be able to function independently again.  They thought I would eventually need to be placed in a long-term treatment center.

With the start of the fall semester in college, my junior year, I finally began to come back to reality.  Slowly my grades began increasing, my relationships with people (including my fiancé) improved, and overall I began to accept my diagnosis and educate myself about it.  I had (and still do) a stubborn streak that allowed me to become more involved in treatment decisions because I didn’t want to blindly accept what my doctors and therapists told me.  I wanted to know what I could expect from my illness and how to overcome it.

In contrast to when I was 17, I was no longer embarrassed by my diagnosis.  I told all of my friends because I knew the real ones would stick with me regardless.  I was surprised to find  that none of them had any qualms about being friends with a schizophrenic.  Instead, they were all very supportive.

In 2010, I was functioning much better.  I hadn’t been hospitalized since September 2009 and my grades were returning to what was typical of me, As and Bs.  I realized  I had learned so much about schizophrenia that I might be able to help others.  On an online support forum, I wrote an article to the parents of schizophrenics entitled “How to Help: For Parents and Caregivers”.  It was received with gratefulness as parents learned to understand what their schizophrenic child was going through, and ways they could help.  I also started my own website called “A Schizophrenic and A Dog” and published that same article on the website, where again I was told how thankful parents were for the insight I could provide.

At the same time that I was helping others, I was learning to help myself.  I developed coping skills to deal with anxiety, hopelessness, and paranoia.  I learned how to ignore hallucinations.  I learned how to “reality-check” delusions; how to test them and prove them to be illogical so that they could also be ignored.  I used a service dog to help me get back into public without such a strong fear of the world around me.

Early in 2010, my fiancé broke up with me for a variety of reasons, my diagnosis included in those reasons.  However, this didn’t cause as much of a setback as I expected.  I got through the grief and moved on.  In time I accepted the breakup and learned that it gave me a chance to continue to grow more independent.

However, despite my progress, my delusion that people are out to get me has persisted.  I spend every single day afraid I will be murdered, raped, or kidnapped.  When I go to class, even with my service dog present, there is a nagging fear in the back of my mind telling me that my classmates are going to kill me.  When I go grocery shopping or to the mall, I suspect every person I see would like to harm me in some manner.  I hear voices that tell me to kill myself every time I take my medicine.

I feel like sometimes I am missing reality.  In reality, no one wants to harm me and no one is telling me to harm myself.  In reality, my classmates are just trying to make it through the same class as I am.  In reality, the people in the mall are just wondering what store they want to go to next or which shirt they like best.  I often feel I am straddling the line between sane and insane.  Luckily, most days I stand even on that line and make my way through the world just like every other person.

Click here to read more of Katherine’s inspiring words at her regularly updated website

]]> http://conditionalpublications.com/2011/02/14/schizophrenia-missing-reality-a-personal-account/feed/ 0 http://conditionalpublications.com/2011/02/13/depression-the-need-for-govt-support-a-testimonial/ http://conditionalpublications.com/2011/02/13/depression-the-need-for-govt-support-a-testimonial/#respond Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:43:53 +0000 http://conditionalpublications.com/?p=676

I am 35 yrs old. I have been diaganosed with Major Depression since I was 21. I spent my 21st birthday in the hospital. Most days I can handle it well. But when something changes too much in my life, it’s hard for me to deal with that.

Example: my SSDI check and my hubby’s check have been cut because of the goverment.  There is no funding to pay the insurance for our meds.  So they have taken a total of $261 from our collective check.  Now they say they are on the way to getting it back to us but we haven’t heard anything yet.

So how I deal with it is I watch a lot of TV.  TV has always been an outlet for me.  Even when I was a kid and there would be a lot of yelling going on and verbal abuse in the house, I would turn to TV.  It soothed me and made me feel like my problems were going away. To this day it does the same for me. The only difference now is that when I’m done watching TV I am so down that I want to do nothing.

