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Avatars Help Schizophrenics Gain Control of Voices In Their Heads
Zothecula writes "Imagine if there was a voice in your head that regularly threatened to harm you or your loved ones, or that even ordered you to do so yourself. Awful as that would be, such auditory hallucinations are one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia, with approximately one in four sufferers continuing to experience them even after taking anti-psychotic drugs. Fortunately, scientists have recently helped some schizophrenics gain control of their condition, by turning those voices into interactive avatars."
"Danny isn't here, Mrs. Torrence"
People almost always hear the word "schizophrenia" mentioned when they hear of violence. Very few are actually violent. Studies have shown that about 5 percent schizophrenics are violent compared to 3 percent most other people.
This is something that I've done for a long time - I've acknowledged that each voice has its own personality and ways of interpreting the world, and as long as they are working together or making efforts to find common ground on a lot of issues, then you as a whole can function productively. I function well enough - I've even seen a psychiatrist and other mental health counselors, who have gone on to say that although having 'delusions'/hearing voices is unusual, the schizophrenia may be a misdiagnosis since it's usually disabling. It's only a mental disease if it causes harm to you or others.
I believe that certain people who are in pain, who feel they have been wronged, or are vengeful for past events, angry at the unfairness of their lives or are otherwise suffering from clinical depression, feel inclined to inflict this pain outwards as a coping mechanism. By far it's not the right direction, and I think that those neurotransmitters which give us our various moods and emotions are partially involved in the way that the voices interact with and direct you.
I'm not a violence-prone person, so they never tell me to hurt people, but they do cheer me on when I'm successful in a project, collaborate on the best course of action when I am worried or someone I care about is troubled, berate me (...and endlessly, at that) when I make mistakes or when I'm depressed, and such.
As one who hears voices, I agree on the point that you don't have to do what they tell you to. Even the tiniest bit of self-control takes precedent, and one would not jump off of a bridge if someone told them to unless they were very seriously mentally compromised.
From what I've been told, it's only diagnosed as 'schizophrenia' if the voices uncontrollably causes one to harm himself or others. I assume that some people do what the voices are obsessing over just to get them to shut up.
My doctor says it's OK for me to argue with myself as long as I wear a Bluetooth headset.
I've already read enough comments of people not knowing what or how schizophrenia is - it's not just voices (or always involving voices in general). The National Institute for Mental Health has this nice little bit to get you all up to a half-educated level:
- What are the symptoms of schizophrenia?
The symptoms of schizophrenia fall into three broad categories: positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive symptoms.
- Positive symptoms
Positive symptoms are psychotic behaviors not seen in healthy people. People with positive symptoms often "lose touch" with reality. These symptoms can come and go. [...] They include the following:
Hallucinations are things a person sees, hears, smells, or feels that no one else can see, hear, smell, or feel. "Voices" are the most common type of hallucination in schizophrenia. Many people with the disorder hear voices. [...]
Delusions are false beliefs that are not part of the person's culture and do not change. The person believes delusions even after other people prove that the beliefs are not true or logical. People with schizophrenia can have delusions that seem bizarre, such as believing that neighbors can control their behavior with magnetic waves. [...]
Thought disorders are unusual or dysfunctional ways of thinking. One form of thought disorder is called "disorganized thinking." This is when a person has trouble organizing his or her thoughts or connecting them logically. They may talk in a garbled way that is hard to understand. Another form is called "thought blocking. [...]
- Negative symptoms
Negative symptoms are associated with disruptions to normal emotions and behaviors. These symptoms are harder to recognize as part of the disorder and can be mistaken for depression or other conditions.
These symptoms include the following:
- "Flat affect" (a person's face does not move or he or she talks in a dull or monotonous voice)
- Lack of pleasure in everyday life
- Lack of ability to begin and sustain planned activities
- Speaking little, even when forced to interact.
People with negative symptoms need help with everyday tasks. They often neglect basic personal hygiene. This may make them seem lazy or unwilling to help themselves, but the problems are symptoms caused by the schizophrenia.
- Cognitive symptoms
Cognitive symptoms are subtle. Like negative symptoms, cognitive symptoms may be difficult to recognize as part of the disorder. Often, they are detected only when other tests are performed. Cognitive symptoms include the following:
- Poor "executive functioning" (the ability to understand information and use it to make decisions)
- Trouble focusing or paying attention
- Problems with "working memory" (the ability to use information immediately after learning it).
Edited down, for some brevity. Full text here
Cognitive symptoms often make it hard to lead a normal life and earn a living. They can cause great emotional distress.
Does anyone know why schizophrenia svoices always seem to try and cause harm? Why don't the voices tell you to clean your house, volunteer for something, build a house, do something good?
Because then it would be Divine revelations, well at least in modern times, in olden times Divine revelations were very sadistic and narcissistic.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That would suggest that the problem is due to a lack of myelin sheathing over the neurons. Which would cause the meatware equivalent of electrical engineering "cross-talk".
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I've known two people who have had it in a bad way, both had adverse reactions to dope (a good indicator), neither was violent although their behavior sometimes made people very uncomfortable. One of them went missing a decade ago in the bush, they found his car but he is still missing. Both of them had a very difficult time trying to lead a normal life. One contracted it in his late teens, the other in her mid-thirties, for both of them the onset came at the same time as an emotional crisis (breaking up with someone they loved).
