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Schizophrenia Experiences and Suggestions?
Jagercola asks: "My sister was recently diagnosed with Schizophrenia. It's a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disease that we don't know a lot about. The movie, A Beautiful Mind, paints an accurate picture of how the disease affects someone in a best case scenario. I would like the vast audience here to help me understand the disease through experiences and that it might help me aid my sister. If you know someone how has the disease, how has it affected your and their life? How have you been able to cope with it? What are the long term implications for quality of life?"
That was an excellent movie, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it an "accurate picture". I also read the book and I don't know if I'd describe Nash's experience as a "best case scenario" - maybe it is, for that particular disease, but it didn't sound too good to me.
There have been many stories on Kuro5hin by people with mental disorders. Take a look at Living With Schizophrenia. More recent, but not very relevant to the question is Living with Asperger's Syndrome, also a fascinating read.
Well....let me think of it this way. I was diagnosed schizoprhenic about 6 years ago....I am a hallucinatory schizophrenic, which means on top of hearing things, I see things. Makes life a bit difficult. Things people take for granted, I find a challenge. Imagine, if you will, driving down the street, and not knowig if the people you see walking in the street are real or not. I haven't been on meds for quite some time, due to lack of health coverage, and the fact that those things can get expensive. If you have any questions, my email is open for anyone who wants it.
My ex-girlfriend is a schizophrenic. When I met her, I could tell she was a very unique person, but I'd honestly never have guessed that she was so seriously ill. When properly medicated (antipsychotics, antianxieties, antidepressants), she was for the most part a normal person.
For the most part. 6 months couldn't go by without some sort of psychotic lapse. She could always feel it coming on days or weeks prior, and could voice her anxiety about it, but was terrified because she couldn't do anything about it. Doctors would up her doses of medication, but it wouldn't help. Before I knew it, little episodes would become more common...we'd be in the middle of a conversation and she'd be staring off into space, her voice would lower to almost mumbling, and I'd not be able to get her attention for up to a minute or two. She'd have no recollection of it, deny that it happened. She'd spin around to catch people that she 'saw' in the mirror behind her. These were the signs that a real lapse was coming.
The real psychotic lapses were the dangerous ones. Self mutilation, overdoses on massive amounts of pills, or worse...finding her screaming, clawing at her skin, not able to recognize anyone (myself included) from whatever horrible visions she was in the midst of. I got used to visiting the "behavioral medicine" department at all the general hospitals in the area, as well as the full-blown mental hospitals.
She turned out to be generally terrible with long-term personal relationships (surprise.), whether with a friend or a boyfriend, and I stuck around much longer than I should have. It's very difficult to fall in love with someone so internally tortured.
Oh, and the medication they use to dull a schizophrenic's brain with have some horrible side effects. She slept 12 - 15 hours a day, and couldn't enjoy sex because the antipsychotics prevented her from ever having an orgasm.
Hrmph, posting anonymously for the first time ever because this post actually chokes me up.
A friend of mine went undiagnosed as a schizophrenic, then attacked someone completely at random one day when he was around 19 or 20, got a couple years in the pokey, got diagnosed in there, did pretty well on meds until he got out, then while on probation, did something, cops came to the door, he freaked out and thought they were coming for him, so he grabbed a shotgun, ran out the back door, jumped a couple yard fences into someone else's backyard, then as they started to close in on him, he put the shotgun up under his chin and took his own head off. Apparently, no one checked to see that he was taking his meds, and he started saying "the voices are telling me to kill you, but I know they're not real, so don't worry, I won't listen to them."
He got gradually worse, to the extent that we didn't really notice. First of all he was wierd to begin with. Second, he was a horny fucker, no doubt. We used to say that he would fuck anything (not anyone). Third, we were partying a lot. Not to mention that we smoked weed on a quite so daily basis.
All in all, we were used to weirdness from his this guy. It took some time until we figured.
So when he started saying that "he could see that those girls wanted him", from hundred meters distance or so, nothing less , he wasn't mental in our eyes, he was just horny and weird.
In the end his mother realized he needed help, and he agreed.
When he got committed, he was pretty much in his own delusional world. From his point of view, and he loves talking about this, so this is not speculation, he were held captive by agents trying to manipulate him. I am not kidding.
And he believed that he were part of a big syndicate smugling heroin, so he really couldn't talk to these agents. Which ofcourse were the people attending him at section 8.
He also believed he had raped, extremely brutaly, a not so little amount of young girls. He believed these agents were trying to tag this onto him, but he did not want to get caught. So he shut up as much as he could.
