Schizophrenia

this is one of the few subjects that still really unnerves people i think -- a combination of instinctive fears, the limited scientific understanding of its aetiology, various media hypes about psychotic killers etc

do you have any experience of family/friends who have been diagnosed as such? 'a global lifetime prevalence of around 0.3–0.7%' so it isn't all that rare

In college, I sang with a girl who was schizophrenic. We just thought she was goofy and weird until she started hearing voices that she couldn't really explain; fortunately, she was aware enough to realize that something wasn't right and hospitalized herself halfway through the semester. When she came back the following year, she'd gotten some serious medication and was much, much better to us, anyway, and she claimed she was dealing with things better and not hearing voices anymore).

I haven't seen or talked to her in about 15 years.

I rear-ended a schizophrenic once. he got all indignant that we had to leave the cars exactly where there were until the police arrived, I could tell the guy was a little off so I humored him. at first I thought he might be a OCD or aspergers until he started talking a steady stream of nonsense while we were waiting about clouds influencing events and evolution and so on. he also insisted he was very important and well known at the police department, which I thought was part of his delusion until the cop showed up and actually knew the guy! was deferential to him so I guessed he was maybe on the force before the illness overtook him.

how could you be sure that was a schizophrenic rather than....perhaps a florid drunk, a 'spirtual person', a holy fool, someone undergoing a transient psychotic episode etc?

a close friend of mine from 8th grade on very gradually became a schizophrenic. when i visit my hometown sometimes i hang out with him and try to tell him his half-chinese ex-girlfriend hasn't tasked chinese psychics to "sit in a white room and project themselves onto [his] living form". i don't do a very good job.

the sad thing about it for me is that it is still very apparent what a smart guy he was/is. one of the things he's obsessed with is taking the first letters of each word in a sentence someone says as an acrostic, and talking about what the revealed word "means"; sometimes he'll do this with everything you say, much more quickly than i could work it out in my head. it's not that his power's diminished; it's that he's lost all sense of direction.

he's a huge momus fan, btw.

If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

do you think you could identify someone suffering from schizophrenia based on your experiences? not the obvious aspects of the 'crazy street person' archetype, but in a more banal/domestic setting?

One of my first meetups with an internet acquaintance (who happened to be a year ahead of me in my high school) occurred some 15 years ago. After a couple of beers on the steps outside the grad student pub, he started confiding in me about a couple of commitals to hospitals, his difficulties with his attorney parents (with whom he still lived at 24). After 3 beers I started hearing about the demons who forced him to masturbate incessantly. I tried to be sympathetic, but I'm kinda glad I never gave him my home address...

do you think you could identify someone suffering from schizophrenia based on your experiences? not the obvious aspects of the 'crazy street person' archetype, but in a more banal/domestic setting?

Not straight off the bat, no. If it was someone I spent a lot of time with, I'd be more confident, but I'm not a psychologist/psychiatrist.

this got me to look up some old documentary footage of sufferers (the term 'schizophrenic' seems too loaded, too harsh) but of course the knowledge of being filmed would have some affect, so it isn't entirely reliable

i have never knowingly spoken to someone diagnosed as such, but i wouldn't be surprised if some of the weird kids i knew growing up hadn't been determined 'schizophrenic' by now

i mean it depends how severe it is but i guess "banal/domestic setting" means that it's not that severe, or that it's being well-treated? (crazy street people are pretty banal.) it's not a diagnosis i'd feel comfortable making the instant someone says something weird about shadow people, but after spending a while with someone there are certain obsessive patterns that would start to look pretty suspicious. most of it is just... realizing that they have a complex and utterly hermetic worldview that isn't just insane/irrational but is untouchable -- anything someone else says in contradiction of it will either be discarded or folded into the general paranoia.

but yeah, i am Not A Doctor.

my understanding is that you can't diagnose personality disorders until after the patient is determined to be "an adult", so I don't know that weirdness as a child directly translates to an adult with a personality disorder

After a couple of beers on the steps outside the grad student pub, he started confiding in me about a couple of commitals to hospitals, his difficulties with his attorney parents (with whom he still lived at 24). After 3 beers I started hearing about the demons who forced him to masturbate incessantly. I tried to be sympathetic, but I'm kinda glad I never gave him my home address...

omg

Pretty sure they don't diagnose individuals as schizophrenic much anymore. I think that there's a myriad of sub-categories of schizophrenia now used (multiple personality, etc.). Maybe there's a professional on board who can clarify.

uhm a pretty quick glance at wikipedia should set u straight there

and obv i'm not talking about diagnosis, which shall be left to the doctors, but whether there seem to be patterns, tropes that would 'flag' a stranger as being schizophrenic even in the absence of luridly egregious behaviours

it's not that his power's diminished; it's that he's lost all sense of direction.

this is the really saddening and scary thing, to me - the way that the wonderful ability to see patterns and create connections, which is what produces so much brilliant art and science and etc, turns monstrous.

