My Name is Will

I’ve been putting this off because I have been troubled with the idea of having to start somewhere, and, knowing where to start, the idea of how. Throughout this blog I aim to talk about many things but none so difficult as perhaps myself and where, circumstantially, it might be easy to talk of my experiences and what I have learned from them, generally relating the concept of “me” and who I am is a completely different story. Maybe this is because I am a person who for one reason or another rarely begins sentences with the overrated “I;” nevertheless, as I look at the time and effort my mother and my sister have invested into this medium, it is a story that must be told.

Without further ado, my name is Will and I have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, having since developed a comorbid anxiety disorder trying to reconcile with life outside of a hospital, and I am the inspiration for SeizingPsych and the interest of my mother and sister in the field of mental health. Having originally dealt with symptoms towards the end of my senior year of high school, they redoubled my freshman year of undergraduate school at Johns Hopkins, effectively leading to my stay in several hospitals for my own sake and a subsequent involvement in research. These symptoms were representative of everything from hallucinations to a desocialization and flat affect and affected every aspect of my life from my performance in the classroom to my adls. To this day I manage a slow recovery with recurrent symptoms but, nonetheless, as a college student and an active participant in my day program, with experience in nearly every facet of progressive rehabilitation, I feel my own is quite a remarkable one.

In this blog I aim to portray an insider’s perspective on the illness, acting as a window into the closed world of mental illness so that those seeking enrichment may understand more about it and those seeking help may understand what it’s like, with my own understanding providing here a perspective on what is both elusive and intimidating. Most importantly, at least for me, I aim to add my own dimension to the SeizingPsych universe and finally give back, in the capacity of this dimension, to a mother and sister without which my own world would look vastly different.