"My mother started hearing voices long before I was born. I believe I inherited it from her," says 35-year-old Mary. She has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, paranoid type. "I was about 11 or 12 when it really started to scare me that that could happen to me. I started to hear the occasional voice at 16, but it wasn't until I turned 18 that I had a full psychotic break. I started seeing demons and distorted figures of people's faces. I would see my own self decomposing when I would look in a mirror and that was quite terrifying.

"I tried to stop those hallucinations by drinking. I did my best to hide it. I tried to kill myself, but the psychiatrist who talked to me in the hospital, I wouldn't tell him that I was hearing these voices, I just said that I'd broken up with my boyfriend. Finally, when the alcohol didn't stop the voices anymore, I went to my family doctor and at that point he diagnosed me with psychotic depression.

"In my mid-20s, it was like I was in a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from. The voices were shouting at me. I was constantly paranoid. If a group of people were laughing nearby me, I assumed they were laughing at me. I started believing that people could read my mind, that they knew what I was thinking. I really started to have a hard time differentiating between what was real and what was not real. And again, I'm getting these feelings of aliens monitoring my thoughts.

"I wasn't diagnosed with schizophrenia until I was around 30."