Also, in a large-format photography course, I chose to do landscapes following the course of a bayou that courses through the city. Downtown, it crossed under a wide bridge which sheltered a large cardboard community of homeless, which I wanted to document. 8 x 10" view cameras are unwieldy things - setting them up and getting decent light meter readings take time. Several of the denizens came out and wanted to know why I was there (some 100 m from the bridge, by the way). I'm fairly generous and fine at negotiating, but a couple had the word-salad symptoms of schizophrenia. One of the women came to my defense, and before I knew it there was a scuffle in the mid-distance, which perhaps my presence may have precipitated. I decided an image wasn't worth imposing yet another outsider on these poor souls' lives. I left with the schools camera and empty pockets.

Some 8 or 9 years prior, President Reagan stepped into the debate raging in the psychiatry community on whether severe schizophrenics should be committed by largely defunding federal support for state mental hospitals. Most wound up on the streets and under bridges.

yeah it reinforced what I said about subtype classifications replacing the blanket "schizophrenic" diagnosis

xxxpost

I had a crazy 2nd cousin Jurgen who was most likely schizo but he lived in Germany so I never had that much direct experience with him. My Dad claims that he took some hallucinogenics as a teen and that's what started the mental illness which I used to think was total BS but I've read stuff since that suggests that some drugs can actually trigger underlying MIs so who knows.

Anyway, he was OK when on meds but when off he would do ridiculous things like take a taxi from Romania to Germany and expect his mom to foot the bill. TBH he was sort of fun to hang out with if you didn't have to deal with him all the time or suffer the consequences of his episodes. We went to a bar once and everyone there started addressing him as Father and it dawned on me that he'd told them all he was a local priest so that they'd buy him free beer. He did like the drink and as a result one day he fell off a bar stool and hit his head and died.

We went to a bar once and everyone there started addressing him as Father and it dawned on me that he'd told them all he was a local priest so that they'd buy him free beer.

that sounds a bit too organised for a schizophrenic!

that second paragraph had me thinking of herzog movies

based on the description of his actions I'd actually guess narcissistic

See I think he was on his meds during the priest incident. He was nuts but he was also pretty smart and sly guy. Like, he knew what he was doing then. When he realized that day that I'd picked up on what was going on (it wasn't hard) he winked and gave me a little "be cool" hand motion. Off meds it was a different story but also one that I didn't get to see and have only hear snippets about.

my wikipedia says that schizophrenia is still in the DSM-IV, although it has no objective test, and that it contains five subtypes (not disassociative identity disorder, tho, the association of which with schizophrenia seems to be an etymological error) which may be dropped in the DSM-V.

then there is indeed a section about various propositions for splitting the blanket diagnosis up, but in this i think it's like a great many mental disorders: the brain is really really hard to study and was actually impossible to directly study at all until the late 20th century, and a lot of the disorders we managed to identify before that are going to turn out to be sloppy and general and fumbling. but doctors still call people who have the classic paranoia/delusions/hallucinations/scrambled speech affliction "schizophrenics".

psychopathology is sort of a sad and tricky discipline: it's such a pressing and desperate desire to understand/help afflicted people, but for so long, while the physicists and the chemists and the biologists were making all these exciting empirical strides, the psychologists just had to sit around and think "man it would be cool if we could look at the brain huh" while dejectedly running mice through mazes

that might not be an accurate depiction of the history of pre-21st-century psychology; call it a "fantasia"

lol

My nephew's birth father (not in the picture anymore) suffered from some kind of schizophrenia...he'd been a pretty chronic pot user for a long time and his mother was a schizophrenic, and there was a suspicion that the pot maybe helped it along in him. He lost a series of manual labor jobs because he would start hearing voice and starting fights in the workplace, and in a number of instances didn't show up for work until the late evening because he swore he was being followed.

In the end my sister was forced to leave him because she couldn't raise a baby and him...it was like having two children.

He got meds and treatment but he never really got off drugs, and he ended up having to be supervised for visits with my nephew because he would just take off with him, my sister would come to collect my nephew and no-one would be home. He was just a mess. He would pay lip service to treatment but he just didn't have the right people around him to help him. Eventually my sister took him out of the picture altogether.

But I also found out later that he has a *number* of kids. he's been out of control for a lot longer than I thought...and eventually I kind of washed my hands of him, cruel as that is...but I felt like him being in my nephew's life, and my sister's life, was more of a threat to them than a help.

there are different aspects of schizophrenia: there is paranoid schizophrenia, with the delusions of being followed or spied upon, and then there is also catatonic schizophrenia, where the victim is for the most part noncommunicative & nonresponsive. I read a book of first-hand accounts of schizophrenia and related mental illnesses and for the most part the experience is pretty much like having the presence of inanimate objects imposing itself upon your inner mental world just by virtue of existing.

I think there are other manifestations of schizophrenia besides that, but it's been a while since I did any kind of research on it at all. As far as I can tell, many experts regard schizophrenia as a language-disorder

Also, DJP, there is such a thing as 'childhood onset schizophrenia' but in most cases, it's very very difficult to differentiate between this and autism.

