When my son is not on medication, it affects my daily life differently than when he is. So when he’s not on medication, I wake up fearful of what mood he will be in, of what personality type we’ll be dealing with that day, if he’s agitated or angry or actively having hallucinations. So it’s very scary and unsettling, not knowing how that day is going to go. The ways that I’ve adjusted is I try to be open in communication with my son, telling him, “Listen, I think you need to go take a break, take a time out, try to breathe, think about your actions and how they can affect how the day will go.”

Well, when I was younger, it was more or less a big problem that I never really cared like I should. They always noticed that I wasn’t caring about myself or what I did, like I really should be. And a lot of times, that got me into problems and trouble, things that really went way out of line or whack in a lot of ways. It put me in a whole different type of reality or something, that I was totally away from any type of for-real life. And I just sort of went through life like that, and slowly calmed down and got better. And you know, I’d get jobs and stuff. And yeah, that was in a good way too, because a lot of my jobs and efforts were well-done, and so I got into a good position like that. And not anymore. I’ve gotten a whole lifetime career I’m working. I got about another year for 20 years with that same hospital company. And it went from a work incentive program all the way to a regular part-time type job with them. So, that’s the biggest accomplishment that someone like me probably could make.

My loved one’s condition impacts my day-to-day life by having an adult male be totally dependent to a certain degree on me to do a lot of things for him. So that means receiving phone calls when I’m ready to get off from work. Can you pick up something for me or can you give me my $20 for Wednesday? And so it becomes frustrating because I feel like I still have a minor child when he’s 36 years old. So what we have done to adjust to some of these challenges is that we have set days where he will receive money from me because he receives disability. So that way he knows only to ask me for money on those days, which would be on a Wednesday or a Saturday.

I struggle dangers daily with voices, paranoia and visions. Visions of preachers. And I’m always suspicious. That’s how it impacts my day to day life.

For me, I feel like right now the treatment that I have received and am receiving for my schizophrenia has improved my day to day life significantly. So currently that means I’m able to function a lot better than I previously could. So in the past, I wasn’t able to do things like go to school or work or live independently or engage socially with others at all. And I was in the hospital at least four times a year, if not more. And currently I’m able to do some of those things like work and live on my own. And I haven’t been hospitalized for over a year. So I do feel like in general, I’m in a much better place, but this does require a lot of effort from me and my team. And I do still have symptoms that interfere with my life. I experience hallucinations and cognitive distortions close to daily, which is quite exhausting. Some days this disrupts sleep a lot. Sometimes the co-occurring mood symptoms make it really, really challenging to tend to daily life needs like self care or going to work or school. I think the biggest challenge for me is the impact it has on my social life. I have a hard time being around groups of people like going out to eat at restaurants or going to parties, things that other people that are my age do. And close friendships or romantic relationships are also challenging because of my illness. Getting close to people or opening up or even able to trust people with this illness is hard. So that’s the hardest part for me. Overcoming challenges like independence in school, I was able to do that with finding a solid treatment team. Medication was also helpful. On finding organizations systems that worked for me, as well as getting accommodations in school to help me manage symptoms as they interfered with my schoolwork.

Taking care of my son has been challenging. The older he gets, the harder it gets. He currently is living in an apartment away from us, which has actually helped. We take him home to do laundry once a week, we take him grocery shopping, we take him to the doctor for his medications. So we still have a lot of caregiving that we have to do, plus we just will go and clean his apartment because he doesn’t clean. But since he’s left our home, it has improved greatly because when he was here at home he would break things and punch holes in walls and he burned down our shed in the backyard. I’m trying to think of what else. He always wanted to get marijuana, alcohol, which in his apartment, I don’t know. I know he goes and walks to the store and gets alcohol, but he is 24 years old so there’s nothing I can really do to stop that. When he is home, he walks around and talks to himself. He laughs manically at himself or the voices in his head. And I think that’s about all for this question.

It affects our daily life because we’re very involved as we’re his special contacts. We need to stay on top of his medicines. He does have a FACT team. Just today, I called to make sure they were going to give the shot tomorrow, and he hadn’t known about it yesterday. He said, no, he didn’t know about the shot. So there’s a constant every day talking to him, making sure that he’s doing what he needs to do. He does live alone. But it very much impacts our daily lives. Always kind of wondering how he’s doing and worrying about what will happen next because a lot has happened.

Well, I’ve had a problem with driving and being social due to the schizophrenia. I haven’t been able to maintain friendships like I want to. It’s just generally a difficult disorder.

Hi, my son’s condition is depressing because he gets angry easily. Sometimes I am scared of him. He has a lot of racing thoughts. He has a lot of stuff, and sometimes he thinks that people want to hurt him. It makes me worried. It makes me depressed. It has me walking on eggshells. He has persons knocking on the door or kicking the door when they’re not there, and it’s not happening. It makes me very anxious. It makes me very sad. How I cope with it is through prayer and meditation. I try to sit and talk to him as much as possible. I try to keep him active. I try to take him outside. I try to have him leave his room. As much activities as possible. I also joined Facebook groups and read persons online that are going through the same thing and joined discussion groups.

My condition impacts my day-to-day life because it makes it very difficult to have a relationship and it makes it very hard to understand reality, and what’s real or not. The frustrations that I experience are being able to differentiate between what is reality and what’s not. What I’ve done to adjust to these challenges are lots of different therapies and medications.

I want to say life of living with schizophrenia, it’s been a challenge because not many people are used to it. And definitely I’m not used to it. I still have a lot of things to overcome. I take it one day at a time and I work through it.

It makes it difficult to go in public with the Schizophrenia I have because I don’t know who’s talking to me and what voices are actually real, so I’ve switched to mail services like Amazon to get my groceries.

I don’t face very many challenges thanks to the medication helping me, but some challenges would be having paranoia and intrusive thoughts. I’ve stuck to coping techniques, learning therapy to face these challenges.

I actually suffer from schizophrenia. The main way that it impacts my daily life is that … well, in two ways. One, the first way is that I can’t work because I might have an episode where I see objects becoming symbolic in nature. And two, these episodes that I have make me fearful about going places in case I would have an episode basically where I would see things. So that’s it.

I have always every day in everyday experiences had some migraines. Of course, I deal with schizophrenia, so sometimes a little paranoia, a little hard to sleep at night, usually every day. But I don’t see visions or hear voices. I do need help sometimes because I do tend to get in accidents, I broke my leg, but I do have a condition in my brain so it does impact a lot of my thinking too in a fairly negative way. But no real problems of suicide or things like that, major problems, more on the medium scale.

My husband’s condition affects our day-to-day life. Both of our sleep is affected. His moods are affected, just the paranoia overall. It impacts, he cannot work. It impacts even going and doing simple errands. It impacts like with the noise level of our children. We have to have them minimize that because it really affects his schizophrenia. Some of the frustrations we have are just how little other [inaudible] people have. And also, the things that we do to help cope with this is he does therapy, he’s on medication. We found a few support groups on Facebook that have been helpful, but we also turn to our faith and just communicate between each other, and that’s what we find helpful.