LUIS’ SUCCESS STORY - October 2007

I am Luis, I am from Spain and I will explain you my personal story. I was born in 1974 and I had a nice childhood and adolescence in my hometown. There I studied during five years to become an office clerk, until I was 18 years old, and during the summers I worked as a building labourer to make some money to go to the university.

At home everything went alright with my parents and my younger brother, except from the fact that my father, who was a bricklayer, drunk too much during the weekends and he is bad tempered. The living together with my mother and brother was easygoing and very fond. Actually, I didn’t have any relevant problems in my personal life during these years, I had a lot of friends, I was very good at studying, the best of my class, I knew a lot of people, my health was all right and I didn’t have money problems because I was given scholarships for my studies and I earned money in the summers and in the weekends working as an office clerk. I was very hard working during these years.

In 1993 I went to study to the University in a town about hundred km. away from my hometown. I studied Technical Engineering in Computer Science, a three year degree, during four years, until 1997. During this period of time I was diagnosed as having OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) by my hometown psychiatrist, basically because I had strong obsessions about things which were not important. From the diagnosis on I took antidepressant and also antipsychotic medication. I must say that it helped me a lot although I should have gone to see a psychologist because of my obsessive behaviour, even with the help of meds.

During my time in the University I was the first three years in a youth hostel and I spend the last year in a shared flat.
The University and the youth hostel gave me the opportunity to establish good relationships with many people on one hand and to keep on being very hard working on the other hand. In a way this gave me a lot of self-confidence and emotional stability, regardless of my obsessions.

In 1997, after finishing my studies in the University, I moved to Barcelona to work there. I lived alone in my grandparent’s flat. I found a good job as a software developer but soon after I started working I began to have my first paranoid delusions. I thought that my boss was mobbing me. By that time I didn’t take antipsychotic meds and I went to see my hometown psychiatrist. He told me that this thinking disorder that I was having belonged to the OCD I had and he prescribed me antipsychotic meds again. I took the medication and the paranoid delusions vanished several days after. I could continue working normally and although I still had obsessions. I stopped taking antipsychotic meds after a while and I could go on until the spring of 2000. By that time I was sharing a flat with a guy from England and I started having the paranoid delusion that he said that I was nuts to other people who came to the shared flat. I went to see a psychiatrist in Barcelona and he diagnosed me for first time as having a psychosis and prescribed me antidepressants and antipsychotic meds. After several days the paranoid delusions faded away.

 In summer of 2000 I moved abroad to work as a technical consultant. I went to Vienna (Austria). There I had my first relationship with a German painter. After some weeks being in Vienna I met her and soon after I moved to live in her apartment. The relationship was unsuccessful right from the beginning, we didn’t get along with each other very well, we had a lot of troubles. She wanted to change me and I resisted to be changed. This fact gave a lot of instability to my life. Apart from this I had a lot of troubles in my work because of the language and my performance was very poor. Some months after I started working I developed once more paranoid delusions. I thought that a work colleague was mobbing me. I went to see a Viennese psychiatrist and he told me that I had OCD and gave me only antidepressants. They didn’t help and I continued having psychotic symptoms. At the end of 2000 I left the company and the psychosis stopped. I kept on taking antidepressants.

In March 2001 I started working as a software developer in a big international firm and some months after starting working there I developed a psychosis. I thought that I was in the newspapers because I could hear voices of people in the street saying it. I also thought that my work colleagues were mobbing me. I left the company in July 2002. The real nightmare was about to start. I continued taking antidepressants but the psychosis didn’t vanish, on the contrary, it was getting worse and worse up to the point that I heard two voices talking about what I was doing and thinking. Later on I developed the ideation that my thoughts were being broadcasted. No matter where I went that I could hear voices talking about my thoughts. The relationship with my partner was deteriorating more and more. I didn’t tell anyone about my thoughts and what was going on with me. I thought that if I did it they would send me to a psychiatric ward of a hospital and I didn’t like the idea at all.

Although I was having a psychosis I didn’t take any antipsychotic med. Besides, in March 2003 I was diagnosed by a neurologist as having multiple sclerosis (MS) and received the appropriate treatment for it. With all this things going on I decided to break up my unsuccessful relationship with my partner and go back home.

In July 2003 I left Vienna and went back to my hometown. Once there I went to see my psychiatrist and he prescribe me antidepressant and antipsychotic meds. Little by little I recovered from the psychosis. I was unemployed for a while and in March 2004 I moved to Barcelona and started working as a software developer for
a firm there. I couldn’t do my work properly because of my medical picture and in June 2005 the Social Security System of Spain gave me the absolute disability and I have been receiving the corresponding pension ever since. Then, I went back to my hometown and started going to an association for mentally ill people and for people with drug dependence. I spent a lot of time there playing domino and cards in the social club of this association. I had a psychologist that visited me once a month and helped me cope with the negative and cognitive symptoms of my psychosis. At home I had the unconditional support of my parents and brother. The have been all the time very understanding about my psychosis. In late summer 2006 I started being a collaborator in the aforementioned association for mentally ill people and people with drug dependence. I have been the photographer of the association and the web designer of its web site. I have also been helping the president of the association with his tasks. Currently I do all these things and furthermore I go with the president to meetings and conferences that take place in Catalonia. I must say that I am pretty busy. In the mornings I help this entity and in the afternoons I do English and German conversation sessions in order to improve my spoken English and German skills. My psychosis is very much under control with antipsychotic meds, concretely with olanzapine, the antidepressant escitalopram, and lithium. I only experience the cognitive symptoms of the illness, especially memory and abstract reasoning problems, but that’s all. I can say now that after all I went through I can lead a normal life despite of my illness.

I must thank very much Dr. Jack Rosberg for all the times that I asked him for help during the course of my illness and for giving me the opportunity to explain my personal story about my illness and I must thank as well the association for mentally ill people and people with drug dependence with which I collaborate, and specially its president for all the help that I’ve been receiving from him. Through the collaboration with this association I recovered my self-esteem and self-confidence and I think that now I am a better person than ever before because I don’t think about myself and instead I think about how to help other people which are going through what I went through.

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