* for the most part the experience of catatonic schizophrenics

(though I wouldn't doubt that the 'evil aura of ordinary things' is a common experience for all schizophrenics.)

there is a part in one of Chuck Klosterman's books where his assistant tells a story about a woman who's mother died, and at the funeral she met a stranger with whom she had a very warm and enjoyable conversation. A week later, she kills her sister.

The point of this story, according to an assistant, is that if you ask a mentally healthy person why the woman killed her sister, they will answer in all sorts of different ways, about grief, or loneliness, or anger. Ask any schizophrenic, though, why the woman killed herself, and they will uniformly say that she wanted to go to another funeral so that she could meet with the stranger and talk to him again.

wiki says that schizophrenia manifests itself in two ways, with 'positive' and 'negative' symptoms.

'positive' = paranoid delusions, but also disordered thoughts and speech and hallucinations

'negative' = catatonic schizophrenia, outwardly characterized by 'flat or blunted affect and emotion, poverty of speech, inability to experience pleasure, lack of desire to form relationships, and lack of motivation.

how could you be sure that was a schizophrenic rather than....perhaps a florid drunk, a 'spirtual person', a holy fool, someone undergoing a transient psychotic episode etc?

― deejeuner sur l'herb (nakhchivan), Tuesday, January 11, 2011 11:50 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I'm no doctor but the speech patterns of schizophrenics are pretty distinct. their fascination with systems and processes, the way they combine unrelated concepts based on puns or sing-song logic or objects in the environment. if silence is golden, talk is silver. I own the largest silver mine in new mexico. mexicans speak in new silver rays just like their new silver jewelry. I can see their rays and I have been able to since I was a new child. and on and on and on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGnl8dqEoPQ

Man, that exchange with his mother is just...

Cellpwn Pics

Someone I went to university with became schizophrenic and dropped out. All I knew at the time was that he was having trouble but nothing about what kind. He'd become very withdrawn and I hardly saw him any more - I thought maybe depression. Caught up with him later when he'd been on medication for a while and was beginning to settle down and he filled me in a bit.

(I guess I didn't visit his room for a few months before dropping out, cz apparently he'd covered it in very intricate hand-drawn mathematical diagrams including fractals because he became convinced that this would make sense of the things in his head)

Anyway, I don't know the guy that well but dude is a straight-up genius and I feel bad as hell for him that he did not get his CS degree - he can't hold down a job but he spends his days programming totally amazing art and music stuff which works from all the dull academic mathematical/algorithmic principles I couldn't understand at uni and actually turns them into awesome stuff that is actually cool to look at and listen to, which is a pretty rare talent

thanks edward, i daresay you are correct

i had totally forgotten that someone i used to know vaguely, a really nice kinda shy kid and quite gifted, has lately been diagnosed with schizophrenia -- he had improved on medication but seemingly is deteriorating again.....and i scarcely remember him being ~strange~ at all

there are few things more grim

AFAI was taught, schizophrenia is a relatively useless blanket term that encompasses a bunch of symptoms that may or may not occur together - you just need a certain number of them to be diagnosed. So two different ppl with schiz. diagnoses would have completely different symptoms.

The partner of an ex-colleague/friend became schizophrenic quite suddenly in his late 30s. He had very bad periods and some better times. He committed suicide a year ago, in the middle of what appeared to be a calm period.

As I mentioned in the other thead, a friend of mine back in the mid 90s developed paranoid schizophrenia when he was about 17-18. He was a really sweet kid who seemed to have a promising writing career ahead of him, but in irst year uni he confided in me he was hearing voices when crossing campus and it was freaking him out.

Inside of year, he was being overmedicated for schizophrenia and bipolar, and became an uncontrollable mess. It was horrible. I dont know if he ever really got it under control, as I lost touch with him/.

my recent gf of nearly six years developed 'schizo-affective' disorder about three years into our relationship. I was living with her during the months that escalated to her being diagnosed & basically witnessed the steady decline of her grip on reality. As you may imagine, it was a very intense and frightening time. I can't begin to imagine what it was like for her. That she was able to rebound to the extent she has is a testament both to the vast diversity of schizophrenic illnesses (there is no convenient summary for such things -- hers just happened to be a manifestation that was esp. treatable) and the sophistication of current medical solutions, to say nothing of the strength of her character.

Suffice it to say I have learned a lot about this issue first-hand. I'd like to write more about it later, when I'm not *working*. For now, I will at least say this: Based on my own ignorant preconceptions of schizophrenia prior to my (x)gf's dilemma, I have since become hyper-aware of how it & mental illnesses in general are portrayed by the media & misunderstood by otherwise reasonable and intelligent people (to say nothing of those less so). Thus, to vaguely categorize the shooter as some 'wacko schizoid' is to apply the same negative stereotype against those with mental illnesses as other more obvious damning generalizations concerning race/gender/sexual preference/etc. Not pointing fingers at anyone on this thread, just sayin..

I have a question abt schizophrenia, based on that clip shown above, and other things I've seen.

