It’s often challenging to fight the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and find pleasure in engaging with others. That can drive you to remain in the confines of your home rather than venture outdoors. This gut reaction to stay inside can be overwhelming at times. My spouse helps me fight this problem by driving me to … Read more

In an earlier post, I encouraged you to write about your experiences with mental illnesses and brain disorders, whether as a mental health consumer or someone who cares about one. A different project is to keep a daily diary about other aspects of your life. If you are a mental health consumer, you are not … Read more

Today, I uploaded the first Chapter of my Podcast: “Schizophrenia As I Live It.” You can find it in the Podcast section of this website https://overliveschizophrenia.com. In this Podcast, I will talk about my experiences as a mental health consumer with the brain disorder paranoid schizophrenia, and I will discuss issues raised in my forthcoming … Read more

The stigma of mental illnesses or brain disorders can make mental health consumers hard on themselves as they seek to incorporate the prejudice exercised against them. Taking care of someone else’s ignorance is not your concern. If people cannot be kind to you, compensate by being kind to yourself. The sentiment of the image, which … Read more

On days when I struggle to free my mind from paranoid loops or obsessive thoughts going nowhere, I find that stopping to do a guided meditation session helps. I use a meditation app on my iPhone for convenience and because I want to choose when I meditate. The app I use is “Calm” by Tamara … Read more

As someone who has endured multiple psychotic breaks due to living with schizophrenia, I know that you cannot always “return to normal” if that means going back to where you were before a psychotic break. Even upon returning to good stable mental health, some of the trauma of the psychotic break remains. I seek therapy … Read more

May 24 is World Schizophrenia Day, also called World Schizophrenia Awareness Day. I display an image of a rhinoceros and her calf because animals are such a source of inspiration and tranquility to me when I struggle with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Many Mental Health Advocacy Groups are doing brilliant work today to bring the … Read more

I once confided in a friend about problems I was having with my family. They advised: “Think about a worse problem for a while, then return to your problem. You may find you aren’t quite as worried about it, which will help you solve it.” At the time, I was somewhat crestfallen that my friend … Read more

I live with paranoid schizophrenia, as did my mother. My mother’s condition worsened due to her inability to admit she had psychiatric problems and the failure of her doctors to handle her denial. She became labeled as “mad.” The character Jodie in my book “The Overlife, A Tale Of Schizophrenia” has a similar fate. My … Read more

When describing schizophrenia, experts usually put “not knowing what is real” near the top of the significant symptoms. Undoubtedly, someone undergoing a relapse of schizophrenia often misinterprets what their senses tell them and can harbor false delusions, like feeling persecuted when they are not and experiencing thought insertion that is not occurring. However, not everything … Read more