Schizophrenia, only a difference, not a disease

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Last edited by elan_i on 22 Jan 2008, 1:01 am, edited 2 times in total.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OVNiLKjMME[/youtube]

Wait. . . is this a joke or not?

http://www.theicarusproject.net

you just got icarus project'd! read and be illuminated. (though it's mainly about bipolar, schizophrenia features too)

All in your mind Part 2 topic

Though I can empathize with people living on the Schizophrenic Spectrum, this is not necessarily a viable place to be. People living on this spectrum often have a great deal of difficulty with reality and logic. Clear thinking is often not an option for these persons, creativity and genius not withstanding. A beautiful mind is not necessarily a beautiful life. Delusions of whatever intensity or type do not seem to be a pleasant option, as indicated in the movie of the same name This would be the case also for people living on the Autism spectrum who may have this existing condition, that unfortunately is debilitating, due to the behaviours and possibility of harm both to self and others. Autism itself does not result in these symptoms.

Having said as much no person should be bullied, harrassed or discriminated against due to any condition or disease.

My cousin is a schizophrenic and i have known one other confirmed. It is true that schizophrenia encompasses many different things it is not a single type of person.

While you might say hallucinations might be *like* an ability. I would degree that it is necessarily a good thing. See being able to visualize something is one thing knowing what is realizing is another. Apart from anything else it can cause the recipient a great deal of stress and confusion, and even if it doesn't it may put them or other people in danger. One girl I knew her perception had no baring on reality, it was always changing. She got herself in a fright and got paranoid over people who seemed perfectly normal, her view on somebody could change overnight or in hours. She spent some time on the street but fortunately found a place at a shelter for vulnerable people. It seems her parents/step dad wasn't all that nice to her. Talking to her was difficult because sometimes she didn't make a lot of sense tbh. Her concerns didn't seem to follow any sort of priority or logic.

I know it is not always the end of the road if you have disordered thoughts/delusions and hallucinations. My cousin uses a great deal of self control stop episodes before they happen. He doesn't take medication anymore. That is not advisable for every schizophrenic however.

Through reading the history of psychiatry, I've been convinced that "schizophrenia" can't be considered a specific condition or even a specific spectrum, but rather the end diagnosis given to people that appear mad, do bizarre acts or are in general unable to deal with life. Hence, the "recruitment" means that it's not really a homogenous group. Kräpelin gathering three different syndromes under one roof didn't turn it into a single disease or condition in reality - paranoia, hebephrenia and catatonia. I find it quite silly that some researchers are actually looking for a genetic origin of schizophrenia, when it's not been established that the people with the diagnosis have much in common, apart from matching a few out of a number of diagnostic criteria.

In my eyes, there are many ways into schizophrenia as well as many ways out, though none guaranteed or easy. The fact that the prognosis is so much better in the third world speaks volumes for the ineffectiveness of psychiatry and its drugs in helping people. I don't believe much in therapy either. What I can see as working is trying to reintroduce the patients to society in a "light" setting, where they're not exposed to very much of that which they fear. I feel that to them, the very presence of the society around them acts as fuel for their condition. I see schizophrenia as simply the problems in dealing with life, metaphorical demons etc, just on a larger scale. Their mental and emotional state is probably what spawns their symptoms, it's quite telling that the negative symptoms appear years before the positive ones. I'm pretty convinced that it's not a brain disease, they've been looking for traces for that for over a century without finding anything wrong with the brains of the patients.

I agree.

I dont think people shuld think that just because Autism is different and not a disease, that other things, such as depression or schizophrenia are the same way.

Scientists HAVE found different brain abnormalites in schizophrenia, and again, the criteria for something to be a disease or disorder is that it should cause impairment in the life of the sufferer. Hallucinations and delusions are often harmful. Most people dont hear angels, they hear dmeons (or other negative voices) and they find it frightening. I think it is incorrect to assume that the brain cannot become diseased as the heart, liver, or lungs do. It's an organ like any other.

Many of those differences also occur in people without it -- who've had long-term exposure to the drugs most frequently given to people with "schizophrenia" (which can't possibly, if you read the history of the term, all be one thing anyway).

Regardless of what we can tell if most see angles or demons. If psychotic people see angles instead of demons it still doesn't make it safe. One of the famous examples was a well known navel offer who captained the queens ship and was a senior member of NATO command until illness struck. He was sectioned but he left the hospital and proceeded to walk right into oncoming traffic. He believed he could stop the traffic and it wouldn't harm him. This was on Steven Fry's program on Bi-Polar. The guy miraculously survived though received severe injuries and his lower limbs were flayed apart. He talked on the program and said he still doesn't regret having bi-polar ask he can talk with angels.

Agreed with this completely, and I wish more people would take time to read the history of the term -- not the history given in psychiatry textbooks, but the actual history.