I used to clean my home all the time and that gave me some sense of accomplishment, but now it’s even hard for me to get the laundry done.  Then there are times just like tonight where I was helping my hubby cook dinner – we made beef stew and I was chopping the veggies for it and I was getting anoyed because all I wanted to do was watch TV.  I was upset because I had just gone small grocery shopping and was telling my hubby that it took a lot for me to buy some cheap pillows – a two-pack at the Family Dollar on sale for $4.  It upset me to buy it because I was worried about how much money it was and if it was really important to get.  My thought was: did I need this and could this $4 go to something else like food or gas?  I started crying about it and felt bad about it.

I try to pull my self out of this a lot.  I usually can with prayer but something is different now.  I don’t know if I need a med change or just a change in my routine. I struggle with the thought that if people found out I had a mental illness, they would not want to be around me anymore.  This excludes my hubby and my closest friends.

I was always a moody child. My mother would diplomatically explain it away as having an “artistic temperament”, as I used to enjoy drawing, painting, and music. When I became a teenager prone to extremely depressed moods and suicidal thoughts, they were blamed on the ups and downs of adolescence. No one ever thought to take me to a psychiatrist, and all was swept under the rug. You see, I grew up in a household where the “stiff upper lip” was the norm, and mental illness was certainly nothing that was ever discussed.

When I was 20 years old, I was a junior transfer student at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis). It was my first time away from home, and initially I thought I was just swept away in the excitement of it all. Then my thoughts began to race, I started talking so fast no one could understand me, and I didn’t need sleep. It escalated to a point where the school basically gave me an ultimatum: go see the psychiatrist at the Student Health Center, or risk getting kicked out of school. I had worked very hard to get into UC Davis, so I complied. The psychiatrist took one look at me in my manic state, grabbed a book from the bookshelf, and started reading symptoms to me, asking me if I had them. When we were done, I had a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder and a prescription for medication. I had side effects from the medication and told the doctor about them, but he seemed rather dismissive of me. So in anger and denial tha there was anything wrong with me, I threw my medication in the trash.

Fast forward to when I was 26 years old. I had just moved to a new town and taken on a new job when I fell into a manic high. I began thinking I was a prophet, and that it was the end of the world. I wandered the streets of San Francisco, started hearing and seeing things, and giving my personal possessions away. I took out a restraining order on my parents because I was sure they were trying to kill me. It came to a head with my being arrested by the airport police at the Air France counter at the San Francisco International Airport for making a shrine to John Lennon. I was involuntarily hospitalized for 2 weeks, and dosed with so much anti-psychotic medication I was immobilized in my bed, drooling with my eyes rolling back into my head. When I was discharged from the hospital, I lost most of the “friends” I thought I had; lost my place to live; had to go bankrupt due to my manic spending sprees, and stay with my parents for some time to recuperate.

When I was 33, I lost my job and was going through a painful divorce. I had a depression that was so paralyzing, getting out of bed was a major effort, and I almost successfully ended my own life. I checked into a hospital in California that didn’t really do me any favors: I checked in depressed and checked out manic. When I became manic, once again I thought I was a prophet and the world was ending, and I heard and saw things. I went to stay with my parents in Oregon, where they were living at the time, and was in and out of the hospital until an outstanding psychiatrist managed to stabilize me. Again, I had to file bankruptcy due to my spending sprees when I was manic.

At age 38, I moved from my native California to Washington State for a relationship and job opportunity. I lost the job unexpectedly within 3 months, and the loss of that job, along with other pressures, caused me to slip headlong into another severe depression. This time, I was able to find an excellent psychiatrist, group and individual counseling and also was able to put some other behavioral pieces into place. In addition to Bipolar Disorder, I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Social Phobia. It has taken a lot of hard work, but things have improved dramatically thanks to an early treatment intervention.

These days, I am waiting on a Social Security Disability hearing in front of a judge. After working in the corporate world for 20 years, I have finally realized I can no longer function in the capacity I once did, and need assistance. But it’s not a dead end being a disabled person. I have written 2 books of poetry and am very active in advocacy with NAMI (National Alliance on the Mentally Ill) by being a speaker in their “In Our Own Voice” program. No, it’s not a dead end – just pursuing life down a different road to the one I’d anticipated.

