A personal viewpoint from India

I am not schizophrenic; I suffer from Borderline Personality disorder. Unfortunately this disease is not recognised very much in India. I was given some mood stabiliser used in Bipolar Disorder, fortunately the mood stabiliser of bipolar are effective on Borderline as well.

This disorder doesn't feel like a disorder initially, you feel that due to bad childhood experiences you are feeling sad & if you talk about it or punish the person you will become better, but talking is never easy, you have to break the ego which is not easy.

Though I break my ego but I was too late and I felt like I had nervous breakdown with no control on myself, I was afraid of thinking and used to try to control my brain by making it absolutely null in term of thinking but it actually used to make me more frustrated.

I used to feel like my heart is shrinking and is going to implode, I used to get angry as well depressed too quickly with no internal strength to regulate my depression as well as anger.

In this time, when I was totally confused. Medicine used to take a lot of time to work and at that time teachings of Bhagwat Geeta helped me. I realised the meaning of soul for the very first time as I read Bhagwat Geeta as I was totally not in control of internal function of my brain in term of emotion regulation or even my body in term of shrinking of my heart.

This phenomenon continued for almost a year and it almost took two years to get control over my body, though bouts of depression never ended and even after my medication I was always fearful of being hurt by words; I used to try not to involve any discussion as it can hurt me.

Irony is psychiatrists in India generally don't give you proper time, they don't ask proper set of questions. They don't use DSM IV, they only listen to the patient and unfortunately patient is not used to the terminologies of psychiatric world and is not able to express all his symptoms. As they have lot of patients, once you are given a name of the disorder, they never try to re-diagnose if you go to a new psychiatrist; they diagnose only on the basis of previous medicine you were taking rather than the symptoms.