One reason I have trouble saying that schizophrenia was a misdiagnosis in autistic people (including me), is that I have trouble saying that it's a valid diagnosis at all when it can be diagnosed in someone whose main trouble is hallucinations and delusions, and in someone else whose main trouble is a movement disorder, and in someone else whose main trouble is having a very difficult time with certain kinds of speech, reasoning, and/or handling functioning on a day-to-day basis. It'd be like saying that my friend's prior diagnosis of "maladjustment to the feminine role" was a misdiagnosis: What on earth kind of diagnosis is that to begin with? (Especially when psychiatry is far less scientific than it pretends to be, and a lot of these categories are sociological rather than scientific.)

And I don't understand the immediate condemnation of some people on this thread. Do people realize that, just like with autism, some people who experience things labeled mental illnesses find positive aspects of their experiences too? That the unpleasant parts, when they exist, are not the whole story? That psychiatry doesn't always have all the answers about everyone?

That's what we are asserting about ourselves, and I know a lot of people who've had horrible experiences in the psych system, and from their own minds, but who interpret those things far differently than psychiatry does. And it's not always a function of severity, although, just like with autism, people try to pretend it does. Irit Shimrat wrote:



That's from the book Call Me Crazy.) I've read her book, and yes, in fact, she did experience episodes of what would be considered by psychiatry to be classic and severe schizophrenia. And yes, in fact, while they were highly distressing in some ways, she also finds meaning in them that most people don't. Most people just want to write off her experiences as "illness" with nothing good about them, and that's not always how she experiences it. It's not about severity, it's about how people think about it -- which is something I've been trying to get across to, and about, autistic people for years.

And believe it or not, severely physically disabled people, too, don't all have negative accounts of their experiences, some of them describe things that only they can experience and not non-disabled people. These viewpoints exist and they are not trivial or nonsensical.

I do think different neurology can cause some experiences of what gets called mental illness (I don't think "brain disease" is accurate, though), and different thinking can as well (as in my case -- what I basically experienced was a very creative and imaginative way of dealing with being unable to take what I thought the world had in store with me, and my attempts to retreat into fantasy were among other things diagnosed as an illness), and so can combinations of the two. I don't think it's bad to admit that brains can differ, but it's also important to note that that's not the only thing going on, and isn't necessarily a sign something is "bad" versus something being "okay".

I don't like at all the notion that autism may not be bad (if it's "mild" enough anyway, all other autistics are supposed to have totally uniformly bad views about our experiences because "who wouldn't?", etc etc etc) but everything else sure is, unless it's really really mild, or something. This is why autistic people need to be aware of, and not immediately discount, other segments of the disability rights movements. I hate when I see autistic people going "Boy is that stupid" when other disabled people say it's okay to be how they are, while knowing full well that's how other people often see our assertion that we're okay.

Does it say nothing to you about the horrible state of mental "hospitals" (they are not real hospitals), that he would rather walk into traffic than live in one? I know a whole lot of people who are perfectly "sane" at the moment and believe that of themselves. I know several people who have actual plans on how to rapidly kill themselves if they end up stuck in a psych ward, who are in no other way suicidal.

These problems, of danger and stuff, are a problem of lack of support, not of something being inherently evil and awful to live with. My mother has bipolar and sometimes has done dangerous stuff. It doesn't mean she should be forced into some horrible "treatment" facility or be forced to view herself as totally destroyed by the way her brain works, or view the way her brain works as inherently awful.

I'm one of those autistic people who walks into traffic, too. I have on multiple occasions. It's not because I don't know traffic can hurt me. There's a few different things it could be. One is that I have trouble with moving cars, they sometimes seem to disappear on me even if they're headed straight at me, due to assorted distortions of visual perception. Another is that I often have an attraction, especially when overloaded, to straight lines and circles. Another is that I often have trouble, especially while overloaded or while doing something else, conceptualizing things as what they are, I see them more as patterns of perceptual input, so something like "desk" becomes only the patterns and shape of it, not "desk", and the same can happen with cars. One time a bus stopped for me (I was in front of it) and my friend yanked me out of traffic and the driver told her not to let me cross roads unattended.

This does not rule my entire life with autism. It just means that I need support around things like that. And people considered bipolar need support with things that might be dangerous too. There's a lot to like about having a brain like that and there is a lot to like about autism regardless of dangers. If the criteria for being able to like the way you are were set by whether certain ordinary situations would endanger you, the only the most "normal" people (whose weaknesses are already dealt with by society for the most part) would be able to like who they were. If everyone had trouble with running into traffic and stuff, we'd have some kind of built-in safeguard for it already, and it'd be a non-issue. (Most children have trouble with it, boys far more than girls, but people are not taught that being a boy is inherently bad because it makes you higher risk of running into traffic.)

