Dylan Abraham, 40, of Madison, Wisconsin, was diagnosed at age 18 as having schizophrenia. “My symptoms began when I was 16,” Mr. Abraham recalls. “They started with a sense of anxiety and unease. By 18, I was having hallucinations: I saw a gold rim of light around people. I heard voices. God and Satan were talking to me, telling me that I was godlike. I thought the CIA, the FBI, and the Communists were after me. I had totally lost it. I was arrested for disorderly conduct. My mother came to get me at the jail. She hospitalized me. That was in 1974.”
The voices he heard did not exist in reality, of course. But to Mr. Abraham, those voices were quite real.
“I was totally psychotic,” he says. “It was very frightening – the most frightening thing I had ever experienced.”
With all that going on inside his skull, Mr. Abraham could not work, study, make friends, or simply sit still. The disease crashed over him in waves.
“When I went to get Dylan from the police that time back in 1974,” recalled his mother, Nancy Abraham, “had I not known that it was Dylan, I would not have recognized him. He was so ill. I had lost the son I knew.”
Those terrible times are now part of the past for Mr. Abraham, and they probably will stay there, so long as he takes his medication. In 1990, he was given Clozaril, then a new drug.
“In the last 5 years,” he says, “Clozaril has wiped out the schizophrenia in me. I study tai chi, play volleyball, go to the gym. I’m dating.”
*97/266/5*
GENERAL HEALTH
Dylan Abraham, 40, of Madison, Wisconsin, was diagnosed at age 18 as having schizophrenia. “My symptoms began when I was 16,” Mr. Abraham recalls. “They started with a sense of anxiety and unease. By 18, I was having hallucinations: I saw a gold rim of light around people. I heard voices. God and Satan were talking to me, telling me that I was godlike. I thought the CIA, the FBI, and the Communists were after me. I had totally lost it. I was arrested for disorderly conduct. My mother came to get me at the jail. She hospitalized me. That was in 1974.”
The voices he heard did not exist in reality, of course. But to Mr. Abraham, those voices were quite real.
“I was totally psychotic,” he says. “It was very frightening – the most frightening thing I had ever experienced.”
With all that going on inside his skull, Mr. Abraham could not work, study, make friends, or simply sit still. The disease crashed over him in waves.
“When I went to get Dylan from the police that time back in 1974,” recalled his mother, Nancy Abraham, “had I not known that it was Dylan, I would not have recognized him. He was so ill. I had lost the son I knew.”
Those terrible times are now part of the past for Mr. Abraham, and they probably will stay there, so long as he takes his medication. In 1990, he was given Clozaril, then a new drug.
“In the last 5 years,” he says, “Clozaril has wiped out the schizophrenia in me. I study tai chi, play volleyball, go to the gym. I’m dating.”
*97/266/5*
GENERAL HEALTH
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