The Ants are Crawling

It is the middle of the night here, and the ants are crawling on my body. Of course they are not ants, they are my tactile hallucination. I get this sometimes at night when I haven’t taken my meds at the proper times, or if i am stressed ,or if I haven’t been getting enough sleep. This time they are a bit worse. So what the hell, I’ll blog about them.

What do I do? I just ignore them. I have survived a decade on a low dose of medication but just ignoring my major tactile hallucinations. Sometimes it is ants. Other times it is a drop of rain. I know that if I wasn’t taking my meds I would start thinking that these fictional ants are actually signs from the Holy Spirit and go nuts. But as things are, I ascribe the phenomena to my mind playing tricks on me.

Now I don’t have voices, and I can’t say whether I would have been able to block voices the way I block the ants that crawl over me sometimes. But I would tell those fellow schizophrenics that it is worth a try.


I read this book-  it was mainly anti-psychiatry so I won’t mention it’s name - it said that many people with schizophrenia managed to suppress and live with their symptoms while taking low doses of medication or sometimes none at all. I am a firm believer in medication, but I am also a firm believer that they should be kept at a minimum. The side effect from too much medication would have rendered me incapable to think or work as a programmer. So ants. Well they crawl sometimes. I just live with it.

Life is worth living

I have been feeling depressed for a year now. Not clinically, but enough to contemplate suicide as a way to escape. In fact, I think my application to Canada has always been a means for me to escape Lebanon. And I think if I don’t get accepted, then maybe I should kill myself to escape this life.

Things get worse with the routine. To work every day doing my job, coding is very routine and often stressful. Code doesn’t always work the first time you write it. And at 33, when I debug my code and it fails, I start thinking “Am I getting too old for this shit?”. Yet whenever contemplating suicide for more than a few minutes, I immediately realize that life is worth living.

First, for all we might know this is the only existence that we will ever have. Sure it has its down sides, but there are always up sides in life. For instance, I don’t have a girlfriend and can’t really name a single person as my friend, but I can find a lot of joy in watching movies, reading books or when my code works. There’s joy in introspection, thinking about the big questions out there. There is joy in education, online and on campus. I have a family that is very supportive of me. And ultimately I have a mind and an imagination that can take me anywhere.

Second, what if the afterlife is worse than this life? Some people think that if they end the pain of this life then they will be at peace. Well maybe, but there are equal odds that what’s waiting on the other side of the curtain of life is much worse. Why have people always feared death? Maybe they had a reason.

Thirdly, we are all going to die. Why rush things? It might be understandable for someone who is in incredible physical pain to want to end his life. But someone like me who is just lonely had no reason to. I never know, I might meet someone in the future. And if I don’t I have things that can keep me occupied while I wait for death. For instance, I have recently started working on a project that might lead me to my dream career. That is exciting and can be very fulfilling.

But ultimately, for every person who is unhappy in this life, there are 10 people who have it much worse than him but who are always smiling. My religious mother, always tells me about our local garbage man. He is a poor ugly fella, who came here from Egypt and survives on below minimum wage. Yet he is always happy. He calls himself the Pasha (which means the boss). Life gave him lemons but he managed to make lemonade out of it. And that’s the kind of view we should have of life. Life, any life is worth living…

Equality: the plight of the highly functional

“I believe if you are on medicine that can control your schizophrenia, you shouldn't be treated unequally; you're a person just like everyone else” - Anonymous

Someone wrote this to one of my comments on reddit. And boy do I wish this was the case. Today, I was in a meeting for this group who are mental health advocates here in Lebanon. Now as I excepted from the get go, most people there were university psychology students trying to help their future by getting involved in this NGO. The NGO wanted to setup a suicide hotline in Lebanon which was a noble cause.

At the start of the meeting they asked everyone of us to introduce himself and tell the group why he wanted to be a member. A girl before me told them that she was joining because she has been suffering from depression for the past 4 years. Her eye was twitching.

I was next, and I talked about me being a programmer and having graduated a decade ago from the university (This was in the hospital of the university). What I didn’t say was that I suffered from schizophrenia. This is because even though these guys were trying to fight the stigma, I know that I would be treated differently. I also know that most people, will treat me differently if they knew.

