One of the problems that people have with this illness is recognizing people they know and trust. In Lorie’s case, I would catch her staring at me, or staring at someone she knew, and I would ask her, “Why are you staring?”, but she never had an answer, she would just awkwardly smile and avoid giving me an answer. Sometime she would get defensive and say in a loud tone that she was not staring and would close up a little just to avoid my questions.
 
Several times with random strangers she would stare, she would then mentally add them to the Cast of voices in her head and they would become one of the many characters that she sees and hears in her head.  Lorie has the type of schizophrenia that she believes she hears people talking in her head and she has visions where she believes she is seeing people.  These characters are very real to her and they become part of her thoughts and memories. The doctors once described her mind as having multiple movies constantly playing in her head at all times, with movies overlapping each other one after another.  
 
Several times over the years,

As a parent you work really hard at making sure that your children are safe and feel safe in their home and with the people around them.  We all have the need to feel that we are safe.  However, for a person with Schizophrenia their world doesn’t feel safe.  It is full of doubts, confusion and fear.

Who is real and who are the ones that are imposters?

I now know the signs to look for when Lorie obviously doesn’t have any clue as to who I am or who the people around her are that she should know.  I can also tell when she is very confused and can see the fear in her face when she sees someone in the store, or I meet someone new and she feels they are someone that she knows has hurt her either in the present or the past.  Lorie struggles with the feeling that her own family members are imposters and other people are out to do her harm.  This is one reason why it is hard to make sure that she continues to take her medicine when she is not sure of who I am and if she can trust me with taking something that I am very committed to her having to take. 

As a mother of a child that has Schizophrenia I have spent thousands of hours going over her life in my mind, from birth to present, trying to get an understanding of her past and researching information on Schizophrenia.  There is always the searching for a reason why?  Why her?, why me? and why did this happen?

As a result, I now have a better understanding of her early life which at the time, and as the years progressed was fraught with emotional anguish, pain and distress.  My daughter diagnosis is disorganized Schizophrenia plus areas of paranoid and catatonic Schizophrenia.  She is also one of those rare cases in that she has been affected with this illness from a very young age.  Looking back, the first symptoms appeared from birth – she would cry for hours every day and the doctors could not figure out what was wrong.  She cried, would sleep very little, eat very little and was very afraid of everyone.  We spent a lot of hours at the doctor’s office and the hospital all resulting in “no clue” what was going on. No suggestions, no assistance and no clue as to why her behavior was not “normal”.

We struggled on until she started school where we worked with the public school system in addressing a world of issues:

Learning Disabilities

Learning disabilities are defined as the brains ability to receive, process and communicate information that it receives.  It then process, analyzes and stores the information.  This has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence, rather how a person is able to process information.  As a result, all areas of reading, writing, spelling and solving math problems are involved in this process.  When a person suffers from learning disabilities they may have problem in some of these areas or all of them.