Schizophrenia videos

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Well, lots of times schizophrenia is episodic. You only have symptoms sometimes, and then they go away for a while. Some people have a single episode and then never again.

But bipolar disorder is the same way--episodic--and can also involve psychotic symptoms. So maybe it was that. Grandiosity is very characteristic of mania, for one; but then it can happen in schizophrenia too, so it's still a toss-up.

And then there's schizoaffective disorder, with characteristics of both...

Differential diagnosis. Don'tcha love it?

...the third video made me cry. I don't know if it was the music or what happened, but I just jumped and started crying. I lower my head in shame...

I have a friend who told me once that she was schizophrenic, but I've honestly never seen it in her at all. That isn't to say that she doesn't have it, I don't think she'd lie, just that I don't know her well enough I suppose. For a few years before I heard about Aspergers I kind of hovered over the idea of schizophrenia. It didn't seem quite right, but at the time there was no other explanation for my behavior and I fit a lot of the symptoms.

I still have moments that just seem so like schizophrenia that it freaks me out, I'm terrified of it getting worse. I've already had to deal with serial rapists hiding behind my shower curtain, I'd have a heart attack if I had anything worse then that. (For a few months I was very convinced that someone was hiding behind my shower curtain waiting to rape and kill me...those were fun times, luckily it's passed now). Now the only thing is I'll suddenly have this moment where there's a man glaring at me through my window. I don't physically see it, but I can perfectly picture it and at the time it's really all the same. There's always this moment of absolute panic and then I usually have to take a few deep breaths and talk myself out of it. I've also learned it helps not to look at the window the man is apparently at. There's also the famous "Why is everyone staring at me?" moments in large crowds. Everyone is out to get me you see. Even my mom noticed that one, and she's the type of mother who insists that nothing is wrong with her darling angel. I'm fine once I get home but every so often it's nothing but, "Why does everyone hate me!?"

...and this is long. Sorry for the long post...thing here. I started typing and it just didn't occur to me to stop.

That's very interesting. There have been a couple times I got to be paranoid, though more often it's something between anxiety and paranoia. Such as, I would be overly-afraid of someone breaking in, to the point that every little sound "must" be someone coming to harm me, there "must" be someone in the house or the room even if I just checked and there's no one there. It felt very much like I was between sleep and awake (which makes sense, as I was sleep deprived at the time).

I also wonder about possible connection between these anxiety/paranoia episodes (mostly it's anxiety, but sometimes crosses into full-blown paranoia, such as when I was convinced my sister's boyfriend was plotting to kill me) and a sleep disorder I have, where I couldn't fall asleep before midnight, and due to school schedules would only get minimal sleep.

Because these anxiety and paranoia episodes only would occur during spring and to some degree summer, and something to do with sensitivity to light influences the sleep disorder (being hypersensitive to light at nighttime, and hyposensitive in the morning). That and the direct effect of sleep deprivation, though I was also sleep deprived in fall and winters (though not in summers), and yet didn't experience this then.

Speaking of which, I should get to sleep.

I am currently hearing voices. They usually say, "You're a freak," "I hate you," and "There's a reason for that." They rarely tell me to do anything. They just seem to hate me.

A few points:

1. As someone who is hearing voices, I feel that the most important improvement psychiatrists can make in their treatment is to make an effort to understand the difference between having a delusion and acting on a possibility. Just because I take precautions against possible plotting doesn't mean I truly believe that they are out there! The next important point they need to realize is that patients care more about whether they are being plotted against when they don't have boyfriends or girlfriends (or some other stabilizing source of pleasure).

If I had a girlfriend, would I care about whether people were producing independent films about me? No, I would not.

It almost seems as if psychiatrists have fun calling us "irrational" and "delusional" in the same way they'd laugh at a man falling down on television. They want to think we're stupid in some way. I honestly worry that treating diagnosed schizophrenics like they're "stupid" may be contributing to violence.

2. I'd also like to add that there are at least three definitions of paranoia. One is extreme distrust, another is irrational distrust, and the third involves persecutory delusions. Some of the greatest philosophers have been paranoid in the first sense (and they call it skepticism) without being paranoid in the second or third sense. To equivocate on this word would be a real insult to some people, including me.

3. About the videos, the first patient's thought did not appear disorganized to me in any real way. All he did was play with his hair.

4. His comment about sperm and eggs (and the mind's reducibility to a single atom), immediately preceded by the psychiatrist's comment that his thought is disorganized, seems similar to beliefs in pantheism and a World-Will, the idea that there is an intelligent spirit governing the behavior of ordinary matter. The psychiatrist may not have known that this is actually a sophisticated view of the natural world that was endorsed by some of the most influential figures of history, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Einstein.

5. I think psychiatrists should be careful to distinguish disorganized thought from disorganized speech. You can have the latter without the former.

6. His reference to God after his comment about being stabbed in the back, which likely wasn't literal, could have been metaphorical or pantheistic.

7. In the second video, the patient says that "stigma is usually why patients refuse treatment." I want to add that the reason I refuse treatment for the voices is because almost all the medications perscribed are dopamine blockers and reduce the function of the brain's pleasure center. For that reason alone I don't trust the medication.

Re. hearing voices--Simple auditory hallucinations, without command hallucinations, without delusions, without disorganization, seem to be pretty benign. Depends on what else they come with, I guess; you can have that kind of "you're horrible" hallucination in major depression. But just voices... sounds like you could cope with that, if it weren't too distracting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement

The first patient was very disorganized on all levels, are you kidding me? His speech was disorganized, his movements: disorganized. How could one not notice?

I am not schizophrenic, and have never really known anyone who is, but I hate the media for the way they portray all sorts of mental illness.

Doesn't mean he has a thinking disorder.

He had what a psychiatrist would label thought disorder. Like, when he said the picture had a headache.
Plus, he had some disorganized behviour, the hair twisting, for example.

A Beautiful Mind
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBjVbtvNGIM[/youtube]

One of the best films ever made that shows schizophrenia from the mind of one suffering from it... you, and John Nash. After you see it you'll know what it's like.

I kinda figured he was stimming because of the Haldol...

"Disorganized' doesn't have to mean "I'm completely unable to understand him". His communication was understandable on some level; it just tended to jump from topic to topic multiple times a sentence, with wild associations, very figurative language, oblique associations. It's as though he couldn't rein in his thoughts to go in a "straight line". Maybe he was having trouble staying focused on what he was trying to say, with other thoughts constantly clogging up the process and coming out in communication. A poet would have an easier time understanding him than a doctor, I think.

Wonder if that's why doctors often don't listen to their schizophrenic patients?--they simply don't want to take the extra energy to get ideas from chaos; or assume that there's nothing there to understand in the first place?

I could understand him. The associations, I am sure, he connected on some level that the rest of us aren't in tune with. Amazing how the mind can do that. Classic example of disorganized thinking.
I don't know if that was stimming from the Haldol or if that was him being disorganized in action. The psychiatrist in the video said he engaged in purposeless activity around the ward and could not take care of himself on his own.

"The picture has a headache" could mean anything. It doesn't mean that he's delusional or that his reasoning is flawed.

Lately I've been misusing words by accident all the time. It doesn't mean I have a thought disorder.

So...do other people notice when you misuse words? Do they mind it when you misuse them?

It doesn't make that big a difference.

I notice people on dopamine blockers can have terrible dysphoria. I thought it was the illness, could be their meds. I think they need better meds and more people would be more willing to take them if they didn't have the side effects.
How long have you been hearing voices?