Equality is the name of the game. It is the plight of the highly functional. I hope one day this will be seen as a case of diabetes or cholesterol. I remember at a previous job, my boss had a rare condition related to high cholesterol. He mentioned it casually and no one cared. This is my hope for schizophrenia. But how to break the stigma and how to contribute. Well this little blog is my attempt at that.

The Onset

In the summer of 2005, I had just graduated from University with a degree in Computer and Communications Engineering and I was feeling frustrated. I was frustrated not because I couldn’t get a job. I didn’t want a job. I was frustrated because I couldn’t get into graduate school. Despite being an uber nerd, and liking computers, I never managed to get great grades in University. At least grades good enough to allow me to get a scholarship abroad, plus my family was having financial difficulties for the past two years, so they couldn’t finance a graduate degree (they barely managed to finance my bachelors).

So during that summer, I discovered something online. People didn’t usually listen to me in real life. But this was a time of revolution in Lebanon. The Syrians had just left Lebanon driven by a popular protest movement sparked by the murder of a former prime minister. What I discovered at the time were forums related to the main political parties in Lebanon.

I started writing on those forums about the sectarian situation in Lebanon. Some of what I wrote was borderline intolerant and others just challenged the status quo. The main writings challenged the political order of Hezbollah, Syrian and the rule of Lebanon by Islam.

Anyway, I started spending an inordinate amount of time online. Day and night, writing on the forums and getting riled up when people didn’t agree with me. As time went by people started to get annoyed with me. And I was watching TV. I started noticing that the politicians on TV seem to be talking about what I was writing online. At some point I started thinking that they were actually writing on those forums.

Now one day I was talking with an important figure on one of the forums and he made a comment about porn. I thought that he was watching my internet activities and snapped at him. Later that night an explosion happened next to my house. This was a time when the Syrians were perpetrating terrorist attacks to kill politicians and civilians in Lebanon. At that point I went crazy. I got convinced that I was being target by Hezbollah who wanted to kill me.

I couldn’t go to sleep anymore. I would watch cars and think that they contain bombs for me. I used to walk a lot on the streets. I still do. Well one time as I was walking I realized the I was in sync with the car beeps. In Lebanon, everyone beeps their horns while driving for whatever reason. I thought to myself that there was a radio station that everyone was tuning into that told people of my movements using American satellites in space.

One night I couldn’t sleep, so I thought that the satellite was watching me from space. I started typing on my chest as I would on a keyboard to communicate with the NSA guys on the other side.

Oh and of course there was the American president, George Bush who knew about my every movement and was tracking me. But why? Well of course God and the holy spirt had something to do with me.

The story goes on, and I am not going to describe it here fully, at least not now. But what would happen over the next few months is that I would be told by my family that we have a history of psychotic illness. That my eccentric aunt actually was bipolar. And I would be taken to a psychiatrist who would prescribe me Risperdone.

It would take another 3 years and 2 episodes for me to a accept to stick to my medication. I would have one break years later, after again stopping my meds, but this time with the help of my psychiatrist.

The onsets of schizophrenia is very difficult for the person involves and for the family. And when it is delusions without hallucination or with tactile and olfactive hallucination it is really difficult to accept that you went crazy and not that it was a mistake in thinking or stress. I still think today that the bomb next to my house was either meant for me or to scare me. But I doubt that George Bush was following my moves. Or that satellites in space were tracking me.

Is Psychosis Comical in Hindsight?

Someone posted on reddit/r/schizophrenia asking if psychosis sufferers found their delusions comical in hindsight? Well during my last psychosis, I made ab about a 100 videos that I posted on YouTube while psychotic. These documented basically my  supposed asylum application to the united states. I was out of my wits at the time. I thought that the holy spirit descended upon me an the CIA/Mossad super spies were watching me  and have there supercomputers hacking my computer etc…

But, at the time I thought at the time these videos were very funny. I would be talking racist, dumb shit mixed with some political analysis, all under the aegis of Jesus H Christ.