I myself have had auditory and visual hallucinations several times ( from staying awake for 3-4 days ) the auditory ones happen when it's quiet and it's always someone saying my name. It's kinda freaky and fascinating at the same time because it doesn't sound like "a voice in your head", it sounds like someone is in the room with you. I can't imagine how freaky it must be to have full blown conversations with it on a regular basis.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So when I gave my wife's friend (whom I didn't know was schizophrenic) a half a joint to calm her down because she was upset, according to you she was acting when she went wandering around my yard pulling her hair out because she was planning to kill someone? Schizophrenia has both genetic and environmental causes, you have a much greater chance of having it if a relative has it, for example if your twin has it you chances of having it are 40%, However it normally doesn't appear until after puberty and it's onset is usually associated with an emotional crisis, such as a divorce. The woman mentioned above "didn't have it" until she was in her mid-thirties.
BTW: Your OBSERVABLE lack of empathy and anger about this could be some sort a mental illness, I'd get that checked out if I were you.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Posting as AC because I was diagnosed with schizophrenia a couple of years ago and lived with it long before I knew what it was.
Short answer: they don't.
These cases get more attention partially because the stories are more exciting and that's what grabs people's attention. You aren't going to see news articles about someone hallucinating about the sound of a window sliding closed, but you will hear about someone who ran into a highly populated area and wrecked havoc because the voices told them so. Auditory hallucinations can be anything from nonverbal sounds to compliments to insults to orders to gibberish.
That said, there is a tendency for the the voices to be negative. From my own experience with the disorder and from talking with a few others who have dealt with it, I believe that the negativity is brought on from whatever incident or on-going circumstance brought on the disorder. My psychiatrist told me that there are some people born with a genetic predisposition towards the disease, but that most of the time, there needs to be a traumatic event for the symptoms of the disease to manifest. This was certainly true in my case and after a few years of looking back and learning to cope, I can see how much of what the voices told me are related to my personal trigger event.
So that's my $0.02, but it's not quite the same in any two people so YMMV.
If you're interested in the subject, my therapist recommended the book Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, and Providers by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey. It's a little on the thick side, but it was incredibly helpful to me when I was coming to grips with my reality being turned on it's head.
Who knew that microsoft Bob was really just a manifestation of your inner dummy?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You joke, but I was on adage once and my date and I heard a guy arguing "on his cell phone". Turns out he didn't have a phone or an earpiece. Just crazy.
I'm surprised that doctors don't prescribe cells or smartphones to their patients. That way, instead of people thinking they were psychotic, they would be thought of as cool or important.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Abraham heard the voice of god. Or he may have been suffering from a disorder such as schizophrenia. Which is more likely... .
If my guess is correct, I wish he had had such an avatar. It would have saved the world quite a bit of misery now.
Bert
Does anyone know why schizophrenia svoices always seem to try and cause harm? Why don't the voices tell you to clean your house, volunteer for something, build a house, do something good?
The voices always tell me what to do...
Turn right - 400 yards.
Merge onto the freeway ahead.
Exit freeway ahead - Exit number 102
Prepare to turn left.
TBH, I have had an experience with voices. I had never experienced anything like it before.
Everyone has internal voices that represent different aspects or masks of their being - part of the exploration and learning in life is recognizing these different aspects of yourself and learning to join them together. It's sort of the process of satori, or enlightenment, IMO. One of those tasks is to unite all aspects of yourself into a single being while simultaneously still possessing understanding from different points of view.
Anyway, those are not the voices I'm talking about. I have those, I recognize them as parts of me. The real voices I heard were something... different.
It happened on Jan. 2 of this year. I had been suffering a longstanding crisis (was keeping a secret on owing lots of money from someone; about 2 years kept as it got progressively worse) on top of an emotional argument (close friend threatened to let the secret loose if I didn't, or to never talk to me again until I did). All of this is on top of many other stressors: I'm an addict and still dealing with that, I have an inverse ego (inferiority complex) and suffer from depression and generalized anxiety my entire life. It includes a long list of non-accomplishments like not having a proper education, dysfunctional family that never socialized, avoidant personality disorder tied into using substance abuse as an escape, having no friends, no job, no career, no money, no driver's license or insurance, no goals or plans, etc... room and board was supplied, everything else was up to me and I kept avoiding everything. Oh, and I got this other.. thing I have to deal with my whole life that's also very stressful and personal.
So all of that stress, then my friend saying he wasn't going to talk to me anymore unless I told a certain someone a necessary secret (my friend was trying to help me, but it made me want to hurt him) so I relapsed after almost two years off of it just to hurt my friend..
Yeah. that night I had a psychotic break.
I can't really explain it. You can't understand unless it happens to you. While I heard the voices distinctly in my head, I couldn't say if I really heard them with my ears... but it was definitely very different from anyone's normal, everyday, internal conflicts and discussions that are part of the human condition. No. This was different.
I've never had or exhibited schizophrenia, a psychotic break, or hearing voices. Through this unique experience, I came to see how such a thing can be extremely convincing. I can't convince you of what they told me, because when I was told a lot of these things there were certain other signs that came with them. I didn't find out later that one aspect that can come up in someone who has schizophrenia is the ability/mental illness to see signs in everything. Suddenly everything seems to _mean_ something, to correlate with what the voices are saying.
I don't know how detailed I want to get into this, because it's very embarrassing and personal. There were two different, but related, experiences that night. The first .. well... it was about...
I could hear a whole roomful of people very clearly and closely, as if we were all trapped in an elevator or something. They were all people from the future and said that they could only contact someone in the past under very specific conditions. Every time they have contacted someone in the past for help... didn't work. Their argument:
The survivors of planet Earth were all in one spaceship trapped in orbit around Earth. It was really the future (I forget the year but it was like 52xx) and the 'reality' I had experienced my whole life was the past - the Matrix, you could say... it was just an entertainment device, but my real self was trapped inside while my body was comatose in the giant spaceship in the future, and they couldn't get me to come out.
They said that Earth's orbit had been interrupted by a giant black hole (I know, it shouldn't be able to happen) and the pl