I think I started to have my first symptoms of schizophrenia when I was aged ten. Looking back, I can see that my behavior and my thoughts about many things were strange, but what really caused me the most difficulty, ruining my life, was the paranoia. I do not remember it, but my Mom says that, when I was in high school, I actually said that I was paranoid because I thought people were talking about me at school. I can now recognize that most of my assumptions about my life throughout my teenage years were paranoid delusions. Even so, it still took two or three more years, one of them away at college, before I was sick enough to wind up in a psychiatric hospital, after I started hearing voices and descended into major depression. However, the paranoia began early and just got worse over time.
Paranoia, as described by the psychiatric community, includes both grandiose delusions, such as believing you are very special, like Jesus, the President of the United States, or someone with special insights to the nature of the universe, and delusions of persecution, thinking people are out to get you, whether it is your best friend, your teacher, your boss, strangers, or the FBI. I only had the persecutory ones, and they never were about the FBI.
In the beginning, I thought the other kids at school hated me and wanted to beat me up. I know I did not get along with other students from first grade on. I think some of the problems were very real, some racial and others caused by my bizarre behavior. I never fit I in and was probably being ostracized. I certainly was picked on a lot; kids who don’t have anyone, a friend, group of friends, or a sibling, watching their back will almost always have a rough time, even when they are not in the process of slowly developing full-blown psychoses. Even so, I was starting to get out of touch with reality.
I lived in fear and was extremely unhappy. School was a miserable place for me. During my fifth grade school year, I was nine and then ten years old, I would leave home in the morning after all the other kids had already started class so that it would be very unlikely there would be anyone around to beat me up. I was tardy and had to sit in the school office almost every morning before being allowed to go to my homeroom. I also left school long after most of the other children had gone, which was easy enough since I always had detention for the tardiness, and even then took a route home that was designed to help me avoid any classmates who might still be on the sidewalks. I slunk through the alleyways behind stores, took the less used streets, and constantly was on the watch for danger. Obviously, I did not have any friends, although there were some very rare occasions when I spent some time after school with some of the unpopular kids.
And that is how it began....
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PS: Unbeknownst to me, I was being drugged, even as a kid, with substances that made me more paranoid and exacerbated real problems and reasonable concerns I had. My teachers were causing many of my problems with other students for reasons to do with their social programming agenda that is part of their job and had in part to do with racial indocrination of the other students in the 1970’s and 1980’s.