In one video, with the millions watching me I admitted that I am a serial masturbator (yes I admit this here, but I am part of NoFap and well I am supposed to be anonymous here).

Anyway, today I am watching one video I had made (I removed them from youtube a long time ago, but I saved all of them on a hard disk). It was painful to watch. Mainly because I was making a fool of myself. I thought at the time that people were laughing with me, but in fact they were laughing at me.

Yes, the whole situation in hindsight is funny. After all I thought that I had received the holly spirit and here in Lebanon it is a running comical saying that when someone gets an impossible inspiration, he has received the holy spirit. So it is funny. I think back and laugh, but then I think of the people who saw those videos and I feel shame…

You see this is the think with psychosis, you don’t dissociate. It is not as if some spirit takes over you and controls you, or a different personality takes hold. It is still you, but with some crazy fucked up assumption. To give you a flavor of what was running through my mind, think of yourself being Richard Dawkins the God of the Atheists, and then Jesus appears to him and proves to him he is real. How would Mr. Atheist behave. It would still be the same person, but with extra assumptions and changes of behavior.

At the time, tactile hallucination proved to me that I was God’s own Apostle. This Muhammad did not go to the mountain. The mountain came to me, unwelcome. How to explain it to people? And how to explain that it was all due to chemicals in my brain?… I laugh about it, sure, but then I meet someone who saw those videos and well….

Making Contact with a Mental Health Advocates

A group of mental health advocates from my old Alma Matra (the one in the previous post) have organized themselves to fight the stigma of mental illness and help fund those mentally ill in need. Well, over a year ago I had contacted them when they first were starting out. I wanted to share my story with them, since that was their thing to get mentally ill people to share their stories and at the time I was just coming out of psychosis and trying to overcome the embarrassing videos I had made while psychotic. But something struck me wrong when I talked to one of them online. Mainly it seemed to me that these were young psychology students who were there to promote their profession and that they would take advantage of someone like me. So I broke off contact.

Anyway, in an attempt to find some extra activities for my spare time and because I wanted to work with mental health advocacy I decided to connect back with these guys. I contacted their head a few weeks back and I am going to attend their first meeting this coming Wednesday. I made it clear though that I do not wish to divulge my mental illness. I will try to see more closely what these guys do. They have so far set up a suicide hotline and made a few videos with people suffering from some more or less minor mental health issues. The most severe one was someone with bipolar disorder, a severe illness of course, but I am not sure if the guy was medicated or not.

Anyway will keep this blog up to date with what happens.

The Other side of Schizophrenia

“Dear Professor,
Woodrow and Bernstein. I got a great story for you about how the American government is spying on me”

Along those lines was the email that I sent to one of my old university professor whom I hadn’t seen in a decade and beyond a single course. He was an American professor at the my old American University and his American nationality was the reason I was contacting him. I wanted someone from the inside to expose the CIA/NSA/Whatever spying mechanism.

He didn’t answer my email. So I went to the university looking for someone who would help me out. On the way, I went to my old faculty of engineering and got into a conversation with an old professor about the randomness of the number PI. I was on to something. The number PI was not random and a former boss whose company was developing an encryption algorithm using the digits of PI was actually endangering Lebanese national security.

I made videos about how a smart phone could be hacked and turned on while you thought that it was off. Indeed, a modern day cell phone can appear to be off while being fully on. This was one of the revelations of Edward Snowden.

Now why the CIA was listening in on me you might ask. Why was I such an important guy? Well for the past few months I have been experiencing a miraculous healing of my pre-diabetes. This I knew for sure, for how else would I explain the energy and what I was feeling. I certainly didn’t need a blood test.

As you might have guessed, I am explaining the symptoms of a psychotic break. This break would last for more than a month during which I made an utter fool of myself, got labeled as a stalker by my former alma mantra. Got my own special file at the American Embassy. And got even picked up and interrogated by police.

This is the side of schizophrenia that everyone knows and expects. This is what people think when they hear the word schizophrenia.

Well here’s the other side:

For the past two years i have been working full time designing a GIS based system that has some of functionalities of Google Street view. A year before that I had worked on a project for two years for government solutions. Before that I designed a system for pharmaceutical companies. And all through those I have earned a decent living, which today even though I am in Lebanon compares well with a lower end salary in the states.

