Does my 12 year old girl have psychological issues?

Page 5 of 5 [ 76 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Ettina
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 13 Jan 2011
Age: 34
Gender: Female
Posts: 3,971

07 Dec 2015, 6:31 pm

psychotic_jester wrote:
Ticker wrote:
0_equals_true wrote:
Contrary to popular belief hearing voices is not enough to get a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is much more about disordered thinking, but it can vary quite a bit.


Do you have schizophrenia? If so can you educate us all on it? I have heard and read such contradictory things on schizo that it might be nice to hear from a bonefide person with schizophrenia what happens or what it is like. And is it related to DID or dissociation disorders?


I know you weren't asking me but I already kind of went over this so I feel compelled to answer. I'm schizoaffective though, so I'm part schizophrenic. I can still give you a insiders view to some extent.

Let's just get the DID part out of the way. as I said before, they are completely unrelated. It's just a common mis-conception mostly due to false info in the media and movies. DID rarely is co-morbid with schizophrenia, but like anything else, yes it's possible. Maybe understanding the difference between dissociative disorders and schizophrenia will help explain. Dissociative disorders are actually related to anxiety(usually). A traumatic event occurs and as a result of the brain not being able to cope with the event or memory of it, the person experiences dissociative symptoms. It can also occur when the person is under alot of stress their mind just sort of leaves them for a while, it shuts down to reboot so to speak, mean while the body goes on functioning. This is often what happens in "dissociative amnesia". So essentially what I'm saying is dissociation is a coping mechanism for the brain under heavy stress, it's not genetic, it's a learned behavior...Ok so that gives you a rough idea of dissociative disorders.

Now schizophrenia on the other hand is genetic. It's a brain disorder. Basically the main symptoms are grossly disorganized behavior and thought patterns, paranoid or bizarre delusions, and/or hallucinations. Not all of these symptoms are always present.

Basically the best way to describe schizophrenia is this:
Imagine an old style switchboard and telephone operator where they have the wires and they have to connect the incoming call to the outgoing one. The operator in the brain frequently connects the incoming wire to the wrong outgoing call. Thus the thoughts and perceptions get misplaced and aren't organized correctly. This is the most common problem that causes delusions. What happens is when the brain organizes the thoughts it's processed in the wrong order.

For example, a guy I read about read this article about a man being arrested by the fbi in the morning. Later on that afternoon he was walking down the street on his way to ask this girl out on a date. People were tapping their foot and fingers on a table and his brain interpreted this to mean that they approved of what he was doing. On his way however he saw a couple men in suits and a helicopter flying over head, his brain connected this with his earlier experiences in the day because of the faulty processing and he believed that the people were FBI trying to stop him from asking out the girl.

That's just one example of delusional behavior resulting from the thought disorder part. I think the confusion with DID comes from the idea that sometimes schizos have behaviorral changes that almost seem like a second personality due to control from a hallucination(auditory or visual). The schizo is still completely aware of everything however and can control their actions if they want to. DID on the other hand, it's not control from a hallucination, A second personality literally takes over the body for a period of time and the person is completely unaware of whats going on and has no control. So it's similar in a way but not really...

Hope that kind of helps?