Here we can all be heard for a little while. Part 3

Thank you for the link JM! I have saved it and will check it daily. I read a few posts and found it really inspiring and wonderfully human, please tell your friend that from me.

Hello SDW! We miss you!

I haven't done a long post for while but here is one about disordered thinking in Schizophrenia. I am struggling with it today and it might help someone, it will help me by writing it out.

Schizophrenia is characterised by disorganised thinking. The best way I can describe this is imagine 10 tvs on 10 different channels playing all at once. Your task is then to make sense of the information each channel is giving you. It is relentless and like this from the moment you wake until the moment you sleep. The programmes change on the channels too sometimes within minutes so they can be about many different things throughout the day.

There are constant thoughts about all kinds of things flooding your brain, one thing this does is make completing tasks very hard because you try to concentrate on one while there is all of this other input. I can manage at the most two tasks at once on a good day, if I try more than that my mind freezes and I become locked up. This means I cannot physically move, I cannot formulate a clear thought to raise my arm or take a step, in fact if I try to take a step I will likely fall over because there are so many other thoughts that my brain cannot complete the task. Although Catatonic Schizophrenia looks very still it is incredibly busy in your brain, you have thoughts firing constantly with utter confusion and you are unable to pick a clear thought out of it even to tell you to move a finger.

Because I am high functioning I am able to use thought-blocking techniques to combat some of this. For example, I can imagine the thought I want to follow physically growing larger in my brain while the others shrink (I see the thoughts as words on a piece of paper and imagine the paper growing larger). Another technique I use is to raise my arm rigidly in the air and I shout stop, the action and the word allow a reset in my brain which momentarily blocks the thoughts and allows me to start again. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful psychiatrist who taught me these methods of control.

However, there are still things I cannot do. I cannot have a tv on often because the voices add to the thoughts and they start swirling around my brain too, I usually sit in silence. The same goes for audio books or music with lyrics. Following conversation can be very hard face to face. I cannot walk and talk at the same time, I will simply forget the conversation or fall straight over my feet because there is so much else filling up my brain. I can usually only manage to do one thing at a time, I can only bring one task into focus, anything else gets lost in amongst all the other thoughts. This severely limits what I can achieve and can be dangerous if it involves things like remembering to both turn off an oven and remove food, There have been many occasions where I will turn off the oven then take the dish out with my bare hands because using an oven glove gets lost in all of the other thoughts. My mind says take the food out but use an oven glove gets lost somewhere under cats are cute, the sky is blue today, I have an itch, I need to brush my teeth, umbrellas keep you dry, my t shirt is green,etc. These random thoughts are with me all the time all pushing to be heard.

It is exhausting physically and mentally and it never stops. It is never quiet. Some days are better than others, I hope for the thoughts at least to be linking to each other so that there is a pattern I can follow. Today is particularly hard.