I take a shower every day. I keep a beard because I am bald, but other than that my hygiene is perfect.

for the past 9 months I have been pursuing a part time MBA and I have been excelling in it. I have read over 120 books in the past decade. Mostly business, technical and other non fiction books.

And guess what I don’t think the CIA/NSA whatever is out to get me. I don’t hallucinate, hear voices or have other types of strange thoughts.

This is the other side of schizophrenia. The side that you don’t hear about. The side that lets people like me lead normal lives.

How do I do it? I take medication, every day. Medication that I will have to take every day of my life.

Now I still have daily struggles, but they have nothing to do with schizophrenia. I am looking for a life partner, but can’t seem to find her. This gets me frustrated. A girl I went out with a few months ago seemed interesting, so I told her about my schizophrenia. She reacted with the same prejudice as someone who knew about the first side of schizophrenia, even though I only showed her the other side.

A priest I have talked to about my condition years ago, told me that I will never get married because of it. I am applying to immigration to Canada and think that I will probably get refused because of the condition (even though the psychiatrist reports I presented gave a very positive prognosis of my condition).

What is important for someone like me is not special access to medical care. I can pay for it myself. It is not special housing or special working conditions. I do fine with what is available to everyone else. What is important is equality. I want to be treated like anyone else. Anyone who has to take a medication to be normal. A lot of people do. Heart medication. Liver medication. Diabetes medication. They are not treated differently and neither should I.

The Seeker

If I don’t put more effort, this will soon turn into a blog about my loneliness. I think it all started towards the end of high-school when I alienated a couple of my best friends as they didn’t share the same taste in movies that I did.


Over through my university years, I managed to make the nerdiest of friends, who in the end left for MIT and Stanford, while my grades kept me in Lebanon.

And then I was stuck in sort of a loop. The schizophrenia happened and I recovered, but I never managed to create for myself a new circle of friends. And here I am whenever I meet someone new, they wonder why I don’t have a circle of friends. They find it odd and then stay away.
Plus my interests are a bit nerdy and not for everyone.

In a way I blog and write online to fill the social gap and maybe to meet new people. But so far, nothing came out of it. Mainly probably cause I am in the wrong country. I have met a few girls through Facebook and online dating, but they were not for me.

And so here I am seeking friendship. Seeking companionship. I have always fought the idea or label that I am somewhat inferior or less competent than anyone else. But a book I read about human evolution suggests that growth of the human brain is in large part attributed to man ability to form social bonds. The brain is very well attuned for us to create a social connection with 150 people. These are the friends and people in our lives. Maybe my brain is not good for that. It doesn’t explain how schizophrenia has not been culled out by evolution. Or maybe it will in this day and age, as more and more schizophrenics die alone with no one to propagate their condition.

But I am optimistic. I am the seeker, I will search high and low, to find that special someone.

The big taboo - A small technical explanation

“Ow this guy has schizophrenia. He is crazy. He is not normal. Don’t go out with him, he is a nut. “
This is the stigma that someone like me has to face if I were to go public with my condition. In the age of gay rights the only remaining taboo is mental health. So I am inspired by some conversations I had with former friends to explain a bit about my condition and in general what is schizophrenia. (I will use some technical information, but it might not be 100 percent accurate)

It all starts towards the end of puberty or early adulthood, the brain will shed some connections to become an adult brain. In this process some neurotransmitters will stop functioning the way they used to. Now this is very technical and one has to be a psychiatrist or neurologist to understand it, but basically the brain is controlled by two things:
- 
Electricity: These are the electric signals between neurons
- Chemistry: These are known as neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline etc… These chemicals also relay information in the brain and between the brain and body.

The problem for people with schizophrenia is mainly a chemical one. The brain produces too much dopamine. This chemical has a lot to do with the feelings of pleasure or to use a technical term: Reward motivated behavior. With too much dopamine in my brain, I become over excited about everything and become prone to delusional thinking.

