Kody Green

Kody Green

Overcoming Schizophrenia: Kody Green

Kody Green was born in 1994 in rural Wisconsin. He has a younger brother and a younger sister, and a mother who struggled with schizophrenia throughout most of his life. He never knew his father, who died in a car crash when he was a year old.

Kody’s childhood was difficult. He felt he was his mother’s caregiver, and remembers having to “grow up” early on to look after her and his siblings. Throughout his childhood, he never had enough money, and pretended he was not hungry at school when he didn’t bring a lunch. He remembers his mother’s applications for financial assistance for low-income families.

Despite a difficult home life, Kody always did well in school, enjoying theatre and music, and running track and cross country. From a young age, he maintained a supportive circle of friends who made good choices and avoided alcohol and drugs. At age 15, Kody also met his future wife, Allyson, at a rival high school.

As Kody was finishing high school, in 2013, his mom was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and began antipsychotic medication, but much cognitive damage had already been done.

Kody planned to stay home to care for his mother after graduating from high school but finally realized that his mother was stable enough for him to move on. He and Allyson decided to rent an apartment near Western Technical College in La Crosse, where Kody began classes to become a choir director or music teacher.

Kody did well until the end of his first semester of college, when he began to believe that other people were watching him, and that his wife was trying to sedate him through his food, with plans of “putting him away” in a hospital or psych ward. He refused to eat or drink anything he suspected she may have touched. He remembers hearing voices, which soon became overwhelming, and hearing other noises such as loud sirens that he eventually realized others could not hear.  He saw people around him barely defined and faceless, and felt crawling sensations on his arms. Kody was very aware that his mother’s schizophrenia was a genetic condition, and was always looking for signs of psychosis in himself. But when it actually began happening, he never suspected his problem was schizophrenia.

Terrified of falling asleep, and desperate to drown out the visions and voices, Kody turned to both prescription stimulant drugs and cocaine, which he bought from friends in La Crosse. Losing his cognition and ability to think rationally, he found himself failing his classes. Soon after, influenced by the drugs, and having not slept for over thirty hours, he accidently wrecked his car, and was badly injured. Following the crash, he entered the criminal justice system. He would go through a formal trial, and spend close to a year in jail, from 2014-2015.

While in jail, Kody began to suspect that something was physically wrong with him, and that it was serious. He recognized that he was having cognitive problems, and wondered if he had chronic fatigue syndrome. Though he was not suspecting he had schizophrenia, he lived with voices and delusions, believing that he was in a coma, and that life in the jail was not real. Isolation made his symptoms worse.

Because the correction officers at the jail saw Kody as a drug-seeker, his continued pleas for a physical assessment were ignored. But Kody spoke with other inmates and found that many of their stories paralleled his own. Kody remembers the other inmates recognizing he was unwell, protecting him, and making him feel safe. When he struggled the most, they provided the support he needed to stay out of the jail’s psychiatric ward.

While in jail, Kody’s mother and Allyson spoke with him over the phone every day. They visited him in person every other week, which was as often as they were allowed. On Kody’s release, he was determined to work together with a physician to obtain a diagnosis and treatment for whatever was wrong with him. He soon began medication for schizophrenia.

Kody’s first antipsychotic medication helped significantly, but he had side effects such as tardive dyskinesia, weight gain, anxiety and heart palpitations. He would spend five years going through various medication trials until he found one that worked well for him with the least side effects. Two years following his release from jail, he married Allyson and bought a house. Though Kody was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a few brief stays, both Allyson and Kody’s mom cared for him, preventing him from spending much time in psychiatric facilities.

As Kody recovered from schizophrenia, his goal was to find employment despite his criminal record. He finally landed a production job making cheese, where he worked for two years. He then worked for a year as an organic dairy retailer. During the beginning of the COVID pandemic, he changed jobs again to do customer service, and then began selling furniture, which he greatly enjoyed. While selling furniture, Kody was given flexibility with his hours, and able to take extra time off if he was feeling symptomatic or needed extra medication.

In 2019, Kody put up his first personal video about his journey through schizophrenia on TikTok. The next morning, Kody woke up to see he had 10,000 followers. As the pandemic began, he recognized the great need for mental health resources on the Internet, and found great fulfillment and success in making content that would educate and encourage people struggling with isolation, anxiety, depression, psychosis and other mental health conditions.

Today, Kody’s TikTok channel “Schizophrenic Hippie” has reached over a million followers. Kody left his job as a furniture salesman in 2024 to work full-time creating content and doing speaking engagements. Today, he has been featured in USA Today and Men’s Health. His proudest achievement is his recently released book titled Minds Over Meetings: A Personal Perspective on Wellness in the Workplace.