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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 anyone*.
*ftfy. - I think it is what they call the qualia problem.
However it still might be useful in a similar sense as lenses that hamper your eyesight to resemble a cataract. It gives the researcher an idea how senses of such an individual are altering his/her perception of the world.
It would be good to have an actual schizophrenic use the product and confirm if this is even remotely similar to what they really experience. Until then, its just what some think their experience is.
True, but short of inducing schizophrenia and then being able to cure it instantly, this might be close enough.
Indeed. Just because the simulation is imperfect, that doesn't make it worthless. Schizophrenia affects more than two million Americans. It is the most common permanently debilitating mental disorder. The cost in treatment, foregone income, etc. is over $100B annually in America. It is a leading contributor to homelessness, criminality, and other social disorders. But is also deeply misunderstood. Many people confuse it with split personality disorder, which is unrelated and rare.
So why does the average person need to understand schizophrenia? Because they can vote. Many of our policies toward homelessness and crime, are politically popular but totally misguided. Homeless is not caused by "lack of houses", and homeless shelters don't work well with disruptive people that shout back at the voices in their head. Our prisons are filled with people being "punished" who see no connection between their actions and the consequences.
I had a cousin which schizophrenia. He told me that the best way to understand it was to think about waking from a vivid dream. For about 10 seconds, you are confused about what was the dream and what is reality. Then your mind clears, and you realize that the dream made no sense whatsoever, and it seems crazy that your mind ever considered it to be real. Except if you have schizophrenia, your mind doesn't clear, and the crazy dreams don't go away when you wake up. My cousin committed suicide when he was 29.
Come up with a way you think you could test this and publish it somewhere. What measurable thing would exist in that case but not if it were untrue?
If schizophrenic people just had stronger or "extra" perceptions, that hypothesis could be tested:
1. If several were in the same place, they should all perceive the same extra sensory occurrences at the same time.
2. The extra information would likely be useful, so schizophrenic people would be more successful.
3. There is no reason that the extra information should distort their interpretation of "normal" reality in harmful ways, just add to it.
None of these are true.
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.