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Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Washington University has found that the condition known as schizophrenia is not just a single disease, but instead a collection of eight different disorders. For years, researchers struggled to understand the genetic basis of schizophrenia. This new method was able to isolate and identify the different conditions (each with its own symptoms) currently classified under the same heading (abstract, full text). "In some patients with hallucinations or delusions, for example, the researchers matched distinct genetic features to patients' symptoms, demonstrating that specific genetic variations interacted to create a 95 percent certainty of schizophrenia. In another group, they found that disorganized speech and behavior were specifically associated with a set of DNA variations that carried a 100 percent risk of schizophrenia." According to one of the study's authors, "By identifying groups of genetic variations and matching them to symptoms in individual patients, it soon may be possible to target treatments to specific pathways that cause problems."
If it is embedded in DNA, is it hereditary?
If it is, I hope it does not bring back Eugenics or the forced sterilization practices of the early 19th century. That didn't end well on several fronts.
I wonder if the depression and anxiety are more side effects of the medications used to treat schizophrenia, or effects of trying to avoid discrimination against people with schizophrenia due to its misrepresentation by Hollywood, as a recent Cracked article suggests.
No, he's thinking of multiple personality disorder, which is extremely rare and much different than schizophrenia. It's confused with schizophrenia because of the hallucinatory voices common in schizophrenia, but those "voices" aren't different personalities of the afflicted; they're just hallucinations. Multiple personality disorder is the split personality one -- the person is basically like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, although the personalities don't have to be good/evil or working at cross purposes to each other, and there can be more than two.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Dogs have had many more generations of breeding to tailor their responses to us than we have had to them - something like 10x as many generations, since they breed about 10x quicker than humans. So they can read us much better than we can read them - they've self-selected for that ability, since the ones that can read us best know best how to suck up to us and get us to feed and shelter them and pick up their poop. Todays dogs are specialists - and their specialty is humans.
Given this, dogs are probably better judges of people than we are.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I've always wondered whether someone experiencing audio hallucinations they couldn't distinguish from real sounds could use software as a prosthetic. Say, write a program to continuously sample sound, display the past 5 minutes or so of waveform history on-screen, do realtime speech recognition, and annotate the waveform display with a transcript of what it thought it heard... so if they thought they heard something really disturbing, they could look at the display to see whether there was an organized waveform a few moments earlier, and listen to it again if they wanted to be sure..
If someone with schizophrenia did that, would it help? Or would it stimulate the development of new neural pathways & eventually make matters worse by inducing visual hallucinations on top of the auditory ones in an attempt to bring their physical perception of reality in line with their mental one?
That would likely help. For those that don't know if the hallucinations are real. However, the problem with hallucinations is that they'll drive you nuts even if you know they're not real. I remember the hallucinations would get so loud that I'd yell at them even though I knew they weren't real because I could barely hear anything else.
The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick. They need to start treating us like we're real people that just happen to have a different sense of reality. Trying to force us to buy into a reality that's every bit as fake as the one they're trying to get us to give up is ludicrous. It's not curable per se, but if we're given the tools to evaluate things for ourselves, the brain will eventually rewire itself in a way that's more functional.
Ultimately, people need to accept the symptoms as symptoms. Trying to fight the disorder is a losing battle. Eventually I got to the point where I missed the voices and started to intentionally cause the hallucinations. Before too long I was having trouble maintaining them and that aspect of the disorder was more or less gone.
The rest is really psycho-social education. It's not that schizophrenics can't be treated or virtually cured, it's that the mental health establishment makes more money with ineffectual treatments than it does for treatments that would improve the situation. There's some very good work being done in the neurosciences that could make a huge difference. Unfortunately, it would put psychologists completely out of business as it requires work from psychiatrists and therapists, but not psychologists.
From the people I've known with schizophrenia (three diagnosed, a couple others probably undiagnosed) the audio hallucinations can either be recognized as hallucinations, or accepted as real, depending on the severity of the disorder at the time. If they are in a less severe mode they usually recognize the voices are not real (not to imply they can stop or control them). The recorder would do no good there. In more severe conditions, they may be unable to tell the difference between the hallucinations and reality, and the hallucinations can be not just auditory but also visual and (most importantly) cognitive. With cognitive delusions, reasoning capacity goes out the window - any kind of "evidence" presented to them would be disregarded. In the really bad cases, when they are ducking out of view of windows so the snipers outside can't get a clear shot, you won't be able to get them to look at any computer program really.