There are several reasons and excuses for why Schizophrenia is undiagnosed or ill-treated.
Sometimes this is the result of the failure of the person affected by the disease, or the people around them. In other cases, this is the result of a lack of education about the disease and the inability to understand what symptoms are. It is also possible that a learning disability may be a direct consequence of a more serious problem of mental illness, which was looked at by a medical professional.
These are just some of the reasons why schizophrenia can be undiagnosed for many years until something difficult to explain is explained, for example, an episode of coughing.
In the early stages of the disease, it is easy to say that there is nothing wrong and you should not ignore the signs of the disease. This is very disturbing at the thought of schizophrenia, its diagnosis or labeling.
But if it is not treated or diagnosed, schizophrenia does not improve and will increase with age.
Fortunately, there have been medical advances to help treat and manage schizophrenia.
It is a disease that you can expect it to worsen, and depending on the severity, death may be the end result. Living with Schizophrenia, which is not treated, is a terrible way to live your life!
Refusal of the disease and why it is not diagnosed.
I have a daughter who has Schizophrenia, and in the first years of her life I knew as a mother that something was wrong.
There were many signs and things that I noticed were different, I would have questioned them in my mind, touched them with our family doctor, and then fired them, saying: in time, she will grow these things.
I will fight with my husband all the time about her, and his answer will always be that she was just trying to get attention.
When it became evident that something was certainly wrong, he still did not admit that he had a daughter with any problems, not to mention a disease as debilitating as schizophrenia.
Even now, my ex-husband still denies the fact that he has a daughter with mental illness.
Denial is the number one reason why Schizophrenia is not diagnosed and why people do not seek help. Either the rejection of the sufferer, or the family around the person who suffers, who denies this and says that there is nothing wrong.
We are all looking for other possible non-serious causes of behavior. We tell ourselves a lie, we think that it is our fault that everything is so, but in time they will be better. We say that time heals all wounds, but in this case it will only worsen if not treated.
The second reason is not diagnosed, is the lack of information about mental illness. For several decades, mental illness has never been mentioned.
His long time not even taught in medical schools, not to mention the fact that they are mentioned in public information.
We all thought of schizophrenia as something that the psychiatrist had, because we only heard about it when it was connected with a violent crime.
In my opinion, when I was thinking about mental illness, I was thinking about a person who was taken to a shelter and forgotten because you could not cope with them.
The fact is that in some cases of mental illness suffering can lead to the darker side of the mind. But over time, and if they are not diagnosed, these dark thoughts will become a reality for them, and they can do something cruel.
But if the disease is diagnosed early enough, then it can be treated and managed.
Obvious and not so obvious symptoms of schizophrenia
Symptoms of schizophrenia can and can include:
Hallucinations (to hear voices, to see people, to see things that are not there)
People with schizophrenia may have different degrees of the disease. Sometimes they hear only voices and never see anyone attached to a voice. In other cases, it is more severe, and they will actually see people, creatures and things that are not present in reality, but for them they are very real.
Doctors call these hallucinations, but to a person with Schizophrenia, the voices and people they hear and see are as real to them as you and me.
People who see or hear these imaginary voices have high tension in speaking out loud, become very loud and have conversations with things that are not there.
They even turn the music really loud in their room so that no one can hear them talking to these imaginary forces. They lock themselves in their room to have these conversations, where no one can hear them, and they can be left alone.
When you hear mentally ill people talking to someone or something that is not there, you understand that the conversation is with a real person, but there is no one with them in the room.
In most cases, if you ask them if they know the people with whom they are talking, they will usually say that they do not know what they are.
But, depending on what happens in their lives, they may begin to believe that they see people who have died, or the actor they have seen on television in the movies. Sometimes the people they want to talk about on the street are strangers that they walked a day or a week earlier.
The problem with these hallucinations is that these interactions often address the Dark Theme. They will start talking or thinking about death, loss, evil, anger, and fear.
For some people with schizophrenia, voices will verbally attack them about who they are and what they have done. They will say things like you, stupid, useless, should never have been born, and these dark comments and thoughts can continue to escalate to thoughts of harm.
Voices, as a rule, never stop, and they are very distracting, tried, criticized and endured.
Fallacies (false beliefs)
It is very difficult to tell someone with schizophrenia that the voices and the people they see are not real. They can draw pictures of what they see and can give you the exact amount of what they are told. But the reality is all these things that they are told, they will begin to believe as absolute truth.
