Schizophrenia videos

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Something strange was going on over there alrighty.
They did have schizophrenia in the family they talked about it all the time and a heightened sense of paranoia is sometimes a part of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses as well. I am pretty sure what was going on over there had a lot to do with the mom's relentless paranoia.
I even get paranoid myself sometimes but I despise it because I know it is sooooo useless to be paranoid it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever than to mess up the life of the person who is paranoid. Whatever is going to happen will happen regardless of that paranoid feeling so why indulge it? Sure it can inspire some preventative measures but night after night of paranoia is a bit much. Too much.
No sense on dwelling on the past though...

On a side note:
Yes, totally agreeing, some fear is very much needed to alert a person to danger. Some autistic (across the spectrum) people lack that 'sensible' part of fear and thus get in trouble/hurt/killed/etc.

An autistic kid or adult may just run right into cars or remain on the streets (for whatever reasons) while there are cars all around them. And of course drowning is a big one. Why consider the danger of the open sea or the pool when the whole situation doesn't ring as dangerous in one's mind?

And heights! Just imagine not fearing falling down and getting killed by the crash from the top-level of a building, a baloney, a tree etc. You'd maybe tempted to climb on everything, because that's a quite fascinating thing to do. Even after you fall and get hurt (badly), you may just don't feel fear.

I am not sure if fear and paranoia are quite the same. Paranoia is that uncomfortable state of mind; the feeling that something bad will happen, someone will do something awful to you, a disaster will happen. It's this relentless unease, sometimes without any cause.
Fear, on the other hand, happens when one realizes there is danger. One can have fear and paranoia at the same time, I suppose. I think of them as two different things. Fear is this sudden jolt of anxiety and dread when I realize something bad will definitely happen. I am in some kind of danger. Paranoia is me sitting on the couch thinking about all the awful things others want to do to me and feeling very uneasy about it. Things that may or may not be true. Plots that may or may not be imagined. I doubt it serves any good.

I'm only educated on the basics of this, so I don't know of how many different professional opinions there are on this and what's currently trendy or not...

The relation of fear and paranoia depend on whether paranoia is focussed onto a specific target which reminds me a lot of phobias or whether it presents itself in the state you describe in which I think it resembles how people describe anxiety.

In the end, these 3 are said to be related, phobias being a subtype of anxiety and paranoia being a special form of anxiety and/or excessive deluded fear. A form of delusion in thought-process and in fear that is, just like anxiety, not necessarily related to truly dangerous outward occurrences.

And there are indeed (I think a lot of) people who started with plain anxiety, maybe social anxiety of the type many autistic people know and then later progress into for example paranoias.

Situational fear is different from forms of anxiety in so far as that this kind of fear as a reaction to danger is related to what happens around you. Rather than worrying about what might happen or is happening and feeling, fear also directly induces the famous fight-or-flight response.

Is important to differentiate between paranoid schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder...

Sora,
That's a much more detailed, precise explanation:)

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 18 Sep 2008, 12:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Callista, it's a part of many disorders. It's a bi-product of altered brain systems. Paranoia is supposedly an unhealthy symptom. I kind of agree with that but it's debatable depending on who has the opinion on it. I find the paranoid feeling to be very uncomfortable, exhausting and an unproductive waste of time. Not to mention stressing.

By definition, paranoia is fear that doesn't have a logical reason for existing. Something like that can't help you; it can only stress you out. So yes, it's always negative.

Fear is not always negative, though. Ever notice how quickly you move and how much you're capable of when you're afraid? That's productive fear.

I've noticed it seems to often come from a particular trouble with reasoning, in people I know who are prone to paranoia (whether diagnosed with anything or not).

I've wondered at times if the emotion is due to the erroneous conclusions more than the other way around. I don't know how to describe it, but some people seem to make giant leaps of logic. Point those leaps in the wrong direction, and you get paranoia or other extremely-false beliefs. Some amount of making those leaps seems to be normal, but then there's some dividing line eventually between illogical and very illogical I guess.

