Transcript

I'm 19, attending a community college in Manhattan. I've been formally diagnosed with psychosis and PTSD. Some of the traumatic events I went through were getting hit by a truck on my way to school. The other event that I witnessed was a fire and someone falling out of a window and unfortunately they did not survive.

The trauma impacted the way I thought about the world and how the world impacts me and led to my psychosis events. My symptoms were like having delusional thoughts like someone was following me and constantly weary and it made me feel really anxious and kind of upset.
To be in high school and have those symptoms was terrifying for me because I didn't know who I could talk to. I can't say for certain that the trauma caused my psychotic symptoms but I do believe it plays some whatever role.

I was a little puzzled by the relationship between the two because I didn't have this psychosis until after all the trauma in my life and according to my clinician, trauma is an indicator that one may or may not get psychosis. Mental health is perceived pretty negatively in an Asian culture. If you come out with it, most of the time they just pass it off as a phase of some sort.

Like my mom, my dad, but they didn't know the exact medical term for it. They just thought I was going through a teenage phase. They want to pretend and just shove everything under the rug and pretend it never happened.

I would say I'm doing pretty well with managing my symptoms. Medicine has been pretty effective and my mom and dad have become a little more accepting. They realized I do have to take the medications and attending group and individual therapy is a necessary thing for me to do. I'm proud of myself for graduating. Just because you failed something once doesn't mean you will fail again. You just have to keep trying until you succeed.

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