Is there a sort of dysphasia that goes along with schizophrenia, that accounts for the seemingly strange trains of thought evident in their speech? It just struck me watching that clip that he felt like he was expressing himself quite clearly, and parts of his speech were unaffected, but strings of seemingly unrelated ideas kind of crowd their way into his thoughts...does he know that that is what is coming out of his mouth?

I guess it's more sort of a mechanics question than anything. Just curious.

most of it is just... realizing that they have a complex and utterly hermetic worldview that isn't just insane/irrational but is untouchable -- anything someone else says in contradiction of it will either be discarded or folded into the general paranoia.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, January 11, 2011 9:14 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

not sure this says anything about schizophrenia, per se, but this is OTM re: my experience of severe mental illness of any kind. the untouchability of the personality within, as though the illness so wholly traps them that they can't see out and you can only see in a little ways. i had a friend & roommate for a number of years who was schizophrenic (diagnosed) but still somewhat functional. he got regular gov't disability checks which he spent on rent and weed. he mostly dumpster dived and went to food banks for the rest of his needs. very talented painter, obsessed with natural patterns of energy in the world and furious about the ways in which man-made systems intentionally disrupt and corrupt them. used to spend a lot of time up on the roof watching the patterns revealed in the movements of birds. was often quite decent and friendly, but just as often combative, paranoid, even abusive. you'd learn to sense which way the wind was blowing and either ride it out or simply avoid him for a while. i spent a lot of time commiserating with his too-tolerant but decent girlfriend, who eventually split. and i spent a lot of my time in conversation with him going "uh-huh ... yeah ... probably ... i don't know." one of his favorite pastimes was the striking of vaguely menacing "martial arts" style poses accompanied by intense staring and loud breathing noises. i think this was supposed to accomplish some kind of magical effect. like his girlfriend, he too up and disappeared one day. hardest thing about being his friend was how deeply unreachable he ultimately was, at least in his madness. don't know that i really ever had a relaxed, honest, human-to-human conversation with him.

does he know that that is what is coming out of his mouth?

In my experience, no. My brother had schizophrenia, and would often blurt out incomprehensible things (wow, the birds had amazing tails!) or lines that might have been song lyrics. Sometimes it was like he was continuing a conversation with someone who wasn't there. He never seemed aware that his utterances were complete non-sequiturs. He didn't have any paranoid delusions like the stabbings related by Gerald above, but really disconcerting nonetheless.

From what I've witnessed & read, a general blurring of dreams/imagination & reality, thought & expression is pretty central to the condition & the degree to which they are blurred & how that corresponds with outward expression and behavior is specific to the type or individual.

I'd guess that the clip above was filmed in the 70s or 80s. Many of medications that the patient is on, as listed, are now considered to be archaic -- such is how significantly medicine to treat these things has progressed in the past 10-15 years. One of the biggest obstacles seems to be how resistant many with such problems are to medication & therapy, and obv. the degree to which others go altogether undiagnosed.

though I wouldn't doubt that the 'evil aura of ordinary things' is a common experience for all schizophrenics.

when i was young, i used to get this at the onset of fevers, when i was beginning to catch a cold. in this condition, i'd sometimes wake in the night with the sense that everything around me was humming, almost screaming with terrible, angry energy, waves of unspeakable hatred that felt like an overwhelming kind of silent noise. even tiny sounds, like my own breath and the movement of my body against the sheets would be magnified and distorted in some awful way. i found this terrifying, but it was clear to me that it was a symptom of some kind. i also realized that it would go away if i had company, that the sensation only seemed overwhelming when i was alone. since it usually happened at night, i'd typically go and watch tv for a few minutes, which seemed to chase it away.

last time it happened, i was about 18 and walking around on campus: groggy, coming down with something. was crossing the dark, empty and echoing basement lobby of the library building, when the horror sensation started to come on. i got the fear and the sounds of my own footsteps became big and angry. i rode it out, and it only lasted a minute or so. by the time i reached the better-lit hallways, it had gone away. never since troubled by it. have since wondered if this was my flirtation with some kind of organic dysfunction, a mental-health bullet i somehow managed to dodge.

more stuff on speech patterns...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder

Schizophrenic or psychotic patients never demonstrate awareness nor concern about it [4] because it results from a fundamental inability to use the same type of Aristotelian logic as everyone else does[5] whereas so-called “organic” patients with a clouded consciousness usually do demonstrate awareness and concern about it, by complaining about being “confused” or “unable to think straight” because it results, instead, from various cognitive deficits.[3]

i spent a lot of time commiserating with his too-tolerant but decent girlfriend, who eventually split. and i spent a lot of my time in conversation with him going "uh-huh ... yeah ... probably ... i don't know."

lots of people in this thread know more than me about this stuff so this only applies to my experience with my friend: yeah exactly. and i never know quite how to handle him, because i don't want to be the guy who just keeps saying "yeah, mm-hmm" as if i'm engaging with him and treating him like a peer when i'm actually secretly thinking he's crazy and just can't be bothered to do the work of saying so; but if i do say so (not literally "you're crazy" but just try to argue with him at all or try to get him to see contradictions or extreme unlikelihoods) it doesn't go anywhere. he usually doesn't get angry with me or anything -- he's either just not very angry in general or he's known me too long. but he doesn't concede anything, and i never feel like i'm reaching anyone.

