Life With Schizophrenia

Hooray! I have now hit 50 posts on Diagnosis: Schizophrenia!

I have also initiated proceedings to link with schizophrenia.com, so if that works out, welcome to browsers from that site.



I wanted to write about my dad. This is a personal post [albeit on an anonymous blog!!].


Before I got ill was the best time of my life, among family, and then socially. I would like to concentrate on the family part.
It was the best time of my life, I was really close with my father. I was seventeen and we were working together on a renovation project. They were brilliant times, full of genuine shared excitement and true joy.
Then I went away from home for a while and came back sick. Then I went away from home again and came back sicker. I had to take time out from university and lived at home. Suddenly I was closed out. Money troubles and work troubles on my father's part made life hard for him, and he made my life hard too. Losing his temper that I didn't speak (because of the symptom alogia), and showing no or little affection to me.

This continued until he died in 2006. Clearly he was depressed because he couldn't understand his want of success on the work and financial front, and this accounted for ornery behaviour. But he gave me a hard time when I was vulnerable. Never physically violent, thank God, but psychologically hurtful, though from a lack of awareness that he was being anything other than benign, probably.
This is a problem, because when someone dies, you think well of them, in a natural way, yet sometimes I can't help looking back and remembering times that I could not think well of him for.

The way I see it, I was like the baby bird handled by a human, that the mother bird then rejects. I had a funny smell all of a sudden. I wasn't the same son anymore.

My mum tells me it was because I couldn't communicate with him, and that was something he couldn't bear.

And yet, thankfully, there is still love between us. But I know that others with schizophrenia may be able to identify with this, and also their relations too.

Luckily I stayed close to my mother, who showed a mother's loyalty in not rejecting me when I behaved and spoke strangely, and all due to my own choices (I became ill through smoking the illegal drug cannabis). I never told my father that I was ill because of the cannabis use, because I was afraid of his anger.


Now as they say he is with the angels and will see all sides of this situation. RIP dad.