Intrusions

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Lately, when my head feels really foggy, when I'm reading something I will have perceptions out of deep, distant, and buried places, like my mother's voice repeating what I think or colors bleeding out of one side of my vision, forming disconnected and nonsensical visions. Sometimes, the fan sounds like people talking in the distance.

I wonder if I should tell my psychiatrist this, tomorrow.

I'd say yes.I heard the fan making sounds before,but it was distant music.Then it got where the fan sounded slow and the ticking of a clock was really loud and annoying.that's when I went back on the antidepressants.

I was on antidepressants, but my doctor didn't think they were doing anything so he took me off of them. For the past month or so, I've been on an antipsychotic instead, but still no improvement.

Do you think you were better on them?The only anti-psychotic I took was seroquel,and it had some nasty effects.Hope you find something that helps.

Not really. I'm not sure if there is anything that can cure, or even really treat, what ails me.

Keep trying,maybe you will find the right medication.
I worry that mine will just quit working,there is a thing called,no joke,poop out syndrome,where the antidepressants quit doing their job.
I guess then shock treatment,no way I ever want to feel the way I did.Dont know if you have ever read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath,that's the way I felt.In some way it gave me comfort to know that someone else felt the same things I did,I wish she had made it.

When I started reading the experiences of people like Elyn Saks, it helped me make sense of my sometimes psychotic conditions, like that really bad episode I had when I was 14. Still, this all makes me wonder what's going wrong with me this time, if it's something really serious and disabling developing again.

Sometimes it comes down to riding it out,I know that's not much comfort.Be sure and tell your doc all that you are feeling.

Only problem: I'm seeing signs that the Zyprexa is starting to really mess up my metabolism. I've been gaining weight and after being mostly below normal for years my blood pressure is now prehypertension (taken at the pharmacy which is usually in line with what my doctor's office measures). Last week, my blood pressure was higher than normal and my weight was gaining, when I was at the doctor's office.

I am going to share this with the psychiatrist.

That's a good idea,also have your cholesterol checked,some of those drugs can raise it dangerously high,had that happen with Depakote.

beneficii I think you might want to reconsider what you are experiencing! I also here voices talking about me in distant background sounds. I cant tell you exactly what you have but I have a suggestion you might want to look into that could explain why anti psyches arnt changing this.

I am not psychotic per say although I do have ASD, BP, dysprexia and a few other odds and ends. I experience what is known as synthesia from time to time and from what I have been told it is related to the ASD. It seems that a certain percentage of people on the spectrum have this.

It could be that in an attempt to make since of the sounds coming from the fan your brain is trying overly hard to match the fans sound pattern against the brains own dictionary of known understandable auditory ques. Essentially, your neurons think they are hearing something they actually arnt, but they tell you that you are. Your brain is hyper associating what it perceives as a pattern in the fan sound and sending it to you as something that it thinks makes since. At least that is my theory. A neurological hyper association rather than a psychological trauma.

I have experienced this both visually and audibly. If I look at an object that is just to far away to make out, my brain will make it look like a recognizable object, it looks weird and I can tell its not quite right because it will kind of shape shift depending oh how I look at it. Then when I get closer it looks entirely different based on the improved information my eyes are giving to my brain. Or maybe I have just done to much LSD IDK. But Synthesia is a very real and is commonly miss diagnosed.

Synthesia is different from an auditory or visual hallucination. You should look it up if you are not already familiar with it, just keep in mind that most of the information your going ot find thru google is both partially inaccurate and woefully incomplete.

I know that I've had consistently low HDL cholesterol "from not enough exercise."

Re: Low HDL-- For what I understand, even strenuous exercise doesn't help HDL that much (although I'm not suggesting exercise isn't a good thing). I'm on Lopid (Gemfibrozil) for hyperlipidemia and one of it's benefits is it raises HDL, so you might want to check that.

I also want to echo the statements RunningFox has made. I hear voices all the time-- that's how I write music. I also hear the groups of people in fans, air conditioners, etc. That could just be audio matrixing-- the tendency of our brains to seek and find patterns in anything. Being on the Spectrum might mean we are prone to overly matrix things (I don't know if there's any research on this, but it's just my guess).

From what has been explained to me by multiple docs (psychologists as well as psychiatrists) is that the difference between that and psychosis-induced voices is whether or not you can distinguish them from "real" sounds, how they make you feel, and whether or not they are telling you to do things (i.e. "command hallucinations.")

That said, there are plenty of examples of people hearing things-- particularly music-- with no psychosis at all. I don't know if the doc you are seeing is a psychiatrist or a GP. If you are seeing a psychiatrist, do they have much experience with ASD? You might want to seek some kind of second opinion just to get a fresh perspective.

Hope this helps. And good luck!

"Four of the five voices in my head want to sleep. The other wants to know whether or not penguins have knees."

He is skeptical that it is psychosis. I am skeptical of everything. I had a really bad psychotic episode at 14 that caused a lot of damage, so I make sure to step forth to bring up every minutia that could suggest a repeat of that. He calls it obsessive; I call it upholding a vow to never repeat what happened at 14 again.

Nevertheless, he is doubling the Zyprexa dose to help me get through this. Despite my self-neglect, fatigue, and reports of wakefulness being painful at times, he says I do not appear to be depressed at all.

When I had the stuff happen recently, it seemed otherworldly. He chalked it up to dissociation, but I wonder otherwise. These are not very familiar to American psyches, but there are certain subjective anomalies that evidence schizophrenia spectrum vulnerability, and I notice I've had many of them for as long as I can remember.

I've been slowly losing it these past couple years, so I want to keep the watch on, to not repeat what happened at 14.

I totally understand your caution. While I was accused of being many things by clinicians, peers, siblings and parents alike, as I've said in other comments no one knew. AS didn't even become a thing until I was out of high school, and my family were uneducated and poor.

I do recall an extreme paranoid episode. I had a high fever at the time (I was 11 or so), and so chalked it up to that. However, it's cropped up again and again later in life-- not to the extent of the original episode, but I'm constantly wondering if it will ever come back and perhaps not go away. There's that whole AS fear of losing my mind that's always with me.

Keep us posted.

Ugh, wakefulness is painful, even with fish in the bag cooking in the oven.

Waiting for 25 minutes for it to cook.