He also was manicly trying to control his own thoughts. Believe it or not, he thought that others could see what he was thinking, and he wouldn't want to embaress himself in front of others. After all he was quite a perv.
When I called him at the instituition, he talked to me somewhat refusingly. He believed I was in on the agent plot... You get the picture.
But with time and medication, he is returning more to his old self. It has taken a couple of years, but now we can hang out and have fun.
But recovery takes time. Just a few months ago when talking to us, he realized for the first time that people actually cannot see his thoughts.
And he still isn't entirely customed to "being sane" as he himself put it, so it happens he makes a few bloopers. But all in all he is recovering quite well now.
If I hadn't known that he had been committed, and hadn't seen him since he was, I wouldn't see the difference.
If you are lucky and get good treatment, all you need is patience.
Hope this helps in some ways. Feel free to ask any other things if you like.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I did a bit of research about schizophrenia a few years ago, and one thing that I read stands out in my memory more than anything else. One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.
Anyway, the thing that stands out in my memory was a schematic diagram of the brain that had two boxes, each with arrows pointing to a third box in the center. The two boxes were labeled "SENSATION" and "THOUGHT" and the third box in the center was labeled "INTEGRATION". The narrative on the opposite page explained that you can think of the brain as an integrator of thoughts and sensations, and that hallucination represents a "crossed wire" in the integration center so that the brain perceives a thought as a sensation. For example, a person may think of spiders crawling on their skin, but the brain interprets that thought as the actual sensation.
This simplified schematic model made good sense to me, and helped me to understand the phenomenon in a more analytical way, rather than just being scared of the unknown.
I've never seen the movie, but I have seen a PBS documentary about John Nash called A Beautiful Madness. It was quite interesting and talked about his condition in some depth.
Also, check out the Wikipedia article on the disease. (There's probably a good article about John Nash as well, while you're at it.)
It's been my experience (I've just been accepted to medical school) that medical conditions or procedures that are initially "scary", "disturbing" or "gross" become easier to cope with after a bit of education. Science can do wonders to calm the soul, if the condition is one that is well understood. You're correct that our current understanding of schizophrenia is relatively incomplete, but it is much better than it was in Nash's day. Where the answers are not available (or are not satisfying), you can always find comfort in some good, old-fashioned prayer or meditation.
Occassionally people saw him brushing his teeth in the bathroom, but no-one thought that was weird. I think some people knew he spent the night at the department sometimes, but even that is not too weird. Heck, I've done it myself when I had a final exam due at 8am the next morning. But somehow, someone finally checked his ID carefully against official documents and discovered that he was neither a student nor a postdoc, nor a professor. It turns out he was an escaped mental patient that was living in the department, carrying around math books.
So the point is, if an escaped mental patient can live in a big math department for a YEAR before being found out, that tells you something about how close real mathematicians are to mental patients, and how tolerant they are of mental "quirks" in their colleagues. It's no accident that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind) was a mathematician.
My advice to all schizophrenics: become mathematicians (or artists).
Homosexuality was in the DSM as a treatable psychological disorder up till 1973.
This is indicative of the trustworthiness of such things. Please...
Medicalizing everything is a specialty of psychology in general. Astrology has more hard fact in it than psychology does. At least we can look up and see the constellations and planets. Most of psychology rests upon a few semi-understood brain chemicals and the ethereal realm of consciousness which no one can define, but lots of people are manufacturing lucrative careers pretending to understand.
I sat in on an undergrad psych presentation at Lehigh a few years back and was amazed to hear one of the presenters talking about the 'blood/brain barrier'. It was the most logical, scientific thing i'd ever heard anyone say in a psych forum. Fluff is the norm.
If psychology is so effective, why do women go to shrinks and get drugs rather than undergo Freudian psychoanalysis? I've sat in on several sessions for an agoraphobic individual - with multiple shrinks, mind you - and saw no actual psychoanalysis attempted. The shrinks are drug dispensers, basically. Moreover, in many cases the drugs dispensed are inappropriate. Agoraphobia has no known treatment. So, therefore they load the patient up with stuff to zonk them out and not give two shits about the world or anyone living on it, like Xanax.
Read a few testimonial books on conquering agoraphobia in particular and you find that they basically tell people to 'overcome their fears, and just do what you are afraid to do'. Well, doh. I never would have figured that out. The amazing part is that this actually works...i've witnessed an agoraphobic become productive by being forced by circumstances to go out and get a job and function like a real mother.
Imagine that.
