Memories of Dystopia: My Life as a Sufferer of Schizoaffective Disorder

By Joanna Clark

Memories of Dystopia is not meant to be a self-pitying rant. It is a short and true account of my life as a sufferer of schizoaffective disorder, and it follows the twenty-eight years it took to get a diagnosis and all the different diagnoses in between as it is one of the most complicated cases many psychiatrists have come across. I have deliberately changed the names of any people in this book to protect their identities, and so as to stop any stigma. It is written in order of importance to me.

The definition of dystopia is a place where everything is bad, nothing will get better and there is no hope. Sometimes my heart breaks off with gravity dragging it. I am now on the road to recovery and have included my positive experiences of getting better in my head.

Schizoaffective disorder is a combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and it is my hope that sufferers of many psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, Aspergers syndrome, borderline personality disorder, and also members of the medical and psychological profession will find it useful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477223628

Joanna Clark

Joanna Clark was born in 1983 and lives in Southern England. She attended Art College at sixteen, has bouts of creativity, writing and a love of animals, which she hopes to pursue as careers. She has been in Psychiatric care from the age of twenty. When she first became ill she tried to solve her problems by researching much literature on Psychiatric conditions. She has been diagnosed with varying diagnoses ranging from Specific learning Disability, Borderline Personality Disorder, Schizoaffective Disorder and Atypical Autism. Her problems actually stem from before birth. After twenty-eight years of finalizing a diagnosis that seems to fit well, she has written about her experience of despair over her lifespan in a process of restoring peace, love and mental recovery.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Today

If I were to say that I have Bipolar disorder, it would be considered acceptable to our society, who know nothing about mental illness. It would even be in fashion these days. A lot of famous people have Bipolar Disorder. However, if I were to say my true diagnosis, Schizoaffective Disorder. People are scared off. They form opinions derived from that word Schizo.

Chapter 2

Déjà vu

"Now I understand what you tried to say to me

And how you suffered for your sanity

And how you tried to set them free.

They did not listen,

They did not know how,

Perhaps they’ll listen now . . ."

(Don MacLean.)

‘Déjà vu n. a form of ‘paramnesia’ distinguished by a delusion of having already seen or experienced before something that is in reality being encountered for the first time. (Oxford dictionary of Psychology; Andrew M. Coleman; 2006, Oxford University Press.)

Déjà vu is probably the most controversial subject I can think of so I’ll try to explain my familiarity and I don’t know if it’s right but I am going on the information I have collected from my thoughts and experiences. It’s a bit of rambling here as I was unwell, but you can get the idea. It’s like the ‘butterfly effect’, which is chaos of time theories.

I can’t call ‘life’, life, because I don’t feel and never have. Maybe I feel, or have felt pain and some moments of contentment . . . maybe . . .

I don’t know how to see the world in a more practical way. This is confusing. I can’t see. It’s my nature to be analytical. Practicality and reality works but reaching that state of mind is something I am in awe of, since I can’t. I observe others and watch how they do ‘life’ and try to copy, but this is not me. It’s a hiding mask. I keep hoping I’ll be able to turn into someone capable of understanding the concept of time. Everything about this time frame hurts so badly. My distractibility from the outside world into a fantasy one as a child was easy; actually I don’t believe I even tried. It may have been escapism, but it was far too natural too. Although I didn’t understand the full concept of time and realize what was needed for a secure future of happiness or at least contentment, I found I lived life by split seconds really. Time would fly by when I found something to look at. I don’t know why I preferred making patterns in the grains of sand to making money. The future never occurred to me. Daydreaming, my father called it. But I don’t want to be a dreamer. It wasn’t intentional. When I had to do ‘life’ I was unhappy. Dreaming and noveling was all I’d ever known. I would have been quite happy writing novels for a living but the problem is not grasping what others want to know, or not know about. Would my masking sell? That is why I have decided to be frank and honest about a true set of events.

When I experience long episodes of dissociation, I realize that time isn’t correctly moving on for me. On inspection it seems I have at least three or four different recollections of my childhood and they all seem true. I have nightmares, and I watch what happens as a result of what I do. I know the past, present and the future but still there is no real time presently existing with memories of my different lives, there is no ‘one’ timeline in which to place them. I observe from outside the world.

Time repeats, yet adjusts whatever happened originally, making me seem a fool. Triggers in life, trigger memories of another, simultaneously. I feel I was sexually abused as a child, but was the trauma severe enough to dive me into a world of fantasy as a means of protection?

In all the memories, one thing is clear . . . I have a learning disability. The déjà Vu wakes me up: brings me into a new world where I embark on a journey of self-discovery. I am alone. The people I meet are objects in the world and unreal. They cannot help me.

I am thrown into Psychiatric care at the tender age of 20 but nobody really knows what’s going on in my head. No one diagnosis really fits well. Is it a personality disorder? Asperger’s? Epilepsy? Psychosis? I am nobody at present. It doesn’t matter about labels in a place where there is no timeline. I have no age, or no ‘one’ age.

I am desperate to fit the pieces together. I am forced to put my many lives into one and be everybody I think I have ever been. I do research on everything I would need to know but find that whatever happens, I start another life, only this time I am