Emma Harding, 27, employment programme project worker
I remember thinking "I hope it’s a brain tumour" because I didn’t want to have a mental health problem. But it wasn’t, it was schizophrenia.
It started during my first term at university. I was getting paranoid about people not liking me and thought the lecturers were short circuiting my brain to make me go mad. People seemed to be whispering about me and I thought they could tell what I was thinking.
The paranoia became so bad that I thought I couldn't continue to exist so I took 15 Prozac and 30 Paracetamol. But it didn’t work and I ended up extremely ill on a liver unit. After that, having taken a year out from university, things only got worse. At first the voices were whispering poetry at me which was really nice. But then they became more aggressive telling me to strip and run round the field naked. I thought it was some higher power - after all I could hear them but couldn't see them so I obeyed them. They told me my friends would petrol bomb my room so I moved all my stuff out.
At one point I became convinced that I was God. No one could tell me I wasn’t. At first it felt quite nice because I was in control and part of everything.... even to the extent that every character in Eastenders was a facet of my personality acting out my life.
But eventually I became convinced that I was actually possessed by the devil to have ever thought I was God. I was convinced that my bed which was metal was a transmitter for evil vibes. I could feel it humming and vibrating, so I took it apart. Eventually my dad got a psychiatrist to come to the house and they got me to hospital. It took a long time to get better but I had a nice psychiatrist and psychologist who helped me to devise a revision plan to get me back to university.
My last admission was in 1998 but my last symptoms were only two weeks ago when I went to visit family and the train got delayed. I’d drunk too much coffee, missed sleep and a few tablets and started being manic and giggly.
My current boyfriend is so supportive and fantastic but a previous boyfriend dumped me when I came out of hospital. His friends would ridicule me; they thought I would ruin his life. I’ve had people call me a nutter and others have actively avoided me. One friend used to introduce me saying “this is Emma, she’s mad.”
It annoys me when people assume people with schizophrenia are violent because violence isn’t a symptom of schizophrenia. You’re three hundred times more likely to be attacked by someone coming out of a pub than by a person with schizophrenia.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve pinned myself into a corner by being so open about my illness. When I first applied for jobs I’d always be honest about it and got nowhere. I wrote to a student newspaper once saying ‘Equal opportunities statements are a pile of rubbish’. Schizophrenia only produces a wall of silence.
I never say I’m a schizophrenic, I say I suffer from schizophrenia because there isn’t one word which describes me. I’m a person as well as having an illness.
FACT: People diagnosed with schizophrenia are 100 times more likely to harm themselves than anybody else. [Dangerousness - a review, ed. by Bluglass and Bowden, 1990]
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