Would 16 likely be too early for these manifestations to appear? What symptoms would appear as the disease progressed?
I appreciate first-hand accounts. I have consulted web sights so I know the X's and O's so to speak, wondering about the subtleties specifically.
1 response so far ↓
1 Anna C // Jun 23, 2009 at 12:09 pm
My brother has schizophrenia. He’s 17 and his symptoms started appearing around a year ago, so no, 16 isn’t too young to develop the condition.
Firstly, he was just really depressed. My parents thought it was just hormones and he was going through a “bad patch”.
He started spending more and more time on his own. He didn’t want to go out with his friends anymore (he used to have a really busy social life) and he spent loads of time in his room. Sometimes I would go in there and he was just sitting on his bed, staring at the wall. He didn’t talk very much and it seemed like he was all wrapped up in his own world. He hardly ever laughed or cried or showed any emotion at all.
And at the same time this was going on, he started to get really paranoid. His paranoia was pretty rational and believable to start off with, he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him so he dumped her, and he thought everyone was talking about him behind his back. My parents wanted to take him to the doctor for depression but he wouldn’t go, and he was convinced that every time we went in the car, they were going to drive him to the doctor’s, so he avoided car travel as much as he could.
We only started to see more obvious symptoms of schizophrenia about 6 months later, when he started saying things randomly (to the voices in his head) and crying at random times, for no reason whatsoever. And then he cut his arm with a kitchen knife, had to go to hospital and told the doctors that the voices told him to.
He’s pretty much ok now, but schizophrenia is not a nice thing to live with. If you’re worried about someone I would get them to the doctor now, before anything really bad happens.
Anna
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