Realizing this, doctors have created medication to regulate the dopamine in the brain. They work for some people like me. The medication is supposed to reduce the amount of dopamine that gets into some receptors. This means less messages about reward motivated behavior.

Too much of medication and a patient will not be able to function normally and will be tired and sleepy all the time. Too little or no medication and he will be in hyper mode and insane. Therefore with the right dose, one can be normal.

Today many doctors are encouraging society to look at schizophrenia the same way they look at diabetes. It is a chronic condition that has to be managed for a lifetime. But a highly manageable one.

Indeed, unless you had seen me during the brief periods where I was off meds and psychotic, you wouldn’t know that I suffered from anything. And now that you understand that it is a biological thing you should look at it as you do any other chronic illness.

Desperation possibly medication induced

So I ended up going out with a girl that I met online, and despite in the end it didn't quite work out, I realize that I have no reason for desperation.

So I am now more positive about my life. I will just make myself more open to opportunities that might come along in the future.

The thing is that my latest desperation started when I switched to Abilify. I think it is a side effect of this med that it makes one slightly depressive.

What is the appropriate level of medication?

So I visited this other psychiatrist the other day. I was referred to her as part of my immigration application to Canada. She was impressed with how highly functional I was. She told me that it is extremely rare for schizophrenics to be so functional and normal.

Indeed, you wouldn’t know that I was a schizophrenic from the way I act or from my life. I work. I study as part of a graduate program and online. I interact with friends (although I could use a wider social circle). And I don’t have symptoms. I don’t hear voices or see things. I do have this mild tactile hallucination that I have lived with for years. I sometimes feel like a drop of rain fall on my body and sometimes hear a tick in my head, but I ignore them and go on about my life. Psychiatrists call my condition “insight”. In other words, I know something is wrong with me and I overcome it. If I were to stop my medication, I would lose the insight and then I would lose this insight and plunge into delusion. So medication is great? Right?

Well not so fast. Indeed, I can’t live without medication. But I have fought a lot to keep this medication at the lowest possible dose. Indeed, one of the psychiatrists I had seen wanted me to take twice the dose I currently take. And if that had happened, I would have never had a career in computer programming or would have never studied anything or done anything aside from sleep.  And indeed, at the time my symptoms were a lot more severe. In addition to the tactile hallucinations I had sleep paralysis where I would have vocal hallucinations. I resisted upping the med and as a result the sleep paralysis and vocal hallucinations went away by themselves.

Now, maybe my condition is not as severe as others. Maybe. But I think keeping my medication low had something to do with my getting better.

Losing Friends

One of the worse aspects of psychosis was how I have lost friends. I had built relationships with people during three different occasions and lost them when they saw me psychotic.

Recently I have told two former friends about the condition through online chat. They seemed understanding, but then later when I have tried to reconnect and meet with them, they didn’t want to. I had lost them.

But I am reminded of a say by a french poet: “It is better to be hated for something that you are than loved for something you are not”. I suppose those were not real friends.

I do have one friend that I have told about my condition years ago and I still see him. The illness has helped to figure out who are real friends and who are fake friends.

Delusions are not errors in thinking

I was reading a post on reddit about someone who had a psychotic experience very similar to mine and this got me thinking back about my psychosis. My psychoses have mostly been delusions of references fed by slight tactile hallucinations. What am I talking about?

Well I would be talking to people online or offline, and start thinking that when they say something they mean something else. That they are lying to me even in simple language. Then I start thinking that TV presenters are sending me special messages. It will then be by tactile hallucinations where I would feel like a drop of water fall on my hand or head and think it is a signal from God. Then a coincidence happen and I start thinking that it is another message.

Now once it was over when I take medication or through itself, I would be back to normal thinking. I would then start thinking that I made a mistake in thought when I was hallucinating, that maybe I didn’t interpret the world around me correctly. I don’t hear voices telling me to do this and that. And I don’t see visions or hallucinations (that will be left for another post). So I think, well it was just some mistake in thought. And that’s dangerous. Because then I would think that I don’t need to take medication. That in fact I can beat this on my own just by focusing more.

