Schizophrenia and higher truths

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http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjour ... l/32/3/422

What does this tell us about schizophrenia? Can we make comparisons between schizophrenia and other things we see in humanity? What does this tell us about the workings of the brain? Would activating the man's neurons actually be enough to shock the rats? Would bleeding actually hurt the rats at all?

I know you are looking for larger implications AG , but I'll just start by accounting my personal experience with it, as within my family :


They were unable to hold onto anything rational as an anchor as this man did or even John Nash for that matter.
So I don't know if a superior intellect can counterweight this as manifested in these two, or the disease just has a severity scale.
I do know that it is global from the PET scan imaging that I've seen , as "this brain" is super stimulated as evidenced by the color image mapping.
Most of the hallucinations arise from serotonin antagonism , and I've heard as an analogy that LSD's action is via the same pathway.

I do know that electroconvulsive therapy worked for about six weeks on my family members, and they were completely rational as they didn't have one iota of a delusion ,until the expiration of this time .
Medicine was added in (Thorazine) and it helped ,but they were unable to disbelieve the irrational. They required supervision and were henceforth disabled ,at least as being independent.

Interesting. From what I hear, the intensity of schizophrenia has a lot to do with the lifetime status of individuals. Those who are more connected with external things have better abilities to cope, while those who are more isolated and lower status fare worse. (This is just a paraphrase from a textbook on abnormal psychology, and possibly a bad one given it's been awhile since I read on the issue)

when i was a child i would be left in the care of my grandmother for long periods of time. she was hebephrenic. she would tie me in a chair for whole days and would pick "bugs" off me and would use a paint brush to spread bleach on my skin. there were conversations with beings only she saw and heard. this came to an end when the neighbors in the housing project finally couldn't trust her anymore and called the police. being in full mania mode, she went after the police with an ax. she ended up in a warehouse situation where all mentally ill people were thrown in together. can you imagine the horror for her and others there who were set upon by predators? she was given strong ect as a way to control her, not for treatment, and eventually died.

this was a long time ago, and this was standard treatment for destitute people. how things have changed! the knowledge and treatment variants for schizophrenia not are many-fold and physicians at least somewhat trained in recognition and treatment.

when i was researching for a book i was writing, i returned to the same housing project and found many residents who remembered her. her small space was occupied by a young woman and her child who allowed me entrance. i felt like i was s tuck in a dean koontz novel. the same chair was still there, still stained by the bleach. no, i didn't sit in it.

schizophrenia is a terrible disorder, a destroyer of all lives it touches. be thankful for the advancements that have been made and those to come.

How sad!


Odd and surreal and I can relate.



No doubt . It is a walking perpetual nightmare from which there isn't a reality awaiting to be awoken to.
Year upon year -year's of lifelong delusions.
E.g., my grandmother had chartered a plane to quickly warn her son of impending danger , but she never flown before , and had a breakdown in the cockpit whilst this little plane was experiencing turbulence from a storm.She probably didn't phone thinking perhaps of some grand conspiracy theory.
-She was always suspicious of her husband and concluded that he was an impostor and therefore one of many "clones" in disguise who was capable of incredible evil. She designated him as " clone # 19".
She would sleep with a knife.

-Or thinking my mother was a clone and driving to her work place and slapping down my mother's shoes on her desk , saying ,"you are not my daughter , she doesn't wear shoes like these". (She broke into our house to get her shoes).
Finally, from 1971 to 1991 , she rested in peace.
She was quite unusual in this case, as she was Dx'd paranoid schizophrenia when 49. Usually it happens in early adulthood.

I believe I found God thanks to my disorders, whatever they are, and I would not exchange them for anything. My higher truths are more important than my normality or sanity!

There's different forms of schizophrenia. Some people only have episodes of psychosis on occasion. Some people are aware their hallucinations and delusions are not real, some believe they are real but are still lucid and coherent (Silvia Brown, David Ike and Bobby Fischer) and then others make no sense at all and have a profoundly distorted thought process.

