# What is schizophrenia? Symptoms, delusions, and paranoia - **Episode:** [153](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/153.md) (2024-12-12) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** schizophrenia, symptoms, mental-health - **Time:** 4:08–8:30 (start 248s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/153?t=248](https://truthliesandwork.com/153?t=248) --- [4:08] Leanne Elliott: I want to start right at the beginning because I think everyone listening, probably, or the majority, would have heard of schizophrenia. but probably don't really understand what it is or maybe afraid to ask. Can you explain what schizophrenia is and how it has affected your life? [4:23] Kody Green: Yeah. So schizophrenia is a mental illness that causes hallucinations, delusions, paranoia. It can also cause issues with memory, motivation. It's basically a separation from reality. So when I was in college, I started having Auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as delusions and paranoia. And that led to me dropping out of college. I lost my job, and I fell into addiction as a way to try to self-medicate with the symptoms I was having. This wasn't actually my first experience with mental illness or with schizophrenia. I actually was a caregiver for my mother with schizoaffective disorder when I was growing up. So I, I actually knew quite a bit about the illness. But unfortunately, the way that schizophrenia works in the brain is even with all of the knowledge I had about mental illness and schizophrenia, I still couldn't identify that that's what was going on with me when it started happening. So I spent several years struggling with addiction that eventually led to me being incarcerated. And it was— it wasn't until, you know, years later that I was able to get a proper diagnosis, medication, treatment [5:36] Al Elliott: Wow [5:36] Kody Green: And I had to start rebuilding my life, which meant I had to start learning how to be out in public again and socialize. And I had burned all these bridges through my illness and through my addiction. And so I had to try to get back to working and be able to function day to day just like anyone else [5:56] Leanne Elliott: Can you give us a kind of an idea of when you were— it was at its most acute, you weren't in treatment, and what you're experiencing on a day-to-day basis and just how disruptive that was to your life [6:08] Kody Green: Yeah, so I mean, like I said, I, I had basically lost everything. I was, uh, struggling with addiction. I was on the verge of, of going to jail. And a lot of what was happening was I was dealing with daily auditory and visual hallucinations. So I was seeing and hearing things that weren't there. I was having paranoid thoughts that the people around me were trying to get me locked up. So Um, my, my paranoia and delusions got so severe that I wouldn't eat food that my wife made me because I thought she was trying to sedate me or poison me. I thought people were watching me constantly. And then I would have very severe delusions of, uh, of different things that weren't really happening, you know, of, uh, the voices trying to convince me that something in my life was going on that really wasn't. And I didn't have the, the intelligence or, or capacity at the time to understand what was really happening. Because when, when I was struggling with these hallucinations, delusions, and paranoid thoughts, I believed 100% that that was all really happening. So that was my reality. And I don't think people quite understand that when I talk about hallucinations now that I'm medicated, I can almost differentiate between what's real and what's not [7:27] Al Elliott: Yeah [7:28] Kody Green: Back then, there was no question in my brain that what I was experiencing was real. So when I was hearing these voices and they were telling me to, uh, when they were telling me to like quit my job or, or stop showing up for school or, or run away and, and use drugs and like all of these things, uh, it wasn't something that I, I could understand was fake. I, I believed in my heart and in my brain that all of this was really happening [7:54] Al Elliott: Yeah [7:55] Kody Green: All of the delusions that I had, I thought were really going on. And so it was such a split from reality that I was essentially living a different life than I am now. So it wasn't until I got medicated that I was able to like actually get some clarity and start looking back on all of the things I went through and start really identifying like what was a delusion versus what was really going on in my life [8:19] Leanne Elliott: What are the The main misconceptions you've seen here about schizophrenia or people living with schizophrenia? What are some of the, maybe the myths that we can put right?