Ponder also, when was the last time you heard of someone being let out of a mental institution without being on semipermanent drug therapy?
The pro-shrink defense squad can go get stuffed, the truth is the truth.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You're right the description given sounds just as likely to be mania (with the associated paranoia) then skizophrenia. Before I went around encouraging someone to take their anti-psychotics I would make sure they had tried lithium and the other medicines used to treat mania.
While anti-psychotics are the only choice for those truly far gone unfortunatly they have very unplesant effects. They cause permenent brain damage (the new atypical anti-psychotics aren't as bad) can cause permanent facial ticks and other issues. Also they often cause extreme depression and those taking them find marijuanna is the only thing which makes them content.
I find it disturbing that people are happy to tell individuals they have never met that they need to be taking their anti-psychotics. This reveals one of my basic disagreements with most of the psychiatric community. Most psychiatrists (conciously or uncouncisly) seem to put as their first priority the normalcy of their patient. Perhaps they believe normalcy is equivalent to good but this simply isn't always true.
Having had both depressive and psychotic episodes myself I would rather be commited and psychotic then sane and sufficently depressed. To be fair this would have to be a fairly extreme depression but this really is a choice each person needs to make for themselves. If an individual decides he doesn't want to take his anti-psychotics anymore that should be his choice (although he should alert care providers).
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Psychologists suck as evidenced by quotes from this article in The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland, page 7A) (21-May-2004)
HELD 6 YEARS WITHOUT CHARGES
"Nobody told us", official says.
A 45-year-old man remains locked up in a state hospital even though the charges against him were dropped six years ago.
When [he] protested and insisted that he should be released from his locked ward because the charges no longer existed, state mental health officials concluded he was delusional. The proof of his insanity, they said, was his repeated insistence that the charges had been dropped.
[Attorneys] with the Disability Law Center said they discovered [the man's] plight when they were doing a review of other cases. Noting that he had been confined for a long period, they began to look into the details of his case.
"When I heard about it, I though well, I'll just go and check it out," [the attorney] said, but when she got to the facility a cocial worker called her aside and offered a friendly warning.
"You shouldn't listen to him," the social worker told [the attorney]. "He's delusional."
In fact, [the attorney] said, every single thing that [the man] told her turned out to be true.
"He was telling the truth the whole time," said [the attorney],"But no one believed him." Though he has slurred speech because of [previous head injuries], [the attorney] said [the man] was "perfectly lucid."
-----
Just goes to show. Once the head-shrinks get their hands on you, for any reason, claiming to be normal is proof of your insanity and reason for them to hang on.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
On Google Answers there was once a guy who asked a question that alarmed many of us researchers...
It started off innocently enough; a question on how to block radio waves in his home. An odd request, sure, but... Faraday cages and such were being talked about, and someone asked in passing if there was some particular frequency he wanted to stop...
He basically stated that there was a group near him that was using some sort of broadcasting equipment to play thoughts in his head in an attempt to brainwash him. He didn't know what the frequency was, so he needed to block everything.
In addition he stated that he had been recommended to various psychologists, but since they were a part of the group doing the broadcasting he could not accept their diagnoses. I think the final answer to that question was a detailed explanation of radio physics, faraday cages, and also a caution suggestion that radio broadcasts can't be received by the human brain directly. I hope that guy, whoever he is, found some help...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
To render it a bit more accurate: There have been laws until recently against minorities and women, so you can't really say "it's against the law, so it's wrong" as an absolute. And guess what... you can't. Ok, now back to the topic: the best resource is probably going to be support groups for families dealing with mental illness. I suspect your local hospital's mental health department will have such a group or at least a pointer on where to find one.
I know this will never get read being so nested, but I think its worth mentioning. Multiple Personality Disorder does not exist, instead there is Diassociatative Identity Disorder (much like as with Retarded to Developmentally Challenged). The difference is the the 'personalities' are really personalities. Personalities are multi-faceted while each so-called personality is flat, uni-faceted, one mood, one identity, etc. Instead the term DID better reflects the current understanding the disorder. In it the individuals disassociates aspects of them selves to better compartmentalize the trauma and to be better deal with the situation. It is a lot less like multiple personalities and more accurately a single fractured personality in which one aspects does not recognizes other aspects of the self.
IANA Psychologist so stake this a grain of salt, but my mom is (MSc)and I talked her about this out of general interest and have read some abnormal psychology.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I'm one of those lucky lads who have an hereditary bipolar disorder and, during my later teens, a marijuana-induced semipsychotic stupor (I smoked weed chronically). During that time I manifested many of the common schitzo reactions, and this only abated after I had quit.