As a young child (around 4-5 years old), I suffered from my “illness”. I would hear voices, and I never slept. Often I would ask my mother why it was that I heard things nobody else heard, and her explanation was that God was trying to talk to me. So when the voices called out my name, I was at my wit’s end, calling to God, telling him I really was listening, and that He could just tell me already!

Growing up was extremely hard for me. School was the worst, because I never had any friends. I wanted friends, but when I had them, I never truly felt happy. I was also verbally abused by my step-father. He was bipolar, and the medication he was on never worked for him.

My mother worked at a convalescent hospital and was always at work, so my step-father would watch my brother and me. He laid in bed all day, sleeping, only waking up for an hour or so to eat. My brother and I were expected to take care of ourselves, and if we  made even a bit of noise, he would come out and beat us. Eventually, as I approached my teen years, my mother left him, and he would never hear from us again. But another problem arose, and it was one that shaped my life forever.

On my mother’s side, I have two cousins, brother and sister. Let’s call them Amy and James. Amy and I had always been close. And James, while he was almost four years older than me, had always been more of an older brother figure. Well, they were…molesting me. Both at the same time, but neither of the two knew about the other’s actions. This abuse plunged me deeper into my insomnia and depression. Some nights, I would stay up the entire night, just sobbing uncontrollably. I felt so helpless and alone. It was then that I started to hurt myself.

My freshman year in high school, I met the most amazing person. Let’s call him Ryan. He was gorgeous, tall, with somewhat Aryan features. He was a nerd, and we would spend hours just talking about video games, cartoons, etc. We started dating, and all was well. But when he graduated, another side of him arose. I was transferred to a school that had just been built, and made new friends. All of them were guys. Ryan was suspicious of them, and forced me to break off the friendship. But I didn’t. Countless times he accused me of cheating on him. And yes, while I thought some guys were cute, I never thought of leaving him. I was so much in love with him, and I knew he was the one for me. But these accusations caused an on-and-off relationship for us. One day, we would be fine, and the next, he would find something wrong with me and break it off.

During this time, the voices came back, louder than ever. I couldn’t go a day without hearing them. And it made me feel even crazier. I would hear voices, and then I would cut myself, which made Ryan angry, and it was just a vicious cycle. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I beat myself up, because all I wanted to do was please Ryan. He was my entire world, and I loved him. He enlisted in the Air Force, and he said he would make a life for us. We began to plan our future together, and the reality was setting in that, even though we had our fights and troubles, he was still in love with me, and that we were going to be together for the rest of our lives.

Before he left, he proposed to me. There was no ring, but it didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was that we promised ourselves to each other, and that we were going to stick it out and make the relationship work. Time went by, and I was so helplessly in love with him. But somehow he didn’t feel the same. So I fell deeper into my depression, and began to have suicidal thoughts. I started taking huge amounts of pills and going to sleep, hoping I would never wake up.

I talked to people on the internet, hoping to find someone who would love me. I wanted to leave Ryan, but every time I tried, he would suck me back in. I hate to admit it, but I began to make relationships with random guys on the internet, even going so far as having phone sex with them, trying to feel something close to love. Those relationships never lasted, and it left me with the feeling of being so dirty. I hated myself so much for what I was doing, but I was so addicted. I would take a shower after every time I was on the phone with a guy, and I would bleach myself, and then cut myself all over my thighs. I wanted to die so bad.

So one day, I took a bunch of pills, I got a scarf, and I tried to hang myself. Right as I was blacking out, the hat rack I was using broke and fell, hitting me on the head. I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. A couple weeks later, I had my mom check me into the mental hospital, because I was so scared of myself. I didn’t feel safe. I wanted to die so very badly, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give up on life. So I spent a week in the hospital, and it’s really a week that I vaguely remember, because I was so drugged up. My speech was slurred, and I couldn’t even walk straight. I really feel that if I wasn’t so drugged, and if my roommate hadn’t molested me, I could have made some progress. However, it plunged me deeper, and the doctors suddenly called me “manic depressive.”

And so here I am today, 17, on the edge of becoming a legal adult, and wondering where I’m going to go from here. The thing that gives me hope is song writing. I hope one day someone will hear my music and be encouraged.

‘Ellie’