Comorbid Confusion

T.B. Shares about his life with comorbid autism and schizophrenia. Life is hard enough with autism but even more challenges present when you have schizophrenia. T.B. addresses some of the facts and myths of autism and mental illness and hopes to inspire the reader to understand people with the illness or developmental disability more. This is an educational book that will change the way you think. In this book T.B. is very candid and open about things. He shares about his imaginary friends Tom and Red. He shares how he has hallucinations and even as he was writing a part of the book he was having a hallucination he was dealing with while writing. If you want a first hand account of what living with schizophrenia might be like then this is an excellent book for you to check out. Towards the end of the book T.B. is diagnosed with Hydrocephalus and he writes about how all of these comorbid diagnoses confuse him and leave him wonder what symptom is caused by which disorder. The important thing is T.B. may be onto something with his hydrocephalus diagnosis and he feels more hopeful now than every before. From autism to hydrocephalus with schizophrenia in the middle T.B. takes the reader on a mental health roller coaster that is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat as you read. T.B. shares how he has tried to remove his autism and cut it out because Red and Tom told him to do so. T.B. often listens to the voices because they only tell him to hurt himself. They say he must be punished for having autism but T.B. knows that they are lying and trying to get him to harm himself. Read this book to see how T.B. fights back against the hallucinations. Here is an excerpt from the book. "One voice is named Red and another is named Tom. Both of these voices keep trying to tell me I need to cut the autism out of me. For some reason they hate my autism and say I have to get rid of it. There have been times where I have tried cutting with a razor to get the autism to bleed out of me. No matter how hard I cut or how many times I try I cannot get rid of the autism. I do not want to get rid of my autism but I feel like I need to in order to be safe and happy. The voices are completely against autism and they keep saying I am a bad person because I am autistic. The voices are always out to hurt me because of my autism. They do not like it one bit and say that if I am ever without a neurotypical friend they will come find me and kill me. The voices are loud and clear even today as I type this. I do take several medications for them as mentioned earlier in this book. I try to block them out and I try to ignore them but it is very frustrating when people try and tell me they are not real and I should just ignore them. Even my behavior consultant does not understand the voices and how they affect someone. He thinks they are not real and he says that I should be able to ignore them and just go on with life. I do not think he realizes how severe these voices and hallucinations are. The voices and hallucinations have ruined my entire life. I cannot even begin to function right now because I am hearing so many voices. I have never been able to do well in college. I have never been able to keep a job for more than a couple months because of the voices. Everything about these voices is bad. I feel like they are out to kill me and sometimes it seems as if they are working with my doctor and autism support services staff to hurt me."