Indeed, it is not a matter of focus. A delusion has the same underlying cause as a hallucination. This neurotransmitter Dopamine that is being secreted in large quantities in a region of the brain. In fact psychotic, I am hyper active. I talk fast. Walk a lot. Feel all this energy and get excited about everything. Meanwhile my brain is in overdrive.

Yes some people manage symptoms on their own without medication. But understanding that medication can have a big effect and solve and stop delusions from happening has been key to my recovery.

Indeed, for the five years I have taken medication steady I didn’t have another psychotic episode. And for the past two years since I got back on medication, I didn’t have a psychotic episode. So if you had psychosis, don’t think you will beat this just by focus and stopping mistakes in thought from happening. Get help. It helps.

Pondering God's existence

So a lot of my delusions had to do with God. A common joke here in Lebanon is to refer to the epiphany that people have about some ideas as when the Holy Spirit descends upon them. Well, in my case I have thought that the Holy Spirit descended on me 4 times. It was of course not the Holy Spirt but insanity. This is when I have had psychotic breaks.

During those breaks, I have sought the help and advice of clergy. I was encouraged by my mother (a religious zealot) who at the time would think that I had a vocation to become a priest. Well, the clergy deferred on their views. The reasonable ones recognized that something was wrong with me, but just said to ignore this and focus on working and finding a wife. One cleric actually encouraged me and said that I was having a divine revelation. As it later turns out, he had impregnated a woman and left the clergy.

We are born on this earth and we have to deal with some strange things. Some people are born with two X chromosomes and one Y. They are neither male nor female. Some people are born with less developed brains. Some people are born with a genetic disposition for schizophrenia. Where is God is all of this? 

I think to myself, that my problems are my cross to bear and I should carry it just like our Lord carried his cross. But then I think to myself what’s exactly the point of bearing a cross. In my second psychosis, I thought that the world was coming to an end and that Jesus was going to return. And you know what? This thought scared the hell out of me. What will happen to the all the progress that humanity is going to make. What will happen to life on earth? From that I started thinking about what would be the point of this life, if it is just a test to see whether you get to go to the second life.

This life has meaning and we have to live it. Yet, what if one’s life is not so great? Mine certainly isn’t. Yes, I am a survivor of mental illness. Yes, I have a job. Yes, I am smart. But am I achieving any of the goals I wanted to achieve when I was a kid? No! Am I achieving any of the goals a 33 year old man should achieve? No again! I am not married and haven’t had a girlfriend in years (and that’s being generous about those who I can call girlfriends in the past). So what if it doesn’t get much better than this in the future. What if this is as good as it is going to get?

Well Jesus offers hope in that there is another world to come. So I can just wait till the end of this life to get to a good life? That’s a mentality that I have accepted for years. But not anymore. I want to align my life with my goals. This is a reason I am investing more of my time to be sociable, to make new friends and meet new people. This is why I have enrolled in an MBA program this year so that I will move closer to a better career.

Now of course it is all small steps. But radical steps will lead down the path to insanity again. If I don’t achieve my goals so what? In the end we are all going to the same place. Religion be damned.

Delusions of Reference

A patient is telling you about a dream she had with a beetle in it. You look through your window and you see an insect that seems like a beetle or in the same family of insects. Is this the subconscious of the universe talking to you? Is it God sending you a message about this woman?
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung believed that this and other coincidences were a manifestation of the collective consciousness. He coined the term Synchronicity to describe these coincidences which are a sort of meaningful coincidence.

Knowing that others experience these kinds of coincidences and reasoning that though they exist they mean nothing was a big part in my recovery. While psychotic, I gave these coincidences supernatural explanation. God, the creator of the universe had implanted these coincidences all through my life to prove to me that he exists. Normal people don’t reason this way. I did when I was psychotic and it was a surprise when the dream world ended and I came back to reality.

How do you explain it? How do you describe it? It is an experience that is hard to share unless you really live it. People think of schizophrenia as hearing voices. A voice in your head starts talking and tormenting you. This is certainly true for some people. But not for all people. For people like me the delusion of reference and the coincidences were the most prominent feature. A good example of this type of delusion was in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”. John Nash started cutting magazines trying to decipher a pattern which he associated to soviet spies talking to each other. “The Pattern” is Synchronicity. It is a pattern that exists in the fabric of the world. Coincidences like shit just happen. Or maybe our brains seeks them and feeds on them. But that doesn’t mean that they mean something more than what they are.




