Hallucinations: Clinical Picture and Impact

CECILIA MCGOUGH: My name this Cecilia McGough. I have schizophrenia, and I am not a monster.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

With my hallucinations, it first started out as shadowy figures. I would see this shadowy figure that my parents would call Mr. Blob Man. As I kept growing older, I started hearing sort of a static, a staticky whispers in my ears.

So it was more around junior and senior year high school where I started actually visually hallucinating the clown from Stephen King's It. And that was terrifying. I also hallucinated large spiders.

Like the clown hallucination is 24/7. But whenever I start seeing the girl, 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 basically as an actual feeling. So it's hurts. It's very painful.

I was a lot more scared of my hallucinations when I was younger. I actually thought that I was possessed. I realized that I had schizophrenia long before I was diagnosed. It actually took me a suicide attempt to finally get the help that I needed.

Once I learned about schizophrenia and realizing that it's a chemical imbalance inside my head, I became less scared of my hallucinations. I realized that, yes, I hallucinate and the voices in my head are very troubling. But really it was the negative voices of real people outside those voices are what I feared the most.

So I had to set the story straight. So I became open about my schizophrenia on a Facebook post that later became my blog, I Am Not A Monster, Schizophrenia. A big misconception about schizophrenia is people think it's a niche topic, but that's wrong.

There's 1.1% of the world's population over the age of 18 has some sort of form of schizophrenia. That's 51 million people worldwide. And that's why I really made it my mission now to try to change the face of schizophrenia, because the current representation is not correct.

Having schizophrenia for a long time a secret of mine and that included a secret that I had to tell potential boyfriends. My current boyfriend is wonderful. He knew about my schizophrenia even before we started dating.

SIDDHARTH SHARMA: So Cecilia told me about her condition I would say the first time we met honestly. Yeah. She was pretty straightforward about it.

CECILIA MCGOUGH: But he doesn't look at me any differently than he treats me. He treats me like—just like a regular girlfriend. I'm founding the organization, Students with Schizophrenia, who are going to help students with outreach, services, and support. I'm pretty convinced that I wouldn't have had my suicide attempt if there was an organization like this.

SIDDHARTH SHARMA: I'm honestly really proud of her for being able to do this. Like I see her working every day in terms of trying to get Students with Schizophrenia to launch.

CECILIA MCGOUGH: You really cannot tell if someone has schizophrenia or not. And that's the big misconception is that we are some sort of a monster. We are not monsters. We want to make sure that anyone, anyone worldwide is not afraid to say the words, I have schizophrenia.