Why is it hard to beat paranoid schizophrenia? (..and why you can now relate better to those with the illness)
1. You tend not to think you are ill when you are and, once you are 'better', it can be hard to accept that you were ill. When they release you from hospital you may have a fair way to go on your recovery journey before you reach an acceptance of your condition. But you can reach it and, once you have have, you are in a better state to put the illness behind you.
Why is it hard to accept you were ill even after treatment?
2 Stigma. Stigma is not just what you experience when you think about somebody else’s stigmatised condition. You feel it about your own. The dirtiness of the feeling prevents you from coming to terms with the fact of your having been ill. In 2004 in England we spent 1.5p per head of population on combating stigma, in Scotland it was 13p and in New Zealand 36p (Social Exclusion Unit 2004). The £16 million lottery grant announced in 2007 still leaves us far behind New Zealand. Meanwhile let me ask you a question. What proportion of murders become the headline news on the BBC? And what proportion of killings become the headline news on the BBC if the person who carried out the killing had paranoid schizophrenia? This irresponsibility makes it harder to acknowledge you have the illness by perpetuating the stigma. What would people say if the BBC disproportionately covered killings carried out by black ethnic minority members of the community? One in 100 people get schizophrenia so very often you pass somebody in the street who has or has had the illness
3 Side effects. If an antipsychotic you were prescribed, quite possibly against your will, gives you unacceptable side effects, for example depression, akathisia and anxiety how can you be expected to believe you have, or even had, an illness if that means having to take such a chemical into your body? I suffered so badly from side effects the hospital was in danger of driving me to suicide and I chose to abscond and one occasion actually escape and go on the run. Queen Mary’s Roehampton never saw me ever again.
4 Co morbid substance abuse, e.g. alcoholism, cannabis... If you don’t think you have a problem with alcohol but do, and that caused your schizophrenia in the first place, you have another barrier between you and recovery. Alcohol can also stop your medication working so the schizophrenia comes back.
5 For some there is another reason it can be hard to recover. Some people enjoy being ill with schizophrenia. Some even report missing their voices when they recover. Others prefer the illness to the treatment though neither is at all pleasant.