Electroshock therapy, though it sounds barbaric I'm sure, and is quite crude, does reset the brain temporarily by disrupting it's equilibrium conditions.

There was once a guy giving a lecture around here titled "Is God a Delusion"

I would have to say it isn't on the basis that the concept of gods is a prehistoric one, and seems to be a result of a logical thinking process given the context of the knowledge bank of the pre-historic human. Pre-historic humans acknowledged cause and effect, and the conclusion of gods was the cause they reasoned existed to explain the effects around them.

In the context of what they knew, it was actually a reasonable assumption whether it was correct or not.

Schizophrenic delusions general lack this reasoning process.For example, exactly how do X number of schizophrenics come to the conclusion that they are Jesus?

I had a friend who had schizophrenia and while he was lucid and stable once I decided to ask him about it. He was quite happy to talk about it. We started talking about the neurological aspects of it. He told me he understood it was an illness and that there is a neurological basis for it,and then told me he had a hypothesis that these changes in his brain enable him to "See" into the "heavenly" realm of things he wasn't supposed to see.

At first this might sound like a manifestation of the illness, but if you consider the fact that he was also religious and had an interest in science fiction, you will see it's actually a logic based hypothesis, even if it's fanciful and has no scientific merit.

I can remember the great difficulty in getting her to a treatment facility for this, as this would usually end with an ambulance call to the house, and when they showed up they said to her, "we can do this the easy way or the hard way." She would hold out her arms and then they guided her to the gurney......she knew the routine all to well.
After it was over the only symptom was erasure of recent memories; long term was intact.

She firmly believed that we were the "nutters"and that she was some type of Joan of Arc with messages from God that were life saving.
"If we only knew," she would comment.
Once when I was 8, she emphatically said that the people that were communicating with her, via invisible voices, were coming over tonight face to face, and this was the "proof" that she knows what she is talking about.
I believe she said at" 9:00 p.m." here , and when they didn't show I asked her about this, but "the delusion" morphed into something else with her.
There wasn't a continuity with this in her, as the delusion would take a new and believable form.
"The furnace man planted a bomb when he made your repair."
"Michael is floating in outer space and there is nothing I can do to help him," as she called and told my mother.

This is incredibly devastating to families:
-Financially, as it dug seep into my grandfathers savings.
-Emotionally; they got a divorce but remarried 3 years later, as he better understood what was happening here.

I remember in 1971, I was in kindergarten then, and I happened to stay the night at their house.
My grandfather left for work as usual, and I was sleeping with my great aunt( her sister) because she was staying with them due to her divorce.
I was afraid of this place for some reason: for one, she kept the curtains drawn all time because the outside light always bothered her eyes. ( She would wear sunglasses when my grandfather got home because he would open the blinds). I hated to stay the night here, but she was my baby sitter when my mom went out with her friends, and hence I slept in my aunt's bed this night .

The next morning I awoke and happened to be looking up here, and I saw my grandmother looking down starring over the top of us..... my aunt was fast asleep still.
Next thing she clawed my aunt with her long fingernails , and my aunt fled the house to get my mother who just lived three blocks away, down the same street. She chased her out to the car and my aunt got in and locked the door and then drove off, but my grandmother pick up a brick in the driveway and threw it and hit her back window and cracked it.

My mother came in her pajamas and entered the house and the next thing I remembered was they were fighting on the ground; pulling hair and yelling and moving and rolling around on the carpet in a scuffle.

My grandfather got there from work and I remember he and my mother grabbed her and forced her down on the bed, face down, and my grandfather picked up a high heel shoe and started swatting her on her butt many, many times, perhaps thinking he could somehow shake this.

This was her plunge into schizophrenia at 49 years of age.

I can relate so much to this. In my research on the reality of patterns and complexities of the universe and the connections between all written history on the origin and nature of humans (and their interactions with the spirit world), I find myself teetering back and forth between insanity and enlightenment.. perhaps they go hand in hand.

I love the idea that schizophrenics