developing insight

My symptoms started when I was a child.  I was diagnosed with sz at age 37.  I am 50 yrs old now.  When did I start having insight into the situation?

When I was 8, something was wrong but I was not able to verbalize what I was feeling.  Instead, I would cut on my hands and knees to externalize the inner pain.  Then at 10 and 11 when I started experiencine delusions and hallucinations, it was not that I felt afraid, I just felt "different."  But a cousin my age told me she also heard voices, so I dismissed them and was not too concerned.  Perhaps, I thought, others are hearing these voices and seeing demons, too.  I wanted to talk to my parents about it but they were very religious and I was afraid that talking to the devil was sinful.  I wanted to talk to a school teacher or counselor, but as a child I thought they should be the ones coming to me.

Then at age 12 depression began to bother me.  And it got steadily worse until I finally confessed my abject misery to my mother and she took me to our family doctor.  He told me I had depression.  That's the first time I had a name for what I was feeling.  And I took antidepressants for a while.  But no educational materials were offered -- only a quick diagnosis and prescription.  That has been one of the big travesties of mental illness in the past -- no effort by professionals to educate or explain what is happening.  Insight can often be gained through information.

In my late teens and early 20's I experienced both mania and psychosis.  But I had no idea what was wrong.  Maybe I was afraid to find out.  Again, I thought it was just some aberration that fell within normal parameters.  I tried to self-medicate by taking my father's valium, but I never thought about going to a doctor to find out what was going on.

Then I married at 23 and stayed steady for a few years, then slowly but surely fell into depression again and eventually into paranoia, psychosis, anorexia, and suicidal and homicidal ideation.  At 37 everything seemed to fall completely apart and I finally saw a psychiatrist.  Although I was diagnosed variably as having major depression, bipolar disorder with psychotic features, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, the doctor I saw never bothered to "let me in on" what the problem was.  Again, I got diagnoses and prescriptions.  And a string of hospitalizations began.  Still, I really had little insight into the illness itself.  But I was working at a medical school and was able to go to the library there and research schizophrenia and depression.  But the number of books on these subjects was pitifully low.

Insight began there, in the medical school library.  I read the DSM and saw why I got the diagnosis of mental illness.  Things from my childhood and early adulthood began to fall into place.  Gradually as the internet developed, I was able to find even more information online.  And the symptoms I had since early childhood began to make sense.