A little update on where I am right now

Well it's been a long way here, but in mid 2016 I got an immigration visa to Canada. I managed to come here and became a Permanent Resident. I also found a job at a big Software Company. I was clear with the Canadians during the medical exam about my schizophrenia and they had me see a psychiatrist who was impressed by how high functioning I was. She told me that it was very rare and apparently her recommendation got me in here.

She was also a muslim which has helped me shed some of my prejudice of islam (even anti-stigma advocates hold some prejudice sometimes). Here in Canada life has been easier than in Lebanon, mainly because I earn more and I am able to live on my own and afford more things that I need. I am still look for a life partner, but have resolved that this will come in time.

I am currently applying for a business visa to the United States. I am afraid that the previous events of my 2014 psychosis will haunt me here. But I will take it one day at a time.

One final thing I like to say about my current home Canada. This is indeed a great nation. They have accepted me as I am and opened up a whole new life for me. Canada is indeed the land of opportunity. God Bless Canada.

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.