^agreed
Mary, I'm so pleased to hear that you are experiencing less symptoms, it sounds like the aripiprazole is really working to treat your schizoaffective disorder. Consider this scenario. If you were diagnosed with diabetes (I think this is the second time I've used diabetes as an example today!) and started taking insulin and the symptoms of diabetes went away, which of these two options describe what your thought process would be?
a) hurrah! The insulin has fixed it, it must have been diabetes, I better remember to take this ALL the days so I don't get those symptoms back again.
b) oh, I'm better, probs wasn't diabetes after all.
I think the same applies here- the treatment for schizoaffective disorder made your symptoms better, so you probably have schizoaffective or a related disorder. I don't know how the technicalities of the diagnosis work, but I would guess that you probably still would be classed as having schizoaffective, but it is now managed by medication and is less of a problem.
With regards to thinking that someone was trying to send a message, it seems like your low mood triggered something of a reappearance of a positive symptom, but this doesn't mean everything will come back or that it will be as intense as it was previously. Did you learn any strategies whilst in hospital about trying to manage these thoughts? I think it would be a good idea to let a member of your team know about this experience, as hopefully catching this early will mean it doesn't escalate- they might be able to slightly alter the medications they are giving you, or give you techniques to challenge thoughts of this kind so that you can manage them without getting caught up in believing them and thus keeping you in a state of being "done with all that shit", as you put it :P
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