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.