;) In this manner it's possible to set up logical bulwarks vs. some of the problems that come with the territory, at least. I know a few other tricks which I'll jot down for you later if there is sufficient interest and when I have a little more time. Hope this semicoherent brain-fart helps ;)
Up to this day I'm not sure whether it was the weed or true schitzophrenia, though I suspect the latter. And while I have been tested, tried, drugged and shrinked from childhood for my bipolar disorder, I had/have never been tested for schitzophrenia. I would guess that, if it IS the case, it is simply difficult to detect since I'm already eccentric by myself. I also feel no need to find out because whatever the case, I've learned to deal with it insofar as possible. I also have tolerant friends who don't freak out if one of my colorful observations are off the mark in whichever way. But I DO remember clearly that during my stoning times, I was in my own hell where I trusted almost no-one out of pure paranoia and had plenty of delusions to go with it. My bipolar disorder in manic phase was, ironically, the only time that I functioned well; I had the energy to have a normal life and it sharpened my wit far enough that it compensated for the inevitable slowdown that weed gives you.
These days I've given up on drugs (except for beer and the occasional cigar), including perscription drugs. My bipolar disorder is mild enough that I can control it by simply keeping an eye on myself - eating and sleeping habits, spending tendencies, etcetera - and compensate by applying the brakes wherever necessary; also, under certain conditions, you can keep yourself slightly manic without danger of the fallback into depression by not overworking.
I suspect that the backslide into depression is caused by heaping up too much work on your plate when you're manic; by keeping yourself in shape, getting plenty of sleep and decent meals, and knowing when/how to give your brain a break - and that means something which requires little thought, such as reordering your baseball card collection, or ironing, or cleaning up, or going for a walk or jog (NO tv, no internet!) - you can keep yourself an a heightened mentally active state indefinitely. I suspect that bipolar disorder may have been an evolutionary advantage once, and that due to social pressures and/or the differences in our modern ways of living compared to, say the stone age, it became a liability rather than a bonus. It might even be that depression wasn't always a necessary component, I don't know.
The delusional aspects from the schitzo-like affliction from my teens (I am now 27) gradually faded through time; one thing that really helped was writing down my delusions and seeing if they stood any statistic chance of being true. For example, when I was convinced I could control stoplights mentally; I simply drove around and compared how often it worked to how often I thought it worked. Needless to say, there were a few discrepancies
Jynx
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
Anyway, malaria gives you nightmares. Serious, terrifying nightmares. Everyone who was in our group reported having dreams about dead people. It also gave me weird lucid dreams -- after a few weeks, at one point in a dream I asked a character, "Is this one of those crazy Lariam dreams?" and he said, "Yes, this is a lariam dream."
Anywho, a girl who was on the program the year before us would wake up screaming in bed, sweating. They were ready to ship her home before they thought it might be the Lariam and took her off of it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The brilliant mathematician stopped taking anti-psychotic drugs in 1970, and then slowly recovered over two decades. This is much more the rule rather than the exception. In ''undeveloped'' countries, nearly two-thirds of schizophrenia patients are doing fairly well five years after initial diagnosis; about 40% have basically recovered. But in the USA and other developed countries, most patients become chronically ill.
The outcome differences are so marked that WHO concluded that living in a developed country is a ''strong predictor'' that a patient never will fully recover."
Hollywood is known to never let facts get in the road of a good story. Or would the lack of drugs be a better story? It is also worth while to check out Psych Watch for various items about psychiatry going down the tubes, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I speak from experience. A member of my family suffered episodes of bipolar disorder requiring several hospitalizations. A period of a few painful years and she stopped taking her medication but seemed okay. She was occasionally difficult to live with, but functional.
Flash forward ten years or so. A sudden, weeklong descent into mania was capped with psychotic delusions. Under delusions that the devil was after her, she ended up stabbing a family member in the chest with a kitchen knife while they slept (no permanent injury resulted, miraculously). This all happened so quickly... there simply wasn't time to get help. She'd seen a doctor already and begun taking an antipsychotic, but there wasn't nearly enough time for it to take effect.
Consequently, several years of her life were wasted in institutions even though, with medication, she almost immediately returned to the most functional I've ever seen her in. If you say you'd rather live in one of them than be depressed outside of them, I seriously question whether you've ever visited an institution. They are not nice places. I've been in them a lot in order to support my relative.
