What it’s like to have schizophrenia: I’m not violent and would never hurt anyone.

I’VE BEEN DEALING with schizophrenia for as long as I can remember, but was never correctly medicated for it until seven months ago. I had been in and out of doctors’ offices and counsellors since I was nine or ten, for things like “depression” and bouts of self-harm. I was always a little different throughout primary and secondary school, I had friends but I was definitely an outcast and spent 95% of my time in a world that my mind had created.

Growing up, I never told anyone about the auditory and visual hallucinations that I had because, in my mind, I wasn’t really in the real world – my body was there physically but my brain was somewhere else entirely and there was nobody that I could trust.

From the age of about 12 I was obsessed with death and the idea of ghosts, and that maybe I was stuck somewhere in the middle. I knew I saw things that nobody else could see, but I was so far removed from reality that I don’t think it ever occurred to me that they weren’t actually real.

I was paranoid and terrified of everyone in my life

From my Junior Cert onwards, the auditory hallucinations started and I would hear sharp whispers or flies buzzing when I couldn’t see any. The visual hallucinations were easier to deal with – they always happened in the distance, a shadow or a face around the corner or in a crowd of people that would disappear, and never happened at home.

I convinced myself that “they” were actually protecting me. I was paranoid and terrified of everyone in my life. I remember being in the first aid tent during a concert one night and the paramedics trying to give me oxygen after I had been pulled from a rough crowd, and I went crazy. I didn’t believe it was oxygen, the paramedic’s faces were distorted and their eyes were stretched out. I pushed all of them away as they kept trying to hold my arms, and even threatened to put me in an ambulance. That was my first big paranoid experience.

I had my guard up at every counselling session

In Transition Year, I completely shut myself off from everyone. I went to school two or three days a week and I didn’t go out with my friends once. I was still in counselling for what my doctor still thought was depression but had my guard up at every session, terrified that “they” were listening and that I’d say something that would turn them against me.

It wasn’t until I went into 6th year that I was moved to another counsellor, the first one that I ever really connected with. Between TY and 6th year, I had started seeing myself in my visual hallucinations. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table and suddenly see a version of myself standing at the bottom of my garden. I’d see myself in shops and on the street. This is the most disturbing and stressful symptom I’ve ever had – I was terrified to look in the mirror in case my reflection moved.