The Story of "Anna"

"Anna" was a UC student when she was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Years later, she shared her story.

When I was a freshman at UC, I heard a guest speaker talk about her experience with schizophrenia. I do not remember her name but we can just call her ‘Anna’ to keep things simple.

Anna had a really normal childhood. She was homeschooled and taught how to play the cello. Anna regularly attended church with her parents and was involved with her church’s activities. After Anna graduated from high school, she decided to go to The University of Cincinnati. This was a huge deal for her but her parents supported her decision.

College was very stressful for Anna. She had a hard time adjusting and found herself having problems sleeping. She did not know anyone and often times she felt alone. During her first semester, Anna began to experience weird occurrences. She would hear voices and became very paranoid. She felt scared a lot and did not understand what was happening to her. Anna got the opportunity to take a mission trip to Africa. After returning, she became obsessed with “saving” Africa causing her schoolwork to suffer. She started failing classes and her parents became concerned for her.

Anna dropped out of college after just one semester. However, she did not go back home, instead she stayed in the Cincinnati area and became homeless. Her weird occurrences got much worse and more frequent. She began to hallucinate, saying that people’s faces would distort and reshape into a frightening and unrecognizable new face. She would hear voices and they would tell her “bad things”. She was not able to sleep due to fear, and being homeless in the winter. Eventually, she was committed to a mental health hospital for evaluation and it was then that she was first diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was 19 years old. Her parents came out and the treatment process began for Anna. She started seeing a specialist and was put on medication. Some of the medication made Anna feel “fuzzy” and “numb”. It took several tries to get her on the right list of medications to make the voices, hallucinations and her paranoia to go away without giving Anna unusual side effects. Once Anna was properly medicated and had started learning how to live with her condition, she decided to write a book. She wanted to tell her story in the hopes that another college student dealing with the same or similar situations would hear it and it would help them.

Anna had schizophrenia her whole life, but it was not until college that she began to experience the symptoms. This is because her previous lifestyle did not present the correct environment for her symptoms to show. The stress of the college lifestyle not only created the prefect environment for a mental illness to show but also for the symptoms to be exacerbated at a rapid rate. This is just one story of one person at one university. There are thousands of other students like Anna and they should know they’re not alone.