I suffer from schizoaffective disorder, it is like having bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at the same time and having normal, depressed, manic, schizophrenic and a mix of them at times every two weeks or so.

I had earned $150,000/year as a programmer, but because of the stress I was under at one job I developed the mental illness and was fired for being mentally ill (I had panic attacks at work, and was ordered to 'snap out of it or you are fired!' and when I couldn't snap out of it I was fired) I tried other jobs but I was just bullied and harassed for being mentally ill. When they know you have a schizophrenic illness they make all kinds of loud noises to distract you and then pretend they didn't make them to trick you into thinking you are hearing things. Like playing wav files on their speakers turned way up, yelling, singing, ringing a bell, one place they bribed an ice cream truck to drive by every 15 minutes and ring the bell and play music near my window. Of course you can't work under those conditions and you file complaints and they are ignored and eventually you get fired because you are mentally ill.

I ended up in disability being too sick to work a job. There was really three ways it could have gone. The only way I could find a job was to become a software contractor on a 1099 form with no benefits and be shuffled around every six months to finish projects nobody else can finish (spaghetti code debugging) and either have to go off medication as they are too expensive without insurance (when you apply for personal health insurance they use pre-existing conditions to deny you, but if you had a W2 Job with a group plan they'd accept you, but as a contractor you aren't allowed on a group plan) or go homeless and wander from one mental hospital or even jail to another. The alternative is to get accepted on disability and avoid that madness. Not unless the right company wants to hire you as an employee with a W2 and keep you on despite the problems with your mental illness they can accommodate you for it.

The problem is a mental illness is a disability, but when most companies or organizations plan for disabilities they think people in wheelchairs, deaf or blind people, and never someone with a mental illness like schizophrenia, they only see that as a weakness and character flaw. They think he/she is a potential criminal/terrorist a ticking time bomb that will go off on a violent spree that will kill people because most of the people who go on murder sprees are labeled mentally ill by the news media. Even if you are not violent, you will get classified as potentially becoming violent and thus a liability. If you had autism or downs syndrome you would find all kinds of support, even get college scholarships and job placements. But as a schizophrenic you are seen as a sub-human creature that should be gotten rid of, and confused with a sociopath or whatever. They even confuse you as having multiple personality disorders even if that is not a part of schizophrenia.

Anyway I am on geodon and clonazapan if anyone wonders what I take to be treated. I went on disability in 2003, and learned meditation in Buddhism to control it better. I am re-learning how to program all over again as well as writing some ebooks and hoping to self-publish them when I am finished.

When I went online for support of my mental illness, I was faced with trolls and people harassing me and bullying me, once even found my home phone number and kept prank calling my house at 3am every night using a VOIP software to create fake caller ID numbers like 666-666-6666 and 123-456-7890 and my wife couldn't take it anymore and changed our phone number to a private number to prevent that after the police failed to do anything about it, even if the caller did threaten to kill us all as well.

It is really difficult for me, as my community does not give me any type of support for it and just generally avoid me because they don't understand my mental illness or even how to talk to me. So I am excluded from things, I lost most of my friends, and my family most of them cut me off after I became mentally ill.

I have two college degrees, one in computer science and the other in business management. Since nobody would hire me, I plan to do work at home and slowly earn income with writing ebooks and maybe doing some small programming tasks.