anyone who has been or seen someone in the throes of a bad LSD trip can see the parallels with schizophrenia. paranoia, inappropriate interpretation of social interactions, feeling cut off from the world, powerful hallucinations, seeing auras, etc etc.

my aunt has suffered with schizophrenia since her late teens, recurring delusions involving god talking to her and christian themes in general. she's been in and out of institutions and on loads of different medications over the years. she can function ok day to day on her medication, but if she misses it at all, it's a vicious circle, the voices tell her not to take it and it gets worse from there. it's so sad, because she's such a smart and kind person when she's well.

my dad (her brother) always feared that either me, my brother or sister would start to show symptoms at around the same age. i suffered from depression (but no mania) as a teenager and that was enough to really worry him for a while.

wiki says that schizophrenia manifests itself in two ways, with 'positive' and 'negative' symptoms.

'positive' = paranoid delusions, but also disordered thoughts and speech and hallucinations

'negative' = catatonic schizophrenia, outwardly characterized by 'flat or blunted affect and emotion, poverty of speech, inability to experience pleasure, lack of desire to form relationships, and lack of motivation.

― Are you anticipating an end to the Age of Stupid? (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, January 11, 2011 2:24 PM (2 hours ago)

symptomatically yeah these are the two main sets of signs; the way a person presents will determine the subcategory into which they're placed and the type of treatment they can expect. positive and negative symptoms are believed to be caused by different pathologies (both mostly invloving dopamine, which makes things hairy wrt treatment and side effects, particularly resulting movement disorders). the newer class of drugs for schizophrenia, the atypical antipsychotics (quetiapine, olanzapine, risperidone, etc) are much better at treating these "negative" symptoms than the traditional drugs but all told we still sort of suck at treating negative symptoms as a whole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCWGdUFyT8Q

this the trailer to a really nice (and devastating) short documentary that we watched when we learned about schizophrenia - don't think it gets into a lot of sciency stuff but it gives a good idea of what life is like for people diagnosed with this disorder and their families

xp - totally otm wrt 'negative symptoms' & modern antipsychotics

also, many of those drugs have the unfortunate side effect of agitating existing movement disorders or stimulating the onset of new ones altogether.

(not in all cases, obv)

i work with some schizophrenic people sometimes, and these people generally self-report it as "paranoid schizophrenia" and not any other kind. it seems very common to believe the president, sometimes the governor or other high-ranking political figure, owes them money or is going to do something for them personally or respond to a demand they have made. i wonder how that happens that they share this common type of delusion.

My Dad claims that he took some hallucinogenics as a teen and that's what started the mental illness which I used to think was total BS but I've read stuff since that suggests that some drugs can actually trigger underlying MIs so who knows.

iirc in one of the acid experiences thread someone related the story of a friend who fell off the deep end after taking acid. can't remember who posted the story though

That has always interested me – why schizophrenic people were interested in hallucinogens. Syd Barrett's the poster guy for this. My best friend's mom has schizophrenia and things were by far the worst during/after she was doing acid – I remember her being convinced for months after tripping once that Marilyn Manson had replaced her three children with robot versions and she refused to do anything mothery or talk to them. It was hard to handle. We were at her house once and watching a Pavement video (lol?) – there was a scene of milk pouring on Cheerios, and she started crying and then kicked me out of the house. Also on acid at that time. She said she was happiest when she was doing acid but she didn't make anyone else happy.

anyone who has been or seen someone in the throes of a bad LSD trip can see the parallels with schizophrenia

Yeah I definitely believe this. The last time I took acid I felt like I was sleepwalking. It was like I was one level removed from the universe, behind the veil, not quite there. A ghost inhabiting a slightly off dimension, populated with nattering voices and other things. I really didn't enjoy it much at points.

I've always understood schizophrenia as a kind of destruction of the membrane in our minds that holds our subconcious back from our concious so we can get on with our daily life. When that goes, you get things liek the word salad - the brain isn't firing the right way. Think of how disjointed one's dreams are. Schizoidal ppl must think that way all the time, i imahgine. Ive dreamt of psychoses and Ive had bad trips, so I feel like I can understand how it might be.

And it scares the shit out of me.

That has always interested me – why schizophrenic people were interested in hallucinogens. Syd Barrett's the poster guy for this.

the wrong way round surely, either the drugs initiated, coincided with or caused his illness - i'd think probably the first

the question in these cases is 'would it have happened anyway'

i know the mother of the kid i mention itt is pretty much traumatized by what is happening to her kid, it's the saddest thing

guessing he was probably doing weed but probably to sef-medicate

the wrong way round surely, either the drugs initiated, coincided with or caused his illness - i'd think probably the first

Why do so many schizophrenics smoke cigarettes, is the other thing? My college psych prof said that 90% do – idk if that is true or not. He was running a smoking cessation program in a mental hospital where cigarettes were used as a reward system.

when you're committed long term, like many schizophrenics are at some point, smoking and food are the only things you look forward to. It's something to do. Same goes for nursing homes. I was working psych the week the facility went smoke free; that was a hell of week. Two people escaped.

that is true abbott - see here for example

Another suggestion is that patients smoke as a form of self-medication with nicotine, which may help regulate a dysfunctional mesolimbic dopamine system. It may increase dopamine release in the pre-frontal cortex and alleviate positive and negative symptoms (Lavin et al, 1996).

