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.