Every day, I deal with my mental illnesses, currently diagnosed as having schizoaffective, bipolar type and PTSD, Some days are brilliant. Others I just wish I could be free not to interact with anyone.
This past year, I was in the hospital 3 times. During the times when I was out, I was in treatment programs.
Among side effects of medications is movement disorders, dry mouth, blurred vision, acne, and most catastrophically, memory loss.
When I am off the meds, I have "limited" clear thinking and photographic, or eidetic, memory. That's how I did so well in school. However, I have to take the meds or else I end up back in the hospital., I have been known to decompensate in one day if I do not take the meds. When I decompensate, that means that I have full-blown paranoia and psychosis. I lose touch with all reality. As a PhD student, I ran around the hospital unit naked. My life feels like almost two different lives.
I want to focus on the life on meds, even though my creativity, artistic ablities and eidetic-like memory goes away with the meds. It's a loss worth taking, because I highly like being stable.
It sucks that I lose my memory because I cannot remember everything that I did in college and graduate school. I do not know if I am able to function with a 40-60 hour work week in the field of biomedical engineering., That is hard for me to comprehend but to be all-realisstic, I have to take my meds and my illnesses have gotten much worse over the years as the schizophrenia part of my brain has gone haywire,
As a highly functioning person who has schizophrenia, biipolar and PTSD as well as haivng studied neuroscience/neural engineering amd neurology, I find my life as being something very interesting.
I think I will always remember the moments in my life when I could function while being manic. Nowadays, my mania is maked with severe paranoia and psychosis. Terrifying psychosis. So, I continue to take my meds.