References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Small beginings

I joined Reddit in mid 2014, after a psychotic break I had six months earlier due to stopping my medication in mid 2013. I decided to post on reddit as an attempt to explore whether I should go public with my diagnosis in Lebanon. You see during my last psychosis, I made a lot of online videos and I think a lot of my friends found out that something was wrong with me. So I wanted to explain things. Since then I have opened up to two former friends and neither were very receptive.
So I am posting here on this blog to shed some myths and mainly explain how someone can live a more or less normal life while suffering from schizophrenia. Maybe this will offer support to others, especially younger people who have just been diagnosed. Also it is a bit cathartic to write about yourself.

I was first diagnosed in 2005 while posing a lot on online forums related to politics in Lebanon. I started thinking that the TV was talking to me and that the people I was talking to on the online forums were related to the major political parties in Lebanon (some of this might be true). I also started thinking that TV shows were being streamed live for me and that the presenters were tailoring the shows for me (a lot less likely to be true). At one point I started thinking that Hassan Nasrallah was targeting me in a speech were he was criticizing some Lebanese youth. Well one day I was chatting with people from those forums and there was a heated argument, then a car bomb happened next to my house. I thought that i was targeted and couldn’t sleep for days, until I saw a psychiatrist and he gave me medication. This is a little summary of my first psychosis, maybe i will expand on it in later posts.

Over the next three years I would live outside of Lebanon and would take medication sporadically. I would have another psychotic break when the war against Israel happened. Then I would have another break still when I would come back to Lebanon and stop my meds suddenly. That last break happened after I quit my meds for three months. Anyway that was the most severe break I suffered I would hallucinate, think that I am in purgatory, visit hell, have a glimpse of heaven, etc…

After it subsided with the help of medication, I would decide to go on medication full time. After having a fear of working, I would find a job and work for 3.5 years developing software. I would excel at it. During that time, all my symptoms were under control. Then in 2012, I would switch to another software development job where I had better opportunities and thrive. We had some trouble getting a client, but the work was progressing well. Then in mid 2012, I would start having some fears about diabetes. The medication stops the psychosis, but it causes weight gain. So with my doctor’s help we decide to switch medication to one that is more diabetes neutral and I start taking metformin. Anyway, my doctor had told me in 2009 that it was possible to wean off anti-psychotic medication after taking them for 5 years. In 2013, i would have reached that 5 years mark and with the help of my doctor I would wean off my medicine.

In early 2014, I would have another break, where I would make all the videos. I would also call all sorts of foreign embassies in Lebanon seeking asylum as a political refugee. Then a few months later, I would go back on medication. And then find a job in software development, where I work from home but full time. And a few months ago, i started an MBA ( I am writing this in early 2016).

So am I normal?


Well basically to a certain degree yes. My biggest health problem has to do with weight gain and pre-diabetes. My biggest social problem is that I have no girlfriend. But I work. I earn the same as anyone working in software in this country. I study, and I am doing well one some of the courses in my MBA. I go out with friends, although I could use a bigger social circle.

I would be fully normal if I didn’t have to take medication. But I don’t hear voices, see people who are not there, or have delusions of association (which have been my main symptom during psychosis). Mentally, I am the same as everyone else. That’s what the medication does and it works.

My biggest concern is whether I get accepted into Canada as an immigrant, which has been a life long dream of mine. My second is if a future employer finds out about my illness and discriminates against me.

Christianity and Islam?


Well, I have said that I had religious delusions in the past. I am still a believer to some extent, but I don’t think that anything that happened to me while psychotic was the work of God or the Devil.

Now I am a christian, and for years I have had several arguments about Islam. These arguments don’t come out of prejudice or something like that. It is just a topic I discuss because I think it has some weight on the politics of the middle east.

What about this blog?


Stay tuned. I have wanted to write about schizophrenia for years. Maybe this blog will turn into something more substantial.