Adriana* is 55 years old, and has been suffering from schizoaffective disorder since the age of 40. In her case, life did not close after she got sick, but opened up new opportunities. Even if it wasn’t easy for him, with the disease he made more friends and got to know another side that he had been missing: stable and healing love. She and her husband, also with a psychiatric diagnosis, are both balanced.

It all started with stress at work. Adriana took her own life at the age of 19, when she got a job as a metrologist. From then on, she was stressed by everything that meant working in communist times – all kinds of violations and bosses who cut and hung – and the stress continued, more or less aggravated, even after the change of regime. In the early 2000s, when the company he worked for was about to be privatized and he felt the threat of losing his job, the stress reached its highest level. Even when she changed her job and became a seller, it was still not easy for her.

“I was very stressed when the symptoms started and there was also underlying fatigue. Personally, I wasn’t happy either because I didn’t have a family, I felt like I was getting old, but I wasn’t doing anything personally or professionally. Everything around me was changing, and I was very disoriented,” says Adriana.

Onset of the disease at the age of 40

In 2006, when Adriana was not yet 40 years old, one night she developed symptoms other than those that would suggest possible depression. She calls it a panic attack, but it was actually more of a delusion. “One night I was under a lot of stress, nothing was going well, I was having a panic attack. I lived with my mother and started to worry,” Adriana recalls.

When the disease first started, Adriana felt disorganized thinking, but in all this chaos, she realized that she needed to see a doctor.

Her mother called an ambulance, but since it was winter and the car was late, the two women took a taxi to the next part of Obregia Hospital. On the way, says Adriana, everything in her head was in complete chaos: “I wanted to go to the hospital, talk to the doctor, because for some reason I realized that I had health problems, I wanted to fly to the airport. , I’m going, I don’t know where. So I got lost, cabbage was in my thoughts.”

“Compared to other cases, I got sick at the age of 40, that is, late. After the signs of the disease appeared, I realized that I have a problem, that it must be solved, that the disease must be fought. And that’s what I did. And at 40, I was diagnosed.”

How she found out that she has schizoaffective disorder

Arriving at Obregia Hospital, she was hospitalized for 20 days. All this time, the psychiatrist, under whose care she came, tried to balance her, especially because Adriana had not slept for several days: “I didn’t understand that I wasn’t sleeping. Before this panic attack, I hadn’t slept and didn’t realize I wasn’t actually resting. I don’t think I slept at all all week. I put my head on the pillow, but I just couldn’t sleep. Then came this panic attack,” she explains.

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