One such example of this faith of votes is my daughter. The voices in her head told her that the food before the meal while eating was poisonous and ate it, because they wanted her to die. If she had eaten him, they would have told her that they could kill her, and she would immediately leave her.
As a result of this constant mental harassment, my daughter began to lose weight and became anorexic, and did not eat or feed her. Because she believed that the voices told her that the food was poisonous, so she stopped eating.
When the mentally ill begin to believe the voices and the people they see and hear, that is, when the person you know is no longer acting and thinks the same way as it once was.
Even if you tell them again and again that these voices are not real, they will not believe you. In their opinion, this is an endless dream or nightmare that never ends. But when you come across them about these voices, which they consider to be absolute reality, they will begin to become more secretive and go into their own world. That way, you can get you out of your life as much as you can, and it’s almost impossible to reach them at this moment.
Lack of emotion or inappropriate expression of emotions
As the disease progresses, people with schizophrenia move more and more into this world of imaginary visions.
They hear and speak freely with voices, and they cease to relate to reality. This disconnection from reality can and will lead to the loss of emotions and availability for interaction in the world.
Once they have accepted this loss of reality, sometimes they begin to believe that they have special powers that are given to them. Some of them believe that they are receiving prophecies about what is about to happen, or they believe that they are speaking directly to God, angels, or the devil.
Sometimes they think that they have an important mission, and no one else understands, so they need to keep it a secret.
Because they feel that no one understands them, typical everyday interactions with normal people will be the result, causing anger and frustration.
As I explained earlier, the disease does not improve if it is not treated or diagnosed. It will not improve over time, and they will slip into their own imaginary world.
Lack of motivation
They lose the desire to go to school, work, take care of themselves or do anything in life. Interacting with people can be stressful and stressful for them, and they will choose to avoid people together.
They just want to be left alone to do what they see fit. If they think that they have received a mission from the votes, then they just want to focus on that mission and forget about everything else.
Lack of motivation can be a direct result of a person with a mental illness that fully focuses on the voices in their head. They will spend hours and days trying to decipher the information they are told about.
In some cases, what they are told does not make any sense at all for them, but they feel that they need to do something to make their voices disappear.
Problems at school or in social situations
The constant grumbling and pressure from these imaginary voices and people who pester the mentally ill exceed them. As a result, they may become disorganized, easily distracted, unable to concentrate or maintain consistent thinking.
They will act improperly, say things in conversations that do not make sense, and laugh at things that are not funny. Complete social awkwardness. This makes work at school or in social situations almost impossible for them.
For young people and children, this type of social awkwardness can lead to teasing and torment from the people around them, which further aggravates the disease.
When this happens, they want to further disconnect from the world, making it difficult for them to function or study at school, at work, or in social interactions.
Self-inflammatory pain with the intention of distracting from the voices and the people they see.
Sometimes the constant voices in your head can be so overwhelming that they just want him to stop and go. In an effort to get rid of voices, they deliberately injure themselves or cut their bodies to cause pain. They will focus on pain, to push away voices that they hear, or thoughts that they do not control. They will take extremely hot showers and try to focus on the hot sensation to distract them from the voice.
They will drink or make drugs, trying to silence the voices in order to have some kind of peace in their lives.
This is just a brief list of several ways in which a mentally ill person will deal with an imaginary world in their head.
If any of these symptoms sound familiar to you or to someone you know. Please take the necessary steps to get help.
Talk to who you think you will listen to. Perhaps your parents, friends, family member or doctor.
Explain, to the best of your abilities, what is happening to you and the specific things that are happening in your mind.
People with mental illness can act very secretly and will keep a lot of things for themselves. They say very well that it is enough to go through and not attract any attention. But without treatment, after a while it will become completely obvious that something is wrong.
They are afraid of what people might think about them, even worse, they think that no one will believe them. In many cases, voices in their heads tell them that something bad will happen if they say something. Therefore, they live in fear and will be afraid of the possible consequences of having to say something.
But the truth is that if the disease is not treated or not diagnosed, the symptoms will only intensify. A person suffering from an illness will become harder and harder to function in the world. Sometimes there are many secrets that they hid from relatives and friends.
But depending on the amount of time that has passed without treatment, this can lead to several personal losses. Such as friends, family, work, school and other loved ones in their lives who do not want to be with them.
For schizophrenia, the earlier it is diagnosed in life, the greater the chances that a person has a normal and happy life.
There is hope of living a normal life with schizophrenia. But this is only possible with the treatment and treatment of symptoms with medicines and its diagnosis as early as possible. In my opinion, it is important to have a great caretaker.