I wrote a blog post, even, called The Vulnerabilities of being Non-Autistic, that also applies to many other things besides autism. We accept the risks associated with being "normal" as acceptable risks in life, but as soon as someone has an "abnormal" risk associated with them, then suddenly they have to change everything they are and become as "normal" as possible to get away from the particular risks unusual to them. I remember a story told by a wheelchair user who went out with a blind person and something happened to knock her over and get her a minor cut in her eye, and what everyone said wasn't, "Why don't you guys have enough support?" but "Why does anyone allow you out alone?" (The same woman wrote a great poem about all the things she can do, some of them sexual -- so I won't post them in a general forum -- without having to stop and breathe, because a machine breathes for her. She found this a good thing, and didn't find her life remotely bad just because of being disabled.)

And there are all kinds of risk associated with being autistic, but most people here don't think that's a sufficient reason to insist (from the outside, by non-autistic people) that non-autistic people know what's best for us and that what's best for us always includes becoming non-autistic somehow. Although some people here do have the attitude that only "mildly" autistic people get to be okay about being autistic, that if you have "severe" problems you'd obviously not want to. But that's not actually the case of course.

At any rate, I've been in a lot of dangerous situations because of the particular risks associated with being autistic (and the fact that I did not have sufficient support to avoid those risks). And some of them did result in pretty serious problems either temporarily or long-term. And I'd still want to be autistic. So I don't see where we get off telling this guy he ought not to want to be bipolar just because one aspect of it was "dangerous" and he lacked the support to avoid it. (And anyone who thinks mental institutions are safe... really doesn't understand them in depth. They're profoundly unsafe, and I hate when people tell stories about those of us who've been in them but "got out against the will of the doctors" or "stopped taking our meds or whatever, end up endangered or in some other bad situation, with the implication that if we just do what our psychiatrists say everything will be all better for everyone. It won't and isn't, but there's a media and cultural stereotype that say that it's wrong for us to do anything but what psychiatry wants.)

Having suffered from delusional thinking in the past, I can tell you it was very painful and torturous and not just a "difference." It's very different from AS where you just have a different way of processing and thinking from the average person. I still have some delusional thinking but not nearly as severely as a used to, and it's a tremendous relief to be more or less free of it.

Some people experience it that way, some people don't, though. Just like with autism.

And I do have a suspicion that a lot of what's considered delusional thinking is caused by something. Specifically, I think that the parts of cognition that normally find abstract connections between things, are way more active than normal, and because of this, frequently find connections that don't actually exist. But I also suspect that mode of thinking lends itself to finding connections that do exist and that not everyone sees, and elaborating on them further than most people would.

And just because some of the connections that don't exist are highly unpleasant for some people doesn't mean the entire way of thinking is wrong, or that some people don't derive importance and meaning from their experiences. Any more than the fact that overload can be excruciatingly painful for autistic people means that we find everything about being autistic to be totally awful.

I don't, however, think that "difference vs. disability" is a real question, because disability is a form of difference combined with those differences not being planned for (as far as support and lack of obstruction goes) in a given place. I don't think that "autism is a difference but all other disabilities are disabilities," because that makes it sound like disabilities aren't differences and like differences aren't ever unpleasant and a whole lot of other things like that.

But autism is the same way. Some autistic people hate it. Some don't mind it. Some really like it. That's the same as anything else. I also know people who really didn't like what psychiatry called their psychotic episodes, but at the same time found some kind of value and meaning in being the sort of person prone to having them. I still need to dig up a link about that that's really interesting. But basically, yes, it is a lot like autism, right down to variation in opinion about it. I find the "only a difference not a disease" formulation as aggravating no matter who uses it though.

Schizophrenia is a neurological syndrome; it is associated with specific brain abnormalities that appear in MRIs. These abnormalities tend to become more pronounced over time.

Like autism, schizophrenia is best understood by those who experience it personally. I believe that those affected by schizophrenia should be free to choose how to handle it. It does affect people in many different ways. Therefore, treatment, or lack there of, should be determined on an individual basis.

Schizophrenia may not be a single syndrome. There are several popular classification systems, dividing it into 2 - 5 types. This underscores the diversity and ambiguity of the schizophrenic spectrum.

One major difference between schizophrenia and the autism spectrum is that schizophrenia usually has a much later onset. Most schizophrenics appear NT until their mid-twenties, while ASDs can usually be diagnosed within the first few years of life.

Having never experienced schizophrenia, I cannot say how similar or dissimilar it is from AS. However, I do believe that, like us, schizophrenics are not NT and should not be subjected to treatment without consent.

There is no irrational behavior. Just people speaking false statements and doing silly things with their bodies.