One trait I've seen for instance, is that if you give a person in that state of mind evidence against their beliefs, then rather than going back and checking their beliefs, they will invent a convoluted, sometimes impossible, explanation, that affirms their beliefs, or at least in their mind does. (Again, some of that trait is considered normal, a lot of it all at once seems not to be.) It's like that "go back and make sure this compares well to reality" thought process isn't there.

Also, it seems to involve some more extreme amount of quantity and unusualness of faulty assumptions.

An example would be something like the assumption, "If someone didn't hit me, then I wouldn't have a bruise." Well, actually, there are a lot of reasons for having a bruise. Maybe you bumped into something. Maybe you fell down. Most people would not carry that assumption in their head. But some people not only have assumptions like that, but utterly refuse to change them under any circumstance. That means every time that person gets a bruise, they assume someone hit them, so then they try to figure out who, exactly, hit them.

Except generally if a person's doing that enough to be considered paranoid they string a bunch of those assumptions out in a row, rather than just one, such that they see a bruise and go more like "If I have a bruise, then someone hit me. If someone hit me, then they did it because someone told them to. If they did it because someone told them to, then there is a conspiracy going on. If there is a conspiracy going on, then aliens must be involved. If aliens are involved, they are disguising themselves as humans." Except they leap to that conclusion so fast, that they see a bruise on themselves, and an instant later start loudly accusing the person next to them of being an alien.

And so I do wonder if the fear is the byproduct of thinking that way, or the thinking that way is a byproduct of fear, or what. I also wonder if this is that adaptive 'quick thinking/decision-making in a scary situation' mode gone extremely awry. It could be that to produce that kind of quick thinking in a crisis, the brain has to dispense with some intermediate steps that normally protect people at least a bit from their own false assumptions.

I have experienced what it is like to have paranoia, after my friends got me incredibly stoned on hash and buds and hash oil. It was not something I could control, it was that reality was distorted. Even when people tried to reassure me my mind told me that they were lying to me, or that they just didnt know the truth. I can't imagine how terrible it must be to feel like that 24/7, to have that as your reality from the moment you wake up till the moment you go to bed.

I think there needs to me more information out there on the link between schizophrenia and marijuana use.

I don't believe it's right to show nay group in such a way.

It could be a bit like the fear you experience when you're dreaming. Nightmares are essentially vivid hallucinations, after all; and when your logic shuts down for the night, you tend to skip from topic to topic. Whenever you try to say something and remember it after you wake up, it doesn't make much sense. Neither does the plot your mind creates for your dreams, most of the time. You reason in ways that you wouldn't when you were awake... you know things you have no reason to know... you draw conclusions that are totally wrong... and your emotions can latch onto anything and feel like anything.

I'm not saying schizophrenia's a sleep disorder. Just that it might involve some of the same "shutting down the logic" mechanisms that happen when you sleep.

What I don't get about paranoia is that if someone is posing actual threats and it's not some delusion people will say the person is being paranoid.

Figure of speech. They mean, "You're worrying about this more than you need to." Like they figure that it doesn't make sense to take the threats seriously. But in that situation I don't think it's paranoia, not if threats have been made as any more than obvious jokes.

The first and second videos were interesting and IMO the 2nd one sends a 'hopeful' message about the disease. The 'Artsy' one didn't have any educational quality to it at all and I kept expecting to see Marilyn Manson in it somewhere. I didn't watch the 4th one, figuring that the videos must have been arranged from best-first to worst-last.

the first one - the guy was so clearly very ill at the time of the video - I wondered why they were attempting to have a rational conversation with him. I suppose there must have been a point.
My sister recently started to hallucinate, have delusions of grandeur and other frightening delusions. She was not depressed at the time. This episode was treated with drugs.
It recently happened again. So I guess she would fit the criteria for Schizophrenia, not sure.

But she is as pretty much the same as anyone else - when she isn't unwell. Maybe .... she does not have schizophenria i don't know.

Working in a hospital I have seen the way people with this diagnosis have hurt themselves in very life threatening ways when unwell. One lovely lady had a wound from one side of her neck to the other, she was a very lovely person when I meet her. When well these people seemed completely normal and nice.