These impulse phobias happened to me especially after my big seizure (following the taking of a firecracker) which led me to have a treatment that I had actually needed for a long time. These impulse obsessions or impulse phobias lasted for several months, and were really heavy to live with. I was afraid that they would never stop, I could not see how they could stop because they were so intense, and I was afraid that by dint of having them I would end up taking action and / or become crazy with worry, that I would end up in asylum, I couldn't see, I couldn't conceive of them being able to leave. I suspected that the treatment I was taking should help, but my intuition made me fear that it would never stop every time one of these impulse phobias crossed my mind.
A week after taking this very concentrated firecracker in cannabis, I was no longer sleeping, and I ended up having an intense anxiety attack, my father took me to the hospital, I was afraid of ending my life in a psychiatric hospital because I was not sure that there was a suitable treatment for me, I wasn't sure if I had schizophrenia (which I knew was curable) but I feared I had an even more serious illness than can be cured. Fortunately, I was quite schizophrenic (quite an amazing sentence if you take it out of context), there was a treatment for me.
In fact I explain to you what I remember about what was going on in my mind:
I was afraid, extremely afraid that such a thing would happen, as I knew that I was crazy, that I could not control my thinking on many subjects and worries, I told myself that logically I would never be able to control these fears of attacking others or killing them, my mind, when these fears came to my mind, made me visualize such a scenario. I told myself then that these flashes, these visualizations of these horrible scenes, as I did not control them, as I could not think of anything else, would never stop and that one day necessarily, I would risk doing this. And so I tried not to think about it to reassure myself that I could think of something else, but the next second I had a phobia of impulse and I dreaded again this and these scenes, these flashes came back to my mind and so on, seeing that I couldn't think of anything else, I panicked that I would one day end up doing this.
I didn't want these ideas, I was aware that I shouldn't have these ideas, but they still came into me.
If you have these fears too intensely, I invite you to take a stronger treatment, I should have explained this to my psychiatrist, he would have given me Tranxene or other, it would surely have relieved me!
It seems to me that having impulse phobias in no way creates a risk of taking action.
For me, now, I think there was surely no chance that I would hurt others even if these impulse phobias had lasted for several years (if you ever suffer from schizophrenia and really think you could do harm, talk to your psychiatrist who will give you treatment, it seems to me that impulse phobias never lead to doing the dreaded act, but I am not totally sure of that, I let you see with your psychiatrist if for you there is really a doubt). In my mind the fear of doing harm was intense, these ideas that I had, I told myself that they were serious if others saw them and this is also what worried me when I saw that I could not contain these ideas. I totally forbade myself from hurting others and now I think that for me there was no chance that I would hurt others.
A little in the continuity of that, for many years, I feared that I would be thought to be really dangerous if I told that I had impulse phobias, I guess today that if you tell your ideas of impulse phobias clearly, that you are afraid of doing harm at these times and that's why you think about it, but that in reality we will surely never do it, that then most people will understand that we are not dangerous but just obsessed with this worry.
Fear of being frowned upon by doctors because of symptoms
So if I told this to my doctor or my psychiatrist, I would then leave the office with a certain discomfort, the fear of being seen as dangerous for some 30 minutes, I told myself then that I had to stop thinking that my doctor thinks that, because it was in practice surely not the case, but that didn't stop me from worrying that he was worried that I was dangerous. When I was hospitalized, just to make the diagnosis of my disease and to adapt my treatment when I was doing it quite well, I ended up not supporting the look of the caregivers who, I had the impression judged me on my ideas, my behavior, as if at every moment they made a silly idea about me. I went home after a week and I was very happy because it was more tenable, it bothered me to think that the caregivers, when I was hospitalized thought that I had had impulse phobias or had some silly stereotypes about me, and that I could not fight against these silly and reductive stereotypes that they had on me, at the risk of getting upset and looking like a dangerous madman, making these stereotypes worse. There can be in some departments a real contempt for patients, when this is the case, it is unacceptable, for my case, I think it was too much concern on my part that caused especially this unpleasant feeling (even if I am a little ashamed to admit it). And I was like, "Luckily I can come home, I would have gone crazy to stay there!" creating a fear of being hospitalized, fortunately for me, never before necessary.
I didn't like to be badly perceived, which is why, sometimes when my former psychiatrist talked to me about certain subjects, I made a little head, like I did not appreciate that I could be considered sick in this way, it is the others who are sick in this way, not me, it was disturbing to be seen like this.
I will take you an example, my former psychiatrist told me about a patient who had strange ideas: Having had a homosexual son, she had as a result of this announcement a painful gynecological problem, I believe she had continuous periods, she then had the impression, the intuition that this gynecological pathology was a consequence, a divine punishment for having had a homosexual child.
My psychiatrist had told me this, I had understood it a little but not really, to draw the parallel between the strange idea that this woman had and the fact that I too could have strange ideas, make supernatural connections between events, in order to open the conversation. Only, I felt that feeling having a homosexual son as a punishment is wrong, because it is intolerant towards homosexuals to think that, which is why when my psychiatrist told me this, rather than saying: yes I also have weird ideas, I had the reaction of wanting not to look like this lady who seemed intolerant to me, for fear of being rejected for being like this and I said something like, "it's not very good to be intolerant (here I was talking about homophobia towards your son), fortunately I'm not like that".
When a psychiatrist I saw at the very beginning of my treatment saw me and asked me the question "do you have any friends?" with a look that made me feel the following message: "ah yes, I see that you have no friend, admit it, it is a sign of schizophrenia", I experienced it badly, as a humiliation, as the fact that I am not worthy of being a human, that this kind of problem I had should make me consider by others as if I were not equal to them, that my thinking was abnormal and that I should not be taken seriously, since a delusional person has only false and somewhat ridiculous opinions, who are borderline funny, and that it's the not good guys who don't have friends,… that was how I felt about it.
You just have to know that it's not our fault to have symptoms,
For doctors, I also saw, fortunately rarely, doctors or caregivers who despised people with psychiatric problems.
The fear that people think that I, who had impulse phobias, really wanted to kill people would have chased me if I had never had treatments.
Humans are good in general, schizophrenics too!
In the same way that there is this mechanism in the brain of almost everyone that makes us terribly afraid to hurt others if we start thinking about it, and that in the end, makes that we do not hurt people in general, this mechanism is always present in schizophrenic patients or even amplified, at least at home it was, it was amplified, I dreaded hurting others, and that's precisely why I had impulse phobias, and not because I really wanted to hurt them.
Even if the paranoia of schizophrenic patients can cause them to hurt people they think could threaten them, harass them, control them, spread rumors about them, the restrained is always present, on the one hand because they may realize that their paranoid ideas although invading their minds is not really founded (I believe that not all schizophrenics understand that their ideas are unfounded in the but I'm not sure about that), but also because hurting people is serious, even if you're schizophrenic.