Have you ever met a schizophrenic person?

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My uncle has schizophrenia. He doesn't have it as badly as he had it when he was younger though.

What is scitzophreinia? I can't spell...

beentheredonethat: it has always bothered me that medicine failed her so utterly!

Unfortunately, medicine is no guarantee. I have encountered a number of individuals who identify medication as being helpful to them but individual mileage varies. As others have noted, medication also comes with some very heavy side effects, including death. If one can get by without it, I'm inclined to think it's very much to their benefit.

blackdove: ty. for your contribution! very insightful. i will bookmark that page!!

Feel free to not only bookmark it, but to share it with any others you think may benefit. I don't know if the routine is the same with something like autism or asperger's but too often, I'm encountering schizophrenics who are told that they will never recover. This is simply not true. Many, many people have recovered. Ironically, the recovery rate is far higher in developing countries who do not have the financial resources to provide hospitalization and neuroleptic medication -- as high as 90% in some places! This comes as a great surprise to many in the developed nations. Here we have been taught/told that schizophrenia is primarily biomedical so we can't imagine someone recovering without the talismans of the biomedical model. Various theories have been floated as to why this is so ranging from less stigma to greater family support. Regardless, it is abundantly clear that other cultures and settings have some valuable lessons for us in regard to schizophrenia and recovery. Whether or not those same lessons are transferable to those who suffer with other ailments... I don't know.

Anyway, it's not my intent to derail the thread. The topic was on schizophrenia so I thought I'd pop in and share a few words in that vein. Those who wish to know more are likely those who carry the diagnosis or care for someone who does. If they choose to do so, they are welcome to visit my blogs -- I have a lot of information there for them, the majority of it from clinicians in the field.

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Spooky...

The definition and interpretation of "schizophrenia" and/or "psychosis" varies by culture, RedMage. The presumed causes are so numerous, it's positively mind-boggling: Ref: Presumed Causes of Schizophrenia.



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My coworker's son had it. She'd actually gotten him a job at the hospital cafeteria (before he started having problems) and he seemed like a very nice, albeit unmotivated, young man.

A couple of years later, he started showing symptoms and things went downhill from there. First, he had his car repaired and accused the mechanic of implanting mind-reading rays into the dashboard. He then got into the nasty habit of accusing his coworkers of reading his thoughts and assaulting them. He also started stealing his mother's xanax and other stuff. After that, he hopped a bus to Montana to see his older brother - thinking that there were no mind-reading forces in Montana.

Anyway, his brother and father pursuaded him to return to Utah. Around the same time, the younger brother (who still lived with mom) got into some trouble. The court appointed a "family preservation" therapist to help the family. She saw the family as being in crisis in part due to the schizophrenic son, so she was going to mandate that he get treatment or be forced to move out (he was an adult by this time, and the minor was her main reason for being involved). I don't really know what ever happenned, as I quit that job right as all this was going on.

I have interacted with schizophrenic patients in my jobs in the hospital as well as at the insurance plan that I now work for. I've interacted with enough of them at this point that I can safely say that they aren't all the same, so I can't give you a one-size-fits-all assessment of how I feel about schizophrenics. No different from ASD's really.

Spiritual_emergency: What happened, anyway, to the idea that hallucinations were the shades of things that are actually happening to the patient? Seeing people coming out of the walls is like the feeling that someone might have that real people in their life who are giving them trouble are omnipresent and have this sort of reach that transcends the material. I never completely dismiss the idea that what they are seeing is real, but I think that operant conditioning creates the mental situation and the hallucinations illustrate to the conscious mind what is happening, even if in a cryptic manner.

The mind-reading rays that Janicka mentioned could easily represent forces of social control, again, a visualization of something that the person has been trained to see that isn't "really" there, but is there in a "spiritual reality", something that I got fed up with a long time ago. The religion that I was part of seemed to want me to see and hear things that weren't here.

Anyway, Spiritual, I think that the reason that people recover better in countries that don't have treatment is because the treatment exacerbates the patient's problems. So does the inability to retreat to the forest to rest and meditate.

"Presumed" causes? Their meaning would be much more clear if they said "hypothetical." Correlation is not causation, either.

GOD, it would be NICE if they could somehow give the people the ability to tell real from imagined, raise the intelligence a few dozen points, and give them a good memory. I wonder how the world would change. Alas, I don't think we should even breath a word of such an idea to a researcher. They probably could never do it anyway.

Steve[/quote]


Steve

Your quote fits PERFECTLY for my feelings about the majority of humanity.If only we could do this for ALL of humanity,especially those who appear to have the most power over defining "reality" and locking up people whose response to the absurdity of human behavior/belief systems is an ascent into psychosis(which seems to me to be a natural response).

An interesting perspective on "Mental Health" was written by R.D.Lang,called ..."The Politics of Experience",I dont agree with every word in it but it was a very refreshing look at the very concept of "Mental Illness" and I think aplicable to those of us with AS,or other "alternative perceptions".

My aunt is "Schizo" she dosen't act crazy but she's very rude.

I haven't met anyone who was schizophrenic. I did however see a homeless guy walking down the street shouting and he seemed pretty unpredictable so it was kind of scary. I do feel sorry for those who are homeless because they often were mentally ill before and becoming homeless certainly doesn't help their situation. I think there needs to be better support services out there.

My father and my uncle are both schizophrenic.

My dad used to wake me up at night to show me lights in the sky, which he thought were experimental aircraft or alien ships. He also used to gawk at the radio towers around here. They have red, flashing lights on them, to prevent aircraft from hitting them. He never seemed to make that connection, because he was convinced that the lights were to warn aircraft away from something else, almost as if the towers served no other purpose.

My uncle was convinced that he'd solved some age-old mathematical problem. He decided that he knew how to mathematically turn a circule into a square. I started arguing about it with him when I was about 10, but he'd never give in. "You're just a child. What do you know?" His solution was actually pretty amusing. Pie times the radius squared, squared... lol

I went through a phase of heavy drug abuse(clean now for nearly a year), and I experienced full-blown amphetamine (and probably marijuana) psychosis, the former being clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia(though patients tend to be more aware of what they're going through). Let me tell you, it wasn't fun.

My first full-blown psychotic episode was awful. I could hear everything my friends were saying, but it had an entirely different meaning to me. I might hear, "Yeah, let's go to the golf course and whack some balls." I heard every word of it, correctly, but my mind assigned a different meaning to it. From my perspective, it was clear as daylight that they were talking about taking me out to the golf course and beating the living crap out of me. In fact, it was so blatantly clear and obvious that I couldn't comprehend any other meaning.

For about 4-5 straight days, my entire reality was warped like that. I even saw, quite clearly, my friends taunting me with knives. In truth, I suspect that they were just showing them to each other(because guys like to do that), but it had an entirely different meaning for me. I asked my friend if I could see the knife, and when he gave it to me, I started waving it around menacingly.

After realizing what was going on, I gave the knife back and locked myself in my room for 2-3 days.

And I DID feel like they could all read my mind the entire time. It felt like they knew every little dirty secret about me.

I was never the same. For the past 2-3 years, I've been struggling to regain my trust in my own thoughts and perceptions. I second guess everything, and it feels like there's no regaining what I lost that day. That condition persisted for over a year, with varying intensity, but luckily it was never that intense again.

I can't imagine what it would be like having episodes like that all the time.