My Story: My Journey Through Paranoid Schizophrenia and Triumph.

– by Ify Otuya

Hi, my name is Ify Otuya. I am going to tell you about a mental health recovery journey. It is a story of my 7-years struggle with a mental health disorder called paranoid schizophrenia and how I eventually triumphed over the illness.

My story began in 2009. I had just relocated from the United Kingdom where I had been living, working and studying, to Nigeria to pursue my budding music career as an Afro Pop Artist. I met a lot of people in Nigeria. I was granted interviews. I shared my art. I promoted my music and networked with anyone who was someone at the time. I was everywhere. I performed at the Future Awards, Fela’s Shrine, Star Trek concert, Jos Peace Rally, many Lagos events, everywhere. I was a success story, people were feeling me. (For more about my music, visit my music website on www.reverbnation.com/ifyotuya).

Soon I began to struggle with my ambitions in Nigeria. Money wasn’t coming into my creative enterprise. I noticed that people wanted to book me for events but were not prepared to pay me for my services. There was this one time I was invited to perform with my band at a high-end venue in Victoria Island, Lagos. After giving the best performance of my life that night alongside my backing band, the venue owner himself decided to slash my previously negotiated fees because they didn’t get up to the number of attendees they were expecting. How was this my problem when it wasn’t my responsibility to guarantee attendees? I was livid but couldn’t do anything about it. This was around 3AM and I didn’t know how to tell my band members that they were going to be paid peanuts that hopefully would be enough for their transportation back home but nothing more. That was not our prior agreement and breaking the news to them was going to be very stressful.

Everybody wanted me to perform somewhere not to get paid but to ‘promote myself’. Meanwhile the makeup and clothes and transportation I was spending money on to make it to these shows were not getting any cheaper or coming by free of charge.

By 2010 I gradually became a shadow of myself. My career came to a standstill. I didn’t have the resources to push my music the way I used to. I felt heavily discouraged and became quite sad about how things had turned out. People who paid me in the past weren’t looking to pay me or anyone else I knew anymore. It took its toll on my health as I contracted malaria and sank deep into depression. For days, I locked myself up in my room and wouldn’t come out to interact with anybody in my family. It is the kind of outcome that can impact on anyone with a failing business anywhere in the world.

I didn’t think I was alone in the struggle but I secluded myself from family members and all others and stayed within my own company for the most part. As I didn’t see any possibility or future for myself in the Nigerian entertainment scene, I eventually got my paperwork done and relocated back to the United Kingdom to study and live. Yes, things were that bad. There went my dreams of becoming a music star, which I had believed in so much and labored so hard for. I got a normal job to support myself and carried on with my life in spite of the disappointment and sadness that laid heavily underneath. I was a perfectionist so failure did in fact hit me hard.

I carried on for the next six years, sometimes creating music and other times doing other things to get by.

In 2016, my sadness and discontent had developed into emotions beyond my control and for the first time in my life, I got hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia. It was a forcible hospitalization aided by police authorities. Yes, things were pretty bad. The diagnosis was a rude awakening to me and it was the beginning of a battle that would take years to resolve. I refused to accept the diagnosis as I just could not bring myself to accept that I had a mental illness. Me? I was a vivacious, spirited, positive and extroverted young woman. How could they tell me that I had paranoid schizophrenia? Were the doctors real? I hadn’t even heard of such an illness before.

In my thoughts, accepting that I had paranoid schizophrenia was tantamount to me accepting that I would never amount to anything in life, I could never go back to being the creative person I used to be, I could never do dope things again and would always need to rely on others to take care of me and chart a path out for me in life. I would never be able to produce a piece of music or beat again or hold a job. I would always be depressed. And the medications? There was no way I would continue to take those. I felt my whole world stop. I felt my life had come to an end and was even suicidal for a while. I just couldn’t picture myself living this life. I didn’t see the point in living. I couldn’t accept that I had paranoid schizophrenia. I just couldn’t accept it.

It was so bad, the way I was feeling. I remember when my cousin came to visit me at the hospital and he brought food in glassware from home, the nurses turned the food out into plastic bowls for me and told him to take the glassware back home as they didn’t trust me to not intentionally break the glassware and use it to harm myself. I had no control over events affecting me or even my life. It was such a very low point in my life that I would never wish upon anyone, unless they were my enemies, but maybe not even my enemies.

