Kurt Snyder's personal experience with schizophrenia.

My name is Kurt Snyder, and I have paranoid schizophrenia. I live in Arnold, Maryland, just outside Annapolis, in the United States. I developed schizophrenia gradually over a period of nine years, with the most severe symptoms appearing when I was twenty-eight years old. For most of those years, my family, friends, and colleagues were unaware that I was experiencing any mental problems. My illness, as is true with all mental illnesses, started in the privacy of my own mind. My thoughts slowly wandered away from the normal range—I began to think less and less about daily life and more about a fantasy created in my mind. I cannot think of anything physical or psychological that could have triggered a change in my mental state. I had wonderful, supportive parents, relatives, and friends, and I had a wonderful childhood. Somewhere between the ages of nineteen and twentyone, I was exposed to the mathematical idea of fractals. I began to think obsessively about fractals and infinity. I thought I was going to discover some incredible and fabulous mathematical principle that would transform the way we view the universe. This delusion occupied my thoughts all day long, every day. I couldn’t concentrate on my regular university studies, and my academic career eventually ended in failure. Still, I thought I was going to become famous. I was a genius just waiting to be discovered by the world. Soon everyone would know who I was because I was going to solve the riddle of the universe. I was having grandiose ideation. I thought about fractals and infinity for many years. I always told myself I was on the verge of discovery, but I simply had to think a little bit harder about it. I just wasn’t thinking hard enough. The reality is that the problems I was trying to solve were far beyondmymental abilities, but I didn’t recognize this fact. Even though I had no evidence to substantiate my self-image, I knew in my heart that I was just like Einstein, and that someday I would get a flash of inspiration. I didn’t recognize the truth—that I am not a genius. I kept most of my mathematical ideas to myself and spoke to very few people about them. I was paranoid that someone else would solve the riddle first if I provided the right clues. At about the age of twenty-two, I had my first significant paranoid episodes. The first episode happened when I was on vacation with my girlfriend, my brother, and his wife in the mountains. We had rented a cabin together. For some reason, I started to think about images from horror movies where an insane man breaks into the house and kills everyone. I actually started to believe this was going to happen to us. I created a fantasy in mymind that we were very vulnerable and helpless, and that someone was going to kill us. It did not occur to me that this scenario was unlikely. The more I thought about it, the more I believed it was going to happen. I remember that I tried to reinforce the doors of the cabin with chairs. Everyone else seemed bewildered by my behavior. Eventually, however, I calmed down and went to bed. Later that year, I had two more minor paranoid episodes. The first one happened when I hurt my leg and had to go to the university clinic. I was again feeling very vulnerable. I began to imagine that the nurse might try to hurt me in some way. I thought she might try to infect me with the AIDS virus by injecting me with a tainted needle. Of course, this idea was completely irrational, but I thought somehow that it could be true. A few weeks later, I became paranoid again—I thought the police were following me. But this idea only lasted a few hours. It would be several more years before any other symptoms of paranoia returned. At about the age of twenty-four, I started to become preoccupied with the idea that people were watching me. I wondered about this several times a day. This idea began occurring to me more and more frequently, and the feeling that I was being watched became more intense. By the age of twenty-six, the thought that I might be under observation was occurring to me more than a hundred times a day. I became severely self-conscious in public places. I also became very sensitive to security cameras. They made me think I was being watched all the time. Oftentimes I thought the security cameras were watching me exclusively. At the age of twenty-seven, I took a job at a highsecurity facility where there were cameras in every room, every hallway, and all over the exterior of the building. I did not anticipate how this environment would affect me. During my first day on the job there, Schizophrenia Bulletin vol. 32 no. 2 pp. 209–211, 2006 doi:10.1093/schbul/sbj032 Advance Access publication on December 9, 2005