Probably a form of self-medication. Nicotine is a very powerful mood-smoothing drug.

In our own study (Kelly & McCreadie, 1999) we found that the average age when patients with schizophrenia started smoking was the same as in the general population, namely mid-teens; 90% of patients who smoked had started smoking before their illness began.

!!!

know a guy from high school w/ this. he joins facebook, friends us, defriends us, disappears, refriends etc etc etc

one time he posted a bunch of pretty scary status updates

Fwiw Nakh, Roger Waters believes Syd had an underlying mental illness before the drugs, and I read somewhere that his mother? may have been suffering from something too, suggesting a predisposition of some kind. Who knows...I mean, Syd was doing metric fucktons of the shit, all the time, so...I'm not averse to the idea that you can create schizophrenia etc with that much intake of halluginogens, whether it's there to start or not. I haven't done any myself but friends and books lead me to feel like you could really short-circuit yourself if you were going hard enough

i was in a certain well-known hospital once, people used to leave sinister messages for the schizophrenic guy on the ward on the scrabble board

the wrong way round surely, either the drugs initiated, coincided with or caused his illness - i'd think probably the first

???
I get where yr comin from, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that ppl with an underlying condition, or predisposition towards one, might also be drawn towards risky behaviors...?

― bernard snowy, Tuesday, January 11, 2011 8:45 PM (27 minutes ago)

"risky behavior" isn't really associated with schizophrenia per se (suicide is, though) as far as i know, and i'm not sure the extent to which substance abuse is comorbid with schizophrenia, though it certainly exists and is a concern. nicotine use i know is especially prevalent. ppl on hallucinogens such as LSD can exhibit schizophrenia-like symptoms, through a mechanism i can't recall offhand (and one which i'm probably sure isn't perfectly understood anyway), but probably relates in some way to mesolimbic dopamine reward release.

(boring science stuff to follow)
most interesting is PCP, which can cause both positive and negative symptoms in those who use it. PCP antagonizes NMDA receptors in the brain, which normally act as a sort of check on mesolimbic dopamine signaling; thus blocking NMDA causes inappropriately high release of dopamine and it's therefore been hypothesized that glutaminergic signaling is hypofunctional in schizophrenia patients. PCP intoxication can also resemble some negative symptoms of schizophrenia, possibly through glutamate's interaction with serotonin-2A receptors, ultimately causing a decrease in dopamine in the prefrontal cortex (this absence of DA in the PFC is what is thought to lead to negative symptoms). atypical antipsychotics, which as i said before tend to better treat negative symptoms, block this 5HT2A receptor and therefore increase extralimbic dopamine

PCP scares the shit out of me. Every time I see crazy news headlines about guys trying to eat their children, or hacking off their own legs with an axe, it's always a PCP story. Dude in Sacramento last year I think killed his own toddler son, ate one of his eyes and then set fire to his own legs. I mean that's one of those 'spaces in the mind' that you just shouldn't go to.

yeah don't do PCP

Always wanted to eat human flesh but were too afraid to try? Try PCP Today!

It turns you into a Reaver!

...sorry, Ive been watching a lot of Firefly lately.

OMG YES

Haha I had a feeling you'd know what I meant.

lol :)

a college acquaintance "came down" with schizophrenia one weekend at school. disappeared, came back, got into shower with all his clothes on. really sweet, funny slacker dude who smoked a ton of pot (which is what he blames for the schizophrenia). hes now medded up and has his life more or less together but hes put on a ton of weight and theres a certain... i dunno... dullness of affect. hes definitely different now.

but, jeez, it terrifies me. from what i can tell its like being trapped in hell.

ikr max, feel terrible for these people....like the kid i referred to itt, he was so nice, and had so much suffering already, and now he will probably have either this awful illness or the deadening effects of drugs for the rest of his life

pcp is so fucking wrong tho....researching this stuff i found u-god (of wu-tang clan) has recently been diagnosed and he kinda blames weed lacked with pcp

Wow, didn't know that. :(

When my wife was In the ward for post partum psychosis there was a catatonic schizophrenic with her. Apparently he woke up one day and lit his house on fire. When the cops arrived he was sitting outside catatonic

wow, PP psychosis...rough shit right there.

Yeah one of my bffs had that, too, I think. She was so severely ragey-depressed she ended up trying to kill herself sometime shortly after her son was born - ended up in a specialist mother/child psych unit at a hospital.