My schizophrenia worsened as its symptoms came alive. Asides being suicidal, in my sick state I had imaginary friends. The more I withdrew from people the more I entertained my imaginary friends, and the closer I grew to my imaginary friends, the more I isolated myself from others. It was a toxic cycle. Having imaginary friends could be cute when you’re a kid but as I soon found out, as an adult it sometimes came with detrimental associations.

I had delusions in which former American Presidents were my friends and I used to chat with them in person through a secret chat line at home or in the privacy of my room. Through this invisible line that none of my family, friends or colleagues knew about, my presidential friends alerted me to the tip that there was a secret agency plot against me in the real world and that certain authorities in high places were seeking to harm me. In one conversation I had with them, they said to me that they were going to protect me and wouldn’t let any intended harm come my way. This impacted negatively on my interactions with others around me as I soon enough considered friends, family members and neighbours co-conspirators in the secret service plot that was seeking to bring harm to me.

On one occasion where I incorrectly assumed that there was a secret service plot against me, I decided by myself to take extra measures just to make sure I was truly protected. I hid a kitchen knife in my bag and pulled it out on the security guard of a hotel building near my house, accusing him of stalking and monitoring me. It didn’t end well. In my petite frame, I came across so threatening to the staff there that the owner of the building called the police on me, who against my will took me straight to the nearest psychiatric hospital for admission and treatment.

This experience was linked to another in which I could perceive odours that no one else around me could perceive and experience physical pain in my body that no one else around me was experiencing at the time. My delusions also caused me debilitating fear a lot of the time. Sometimes I would wake up at night from a nightmare, screaming, shivering, sweating profusely and in fear and worry I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. I had other symptoms and experiences as well which I will not include or discuss here in this write-up so as to not make it any longer than intended.

I carried on like this for a while but there is always light at the end of darkness. Thank God.

Although at the time, I never accepted the diagnosis or treatment from the doctors, I never let the doctors or nurses know this. I didn’t want them to prescribe more medicine for me or keep me at the hospital any longer than they already planned to. So I just went along with them and told them what they wanted to hear from me. This is in fact the first time I am revealing this secret. Many people in psychiatric wards today act this way and in many instances, the secrecy is partly to blame for a patient’s experienced relapse(s). My mental illness wasn’t one in which you could tell I had by merely looking at my face. Plus I really hated being at the hospital. Consequently, I found myself relying more on myself for my healing and progress than I did the doctors.

Eventually the doctors released me from the hospital to go and live my life. I was overjoyed. There would be other discharges in the future and each one of them brought me great joy. The more I met and connected with other people on the outside who had one mental challenge or the other, the more I saw and felt that I could overcome this disease that had been attacking my normalcy in ways I wasn’t prepared for. I discovered that if we can get in touch with the way we are feeling, what we are thinking and what we are experiencing on the inside at any given moment in time, we can arrest negative thoughts and feelings that abound therein with the simple message that it can and does get better, because it usually does. This message gave me a lot of hope and I soon learned that it was the practice of me discovering my power of self-will and walking in my power.

But I still had a lot to learn about schizophrenia and no matter how careful I was, I experienced relapses in varying degrees on this long journey to wholeness. I have been hospitalized and discharged since 2016 a total of nine times because of paranoid schizophrenia. Resultantly, each time, I have dug deep into the recesses of my soul to scrutinize and discover more and more about myself and unearth strength I didn’t know I had in my often grim fight. Spending weeks of quiet hours alone by yourself in a hospital can have this sort of effect on a person. I didn’t ask for this illness but somehow life thought it was worth gifting it to me. I remember the doctor’s warning against relapse. They said to me that every time I had a relapse, my brain got affected in its efficiency and performance. To me this translated to brain damage and gave me the greatest scare for the longest of time.

