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Inside the Mind of a Schizophrenic Through Virtual Reality
blottsie writes Viscira produces videos and technology simulations for the healthcare industry, and the project I tested called "Mindscape" was created for a pharmaceutical company that wanted to give potential clients insight into what some schizophrenic patients might feel like in a real-life scenario. Unlike audio tests or videos that show you a first-person perspective of schizophrenic experiences, Viscira's demonstration uses the Oculus Rift headset and is entirely immersive. You can look around at each individual's face, and up and down the hallway. Walk through the elevator, and hear voices that appear to be coming from both strangers and your own head.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot "get into the mind" of a schizophrenic. Even with the Oculus Rift.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
What if there were beings or entities that existed just outside our range of perception, that we are not aware of?
Much like a dog whistle, which humans cannot hear. What if some people were 'sensitive' to other energies - sounds, lights, etc. that were outside the normal realm of human perception?
What if schizophrenic people weren't "hallucinating", so to speak, but were able to actually "perceive" these energies or beings?
Ahh, what then?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Timothy Leary and other researchers used LSD when it was still legal, to induce temporary psychosis in themselves and other clinicians.
They did so to better understand the mindscape of psychotic patients. A schizophrenic is not psychotic all the time, but the brain's full tilt mode is reportedly really close to what can be achieved by consumption of LSD. Recreational consumers of LSD call this state a bad trip.
Sadly, since LSD is one of the "bad" drugs that needs to have "war" waged against it, clinical experiments with it have all but ceased. Now, if you want to explore its potential as a pharmaceutical substance, you have to join the CIA (or other shady organization). I doubt they're working on helping schizophrenics though.
Those psychomimetic effects aren't necessarily interpreted as a "bad trip".
Many people with schizophrenia don't consider it a "bad trip" either. By the time they are diagnosed, many of them have already lost their friends, alienated their families, have no job, and little hope of having a meaningful life. For them, reality is shit. But inside their their own mind, they are the king of the world. So why should they go through the effort of conscientiously taking medication that converts them from a king to a lonely homeless loser? This is something that makes treating schizophrenia difficult: treatment makes things get worse, sometimes much worse, before things get better. It is explained in the book The Seduction of Madness.
About a decade ago, a one-shot FX series called Dirt came out. It was about the celebrity tabloid journalism industry, I thought it was pretty interesting even though I'm not into that kind of stuff. One of the more interesting parts of it was that there was a schizophrenic photographer, and they did a couple segments from his perspective during periods when he was on and off his meds. I have no idea if their portrayal is how it acutally is, but I thought it matched what we've been described to as the symptoms. When the show was through his perspective, it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't real sometimes.