When I was in school, we had a woman come speak to my clinical psych nursing class. She was a former teacher, great speaker, just the nicest lady ever. Then she drops the bomb about how she killed her two kids, attempted suicide and wound up in the state psych hospital for 7 years. She now devotes her life to educating people about PPD/PPP. Up until that point, a lot of my classmates were having difficulties dealing with the psych rotation; there was a lot of judgment. She really helped humanize people with psych issues for many of my classmates.

Wow.

^^

xp Max: Dullness of affect is also a symptom of schizophrenia, so it may not be his meds doing that to him.

My wife was pretty gone, never any thoughts of killing our son but loads of out there delusions. She thought she solved lost and needed to speak with jj abrams

i knew something wasn't right with her for a few days, she was talking incessantly and not sleeping at all. I went out to get some diapers and came home she was babbling about Nat King Cole and his connection to her family (which there is none). She also didn't think anything was wrong with her either. Later that day she went upstairs to use our pc and came down with this look in her eyes and said " i need to go to the hospital". Well needless to say off we went, once we got in the car she lost it. Screaming about the government spying on our house and our satellite dishes that i put up to keep an eye on her. she threatened to jump out of the car on the way to the hospital, i had to restrain her and drive. Not fun. She then proceeded to get all happy because "she knew" i was taking her to a place where they were going to have a huge party for her because she figured out Lost before the show ended and that JJ Abrams would be waiting for her with a grand prize. These delusions continued for a week at the hospital among other ones about having an affair with her boyfriend from 20 years ago, how when she got home that we had a new house....needless to say, it was quite possibly the worst couple months of my life. Two years later she's fully recovered and better than ever. Issue is now the idea of having another child, which gives her a 50/50 chance of getting PPP again...but this time she would be on meds and monitored the moment she got pregnant.

i think people confuse PPD and PPP. No signs of depression with PPP...mania.

I hope you had family / very good friends around when that happened.

yes we did, thank god. Of course her parents didn't want to believe that something was wrong with her. They didn't even go see her until I yelled at them to do so..i think they were too scared to go see her. Nor did they think there was anything was seriously wrong with her until they went and saw her. To top it off once she got home my dormant OCD manifested itself.

Wow Chris. So glad that you both came out of it okay..I mean I know marriage is never perfect but that you could both weather all of that is really something. You're a good man, Charlie Brown :)

it was incredibly sad. they sedated her and restrained her when we got to the hospital and i sat and waited by her side for the three hours she slept, hoping when she woke up she would be fine. She woke up and immediately started in on the Lost delusions. Sucked. So they finally got her a bed and when i left her she was screaming for me to help her and they just said it was best for me to go. I got outside and broke down. Next day when i went to visit she had no clue what was happening, she just looked up at me from the lunch room and said "im so confused". She had moments of clarity in and out for about 5 days and on day 6-7 she started to come through when her meds kicked in.

Anyways, enough about this...she's med free and great.

yow, damn man, glad you all came through okay. can't imagine...

I can't even imagine, Chris.

we did, we had it rough for about 4 months but all is well now. oh and she never had an affair, she talked to an ex on facebook and her delusion was about him and the book the time travelers wife. Nuts huh. Of course I was convinced she did and we ended up in marriage counseling.

But to be clear, she did solve Lost though, right? :)

What's so amazing is that was on top of childbirth, which is an emotionally intense, exhausting, and kind of surreal, albeit happy, experience in its own right. Hard to imagine.

funny is i emailed this guys wife and accused him and my wife of having an affair...oops. In my OCD brain i convinced myself that it wasn't a delusion.

Oh yeah, she solved it alright! We found a notebook not too long ago that she had hid, filled with her daily incoherent ramblings about lost that she was writing on the days leading up to her hospitalization.

The doctor said that the come done from all the hormones (we did IVF treatment 4 times before she got pregnant), my son having to be re-hospitalized for jaundice and her lack of sleep pushed her over the edge.

My housemate years ago was a midwife at a small local hospital and she had told me some stories of a couple of patients with PPP...PPD being obviously more common, but she said it's definitely difficult for the women and the families in both cases, because there's such an expectation of joy surrounding the event that it can be really hard to deal with all of these *other* emotions and accept that it does happen. She said PPD in particular can get dicey because mothers are fighting so hard against the emotions they're having, and the guilt involved. It's just such a hard time for everyone.

Again, hats off to Chris and wife for navigating through all of that.

thanks!

And she was a mental health counselor for years before this and dealt with this all the time. ah life.

Luckily I recognized something was wrong with her a few days before we got to the hospital, since i sort of have some family history with people going crazy. my dad is bi-polar and i got to see him in his finest mania and worst depression. He was also on the same locked unit as my wife, 20 years ago.

Im also thankful that i was on paternity leave at this time, because lord knows what could have happened to her and my son when i was at work.

damn chris, that sounded awfully rough. thanks for sharing, glad everything turned out okay.

friend just had a really heartbreaking episode, just so fucking scary to see all sense of reality torn away from someone who you know so well

;_;

was he already diagnosed

I'm sorry Uh Oh. That sounds like an awful experience.

