Woman with schizophrenia reveals her most terrifying hallucinations

[ReedeFox]

For those who don't know what schizophrenia is; it's basically a mental disorder that can cause sufferers to have hallucinations, hear voices in their head, and have difficulty understanding reality. 



Cecilia McGough, who has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, decided to discuss what every day life is like for her and it truly the stuff of nightmares. The 23-year-old has several hallucinations that appear in front of her, including a shadowy figure called Mr Blob Man, and gigantic spiders.



Cecilia's hallucinations are so vivid that she can actually feel physical pain. She says:
 

It was more around junior and senior year of high school where I started actually hallucinating the clown from Stephen King's It and that was terrifying. I also hallucinated large spiders. The clown hallucination is 24/7. But whenever I start seeing the girl, like out of The Ring, that's a hallucination that I'm a little bit more afraid of: the girl stabbing me. It's called a tactile hallucination, so my brain is registering it as an actual feeling, so it hurts, it's very painful.

  
Check out Cecilia's interview with Barcroft TV:



Tactile hallucinations in schizophrenia patients is actually pretty rare, with only about 20 percent of schizophrenics experiencing it. Cecilia says that although she was scared of her schizophrenia while she was growing up, she has now come to terms with it and tried to lead a normal life. Cecilia says she wanted to be open to people about her condition because she wants to break down the stereotype that people with schizophrenia can't be active members of society. Wow. Poor girl. Seeing scary shit like that 24/7 sounds fucking awul!

[GrandDuke]

I chatted to a 19 year old homeless girl sat on the pavement outside a railway station. She was reading a book which is a pretty unusual thing to see amongst homeless people on the street. We talked for nearly two hours and she told me about her life. It was pretty horrific, so I won't go into detail now.

She admitted that she suffered from schizophrenia and how bad it made her life. She could not get prescription drugs to treat it as she could not see a doctor to get them without registering first with an address. She hears voices telling her to kill herself and others but worst of all was the fact that she had actually been raped by an Asian guy a few months earlier, but was too scared to go to the police in case they did not believe her with her mental health. Ever since, she now has a hallucination where every person in the street is a rapist who will attack her. Fortunately, this is only during an attack but it must be terrifying for her. Unbelievably an Asian guy came over to her and said something aggressive to her whilst we were talking, that I could not catch. It turned out that he was actually the rapist himself returning to see her. She only told me this afterwards,, so I never looked at him properly to see what he looked like.

I took her name and details and contacted the Salvation Army who said that they would try and find her and get some help for her if successful. However, all the odds are stacked against her, despite being a bright girl who was proud of being top of the class when aged 12, before she was thrown out of her house onto the streets by her stepfather when she 13.

Mental illness is a terrible thing to suffer, but as it is invisible usually, sufferers rarely get any sympathy or even help until sometimes it is too late.

I am depressed now just thinking about that. It is so, so sad.