How coming up with fallacies stopped my schizophrenia

 Around the time I was 13 or 14 years old, I was exposed to the idea that the devil sits on your left shoulder, while an angel sits on your right. This stuck with me in a bad way, and would only get worse from there.

Throughout my teenage years, I held many superstitious beliefs characterized by mental health professionals as a kind of schizophrenia paired with obsessive compulsive disorder. I believed that there were demons out to get me, and that if I didn't comply with their demands to commit to bizarre ritual-like behaviors, something bad would happen. I would step over lines on the ground with only my right foot, turn faucets on and off over and over according to specific rules, all the while looking for confirmation that I was doing the right thing by looking for "omens" and feeling like I made a mistake when something bad happened.

It all got to the point where I couldn't function without strong medication like Prozac. I became disabled, and it was hard to do anything productive or enjoy my life.

Today, I still am disabled, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, but my schizophrenic tendencies are basically gone; how did I manage this? First off I became atheist, basically out of necessity. Without a god or demons to believe in, all reason to commit to my rituals had gone. But to really drive home that what I was doing was illogical, I come up with a short list of fallacies.

FALLACY NO. 1: "Anything can happen, especially if you give it an opportunity."

 Because I would constantly search for omens, like birds flying past a window or the like, I came to realize that anything can happen at any time. This doesn't mean that I caused it to happen, or that angels or demons are trying to speak to me. It also means that bad things just happen; it doesn't mean I caused them.

FALLACY NO. 2: "Connecting dots where none exist."

This is similar to an existing fallacy that I don't remember the name of, but the idea is that correlation does not equal causation, (actually that's probably the name of it...)

FALLACY NO. 3: "Focusing on affirming patterns." 

 The idea is that, if out of ten chances I give for an omen to appear, it appears three times, I will hyper-focus on the three affirming moments, while ignoring the non-affirming 7. Similar to fallacy 1, the idea is that the more chances I give for an omen to present itself, the more likely it is to occur, and I will ignore probability.

 

 Over the course of a year or so, examining these fallacies allowed me to break away from my rituals, realize that things just happen, and to stop looking for affirmation for my superstitious actions.

... Yeah, that's about it.

Next time I'll be focusing on the time my life started to turn around when I changed my world-view.

Peace!