I would guess no
friend was uh tenuously diagnosed in that I knew a history of such behavior existed, but that was attributed more to drugs
now that he's clean its apparent its its own thing

It's so hard to know, though. My brother's dabbling with psychotropic substances and his diagnosis of schizophrenia were so close on the timeline that it was really that 'what came first: chicken/egg?' thing. Sorry to hear about your friend.

Isn't there some evidence that certain drugs can sort of trigger underlying MI (and schizophrenia in particular) in certain people?

yeah

Yeah, numerous studies. Probably goes w/o saying, but there's also lots of evidence that people with latent mental health issues are self-medicating with cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs. Lots of grey areas.

And also, the age in which most drug experimentation starts (late teens-early twenties) is the age when schizophrenia tends to manifest for the first time. (BTW, there's a second peak age for women--late forties to early fifties. But that seems to be a menopause thing.)

new research is always a good thing: http://io9.com/#!5791805/this-is-what-schizophrenia-looks-like-at-the-molecular-level

I'd like to read the full article this ^ is taken from, but I don't subscribe to Nature & they want $32 (!) for the full text, so..

Will be reading this over the next week. I'm no expert but looking molecular mechanisms in Scz appears to be incredibly complex. Current methods of brain imaging feel too crude, no simple lesion studies. I'm not sold on most of the size irregularities or nt hypothesis stuff I've read either. Can email copy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6CILJA110Y

An older friend just confided to me today that her 20-something, med student, beautiful daughter is now on multiple medications for anxiety and for schizophrenia/bi-polar disorder and yet is still having panic attacks, paranoia, and outbursts of physical and verbal violence/destructiveness, and it's so incredibly painful to watch her mom grapple with. Of course the daughter's doctor won't tell my friend anything bc of patient confidentiality but the daughter is potentially not taking her meds, not a reliable narrator, recently acted on suicidal plans (and was prevented), and my friend is asking me if this is forever, will her daughter never get better? And I'm just like...

I told my friend to get herself back into talk therapy so she has someone to break it down for her and a hand to hold in whatever comes next.

She's a single mom with so much injustice and abuse in her past. And right now she's so ashamed, not that there's anything to be ashamed of but she's going to have to overcome a lot of negative cultural messages around metal health issues. How can I help her? What is there to say?

hard one

i have known at least three individuals with paranoid schizophrenia - all have had violent outbursts etc but have in many ways been great people as well

i had to cut ties with one dude because he was very violent, the other two were girls and they were prone to outbursts and one thing i learned that is scary is eventually your voice can become part of their mental framework, and they hear you saying things or think you do things you did not do.

ime this has never went away for the affected individuals but it is compounded if they use illicit drugs..the daughter must get back on the meds and stay on them (easier said than done) otherwise the manic episodes will continue

wishing you well

also it helps if the individual has social-medical coverage as employment can be difficult to impossible

I have two ex-housemates and one ex-girlfriend with diagnoses for schizophrenia, and it's not something easily overcome, even now. All three are basically out of "regular society" for the rest of their lives, this suits the one who is a musician, but not the other two. OTOH you see posters up in psych wars of people who have managed to overcome it and get back to their plans for life, there are these people out there, and there is hope.
I agree that keeping away from drugs, especially pot, is very important.

I don’t have direct experience with being close to someone with a schizophrenic condition. I’m sorry your friend and her daughter have to deal with this. I think the best thing for you to do is seek out accurate research and advocacy materials. Maybe do some of the legwork for your friend in that regard: screen some books and give her the best one, find out if there are peer support groups for parents of adult children with schizophrenia, assist figuring out what local health department resources exist to serve the daughter.

There is lots of anguished debate from well-meaning people over whether this is good or bad but depending on the jurisdiction the daughter will likely be entitled to her autonomy up to the point where she presents an incipient and specific danger to herself or another. I would want that autonomy for myself, even if I were struggling badly to continue living a stable life.

Hope these thoughts help somehow.

It could equally be bpd, the same drugs seem to be used for both. One drug is anti-anxiety, one is an anti-convulsant, and one is a mood-stabilizer to suppress the manic swings. Either way yeah it seems like she needs to be taking all of them.

you can encourage her to seek as much professional support as she can -- advising her to seek a therapist/support group to help her cope is a good idea and beyond that, it's gonna be hard for a friend to do much.

my experiences with schizophrenic people started when i was a kid with my parents' friend roger (who went on and off his meds visibly), continued when a constituent used to call my house to talk with my dad (pre-caller ID) to ramble incoherently and recently i had a student with this diagnosis who had an outburst in class. i was also stalked by the daughter of my parents' friends who called me incessantly from another state and wanted to come live with me (we were not friends, it was quite scary tbh)

your friend needs to seek out people who thoroughly understand her situation and you can be there to give her some lemonade and a hug <3

You are such a good friend to be so thoughtful about this!

Just making yourself available as a safe and accepting ear (just listening instead of trying to problem-solve) is honestly the most helpful thing you could possibly do imo

<3

Xpost pot is terrible for schizophrenia. As far as early use and later repercussions, also know too hard people that went off the grid as well