The meds might make you feel different. You may feel "off". Work with your doctor. Find one that works for you. You will get better acclimated to it. Frequently bipolars mistake the absence of mania for feeling "dulled". The thing to remember is: you are not the best judge of whether you need to take your meds or not. Your doctor is.
To the original poster: I'm sorry you and your sister will have to go through this. Some people respond very well to the medications; those medicines are getting better all the time. Hopefully your sister is one of those people. I would strongly suggest getting some counseling for yourself and the rest of your family, particularly if your sister turns out to not be one of the lucky ones. You will need it in order to be able to supply the support your sister deserves.
If you are interested in LSD, it has been studied. Remember it was discovered in the 30s and not made illegal until the late 60s or early 70s (I forget exactly).
I HIGHLY recomend "LSD Psychotherepy" by Stanislav Groff MD. It is THE work on the subject and a very aproachable book overall. It talks extensivly about his clinical work with LSD over the years and what techniques have found good results.
The overall process falls somewhere between ancient shamanic ritual and modern psychoterepy (and in a way, uses both). It is not seen as a treatment in and of itself so much as a part of a larger treatment plan involving more traditional counseling before and after the experience(s).
From my own LSD experiences I can see the value. LSD is not an escapists drug. I have seen people try to use it that way, and it can do that for a while. However, if you are fundamentally not happy, you can expect very difficult experiences. LSD will cause your inner world to project outward into your perceptions. If you emotionally feel like shit, then with LSD you will quite likely find yourself in a world of shit.
One of the more fascinating effects was noted with schizophrenia. Its been noted that often schizophrenics who are having an episode will "get worst before they get better". LSD experiences tend to make the episode get worst faster, but also, lessen the overall average length of the episode. (really read the book. Dr Groff is the authority)
As for flashbacks, they are normal. ANyone who says they have never had one either doesn't understand them, or is really abnormal. Ever felt deja-vu? guess what? Same thing. Flashbacks can be much more intense or vivid, but thats rare.
Now on topic again... I have seen people go through several psychotic breaks. Some drug related, some not so much. In all cases its been similar, but not in a way I can easily describe. Its an odd skill that you pick up from seeing people that you care about go through delusions. A way of relating to them and even helping them when you can (even if that means just steering them away from trouble long enough for them to get a grip or not get arrested)
You realise that knowing they are having a delusion doesn't really make the delusion any less real. You have to know that it IS real for them, and you have to respect that reality.
As for being on the other end, I don't know. I have philisophical problems with anti-psychotic drugs, and never mind their side effects (look at the side effects for thorazine sometime... it can (rearely) cause a permanent parkinsons syndrome after even a single dose!)
This is one of the reasons I liked Brillient mind. Wonderful movie and great story. He came to a realisation that alot of people don't get. The mind is very trainable. Just as a person can be trained to stop at a red light at 3 am on deserted city streets waiting for that green, just as a person can be trained to see the world in such black and white terms that they could blow themselves up with a crowd of their "enemys", so can a mind be trained to pay attention to things or see things that it would normally ignore.(or ignore things that it would normally see)
Thats the funny thing about lsd too. Many of the odd effects are just things that you stop ignoring. Like the little trails in your vision, or the faint echo of your voice off the walls, or the feeling of various parts of your body that you normally wouldn't be paying attention to.
Its just a matter of remembering, as long as you cankeep yourself healthy and alie and socialize with outher people to a level thats satisfactory for your own happiness, it doesn't matter how many deamons are running around or how many songs inanimate objects sing... its only a mental disorder if its causing a problem for you.
The hard part is learning to not let it cause a problem. As a friend of mine once said "sure after you have done as much acid as I have you might startto see ghost images in mirrors and all sorts of weird disturbances, but eventually you get used to them" (if we could only all be so calm about it, I think we would have less problems with people overall)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The sucess rate for so called "talking cures" is ~30% the sucess rate for drugs is ~60%.
I call bullshit - I'm pretty positive you're making those numbers up on the spot. This is an article about the efficacy of drugs versus therapy. What's more useful is the two therapies (drugs and psychotherapy) combined.
Also "talking cures can take years to reach that sucess rate, most drugs take weeks. Also "talking cures" are billed at $100 per hour, drugs, even expense ones are far far cheaper.
That might be true, about the drugs having an effect sooner - however, most psychotherapy is time-limited. Drugs often are prescribed for a lifetime. 24 weeks of psychotherapy once a week for an hour at $100 an hour begins to sound like a bargain in comparison to a lifetime of drugs. And more importantly, drugs have significant side effects.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"