Question:
When I was a child, I had some psychotic symptoms. I've always wondered why,
but I've never found out why. When I was around 4 and 5 years old, I had
scary visual hallucinations, mostly at night. I'd see things like a skeleton
at my bedside. Occasionally, I had auditory hallucinations and tactile
hallucinations while in bed at night. When I was 5, I had a horrible dream
like hallucinatory experience that I might post about later. Do such
hallucinations indicate childhood psychosis?
Answer:
I saw a horse skeleton in my room -- that's the first thing that jumped
out at me from your post. I saw things like that, but I don't think they
were necessarily 'childhood schizophrenia'... I developed my first
obvious (to me) symptoms at age 11, and was able to conceal them for a
few years because I knew what they looked like and was afraid of being
"locked up".In my own case, I usually draw a distinction between visual
hallucinations and schizophrenia, because I have always been able to make
things appear like they are there... and it didn't seem particularly
psychotic in nature.Could you explain more about how you distinguish between visual
hallucinations and schizophrenia? I've read about childhood schizophrenia.
Most of the cases I read about sounded much worse than me as a child. So, you
had similar experiences? Did you develop delusions at age 11? I would like to
learn more about my childhood psychosis.
