My advice is to look at the reasons you are so afraid of turning Schizophrenic. Last year I had a period of a few months where I was constantly reading about Schizophrenia and obsessing about it. I analysed myself, my thoughts and my actions and became convinced, like you, that I was becoming schizophrenic, going insane or simply in grave danger of dissapearing/vanishing into non-existance. I started to seriously question whether or not I had died and was now living in a self-constructed dream world.
But I've always had this notion of needing to heal and be healed, which has taken many different forms throughout my life. During that period I was doing a lot of reading about Shamanism, Shamanic Healing and Shamanic Journeying (which by the way is something that everyone can do with practice, though some people have a talent for it). However, the general idea of Shamanism is that you enter mind-states in which you have literally gone insane (by societies values) and induce psychotic breaks in your consciousness (e.g. through drugs, dance, repetitive drumming etc). Or, in other words, if you are schizophrenic then you are basically being put through some sort of trial or initiation into the Shamanic path, because you are constantly in the state of mind in which Shamanic work can be undertaken.
I did and still do find the concept incredibly facinating and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem lay in what I did with it all. I realised that while I was absolutely terified of going insane and losing my mind I also WANTED it to happen. So much so that I was taking a lot of drugs, including psychedelics (bad idea when your head is already messed up) and obsessing a lot about the related philosophies (again, nothing wrong with trying it and reading about it, but to take it the extent that we can is not healthy).
I welcomed and desired to become Schizophrenic because if I could become Schizophrenic then I would be "one of the blessed". i.e. Blessed with an illness that is simultaneously hideous yet incredibly rewarding, depending on how you look at it. I wanted so badly to become gifted so that I could do Shamanic work on myself (thus healing myself) and then go on to use that gift to heal others (saviour complex).
So look closely at what this tells me about myself:
1. I don't trust people - I wanted to go insane so that I could heal myself by myself, without needing to tell anyone or let any of it out or rely on others to help.
2. I want to feel special, needed and superior in some way - to the extent that I want/wanted to become a messiah-like figure who could go through hell and come out the other side the saviour of the world. i.e. That I could then go on to help other people cope with their mental illnesses.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with wanting to heal and to help others. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do it under your own steam. But we have to realise that we are only human and to BALANCE these desires with reality (not to ignore them completely).
And the reality is that we are wounded. We can't do this on our own. We need to be human and acknowledge our frailty (and hence beauty) in order to get through this.
Have a think about how this all applies to you, and good luck.