I struggled with taking my prescribed medication since regardless of the years that had passed by I still hadn’t fully come to the point of accepting the hospital’s diagnosis. There was always that element of me that refused to accept that I had this illness. Each time I was hospitalized I took my prescribed medication at the hospital but the moment I was discharged I stopped taking the medication. Each time. I pretended to my family that I took my medication but I didn’t. In the moments when I decided to stop taking my medications after being discharged from the hospital, the driving thought I had was that I did not need the medications (since I didn’t have paranoid schizophrenia) so therefore shouldn’t take them. There were certain rare occasions in which I complied with taking the medication outside of the hospital but these moments didn’t last long. I didn’t like popping pills. I was soon back to old habits. In the near future, I was going to reach a turning point that would usurp this trajectory in my life.

Early in 2023 – seven years after my initial diagnosis – I reached a turning point in my battle with paranoid schizophrenia. I realized that my life’s story in recent years was becoming inseparable from that of paranoid schizophrenia and I didn’t want this narrative for myself. I wanted more. I didn’t want a story of my life in which I was under the illness, affected by it and struggling to control or manage it for the longest of time, aided by medical professionals and caregivers. No! It was not enough. I wanted to be on top of the illness, winning and flourishing. I wanted better. I was faced with a conundrum: paranoid schizophrenia could either be a source of fear and disability to me or it could become known to me as a source of power. I wanted the latter. In this moment, I badly wanted to see a change.

With boldness, I turned around to myself and had a fierce heart to heart. I knew it was time to seize the moment and make the change I wanted to see. For the first time I accepted that I indeed had paranoid schizophrenia but refused to accept that it was the end of my story. I was the author of my destiny, not this illness goddammit! I was not the person this disease was making me out to be. There was more to me. I had this illness but what the hell, I was still going to do dope things, new things and succeed at doing those things. The sickness did not define me, I did.

As a matter of fact, I was going to speak healing to illness! How? I was going to tell empowering stories about mental health recoveries and write articles with information about mental health that people need. I would sow these seeds of healing, seeds of hope, seeds of light and life all around me in my immediate environs and witness them blossom into something truly beneficial, beautiful and magical. In essence, I would be reclaiming my immediate environs and helping others reclaim their lives too from mental disorder. I would arm myself and others in my community with necessary information to fight back and overcome mental illness in our society. This was what I said to myself and after making this proclamation, you know what? I got up and did it.

With the same brain they said was damaged, I did it. In spite of all the negativity and condemnation the sickness had fed me for years, I did it. I am now creating engaging content about mental health, a topic that I never wrote about before prior to reaching my turning point, and I am gathering audiences along the way. If others are inspired by half as much as my turning point transformed me and continues to inspire me daily, I think it would amount to something truly impactful and big.

My turning point marked a shift in my perspective from viewing my paranoid schizophrenia as a limitation to seeing it as an opportunity for growth, empowerment and advocacy. Prior to reaching this turning point, I exhibited social withdrawal (withdrawal from people), delusions, hallucinations and negatively talking to myself a lot. Since owning my mental disorder, I have gone the longest without exhibiting those same symptoms and more!

This is my mental health story.

Today, through the power of storytelling I influence people’s perceptions about mental health and I change lives in my own special way. I walk in my power and it feels good! I not only share my own real-life personal story with mental illness, but I tell fictional empowering stories about mental health recoveries to help different people with mental health challenges to discover their voice and triumph. The stories – inspired by true events – are relatable with characters who endure under hard times and then triumph.

What’s more, specifically through the power of storytelling, I help people to become knowledgeable and aware of mental health issues, to grow empathy and compassion where mental health is concerned, and to destigmatize mental health. I speak to audiences online via my website www.ifyotuya.com and my broader digital community.

To schedule me for a speaking event or interview, kindly email me at: missotuya@gmail.com or ify@ifyotuya.com.

Please share this story with your family, your friends and other people if you find it meaningful.

Author’s Bio:

Hi, I’m Ify Otuya, a mental health advocate and speaker, and also the founder of June E-waste Academy. With expertise in entrepreneurship, my background lies in the arts, e-waste management and marketing. I create articles and empowering mental health recovery stories to inform, grow empathy and compassion for individuals with mental health challenges and to destigmatize mental health. I am currently building my community to bring hope and to inspire others to live their best lives today. To schedule me for a speaking event or interview, kindly email me at: missotuya@gmail.com. Visit www.ifyotuya.com to join me on my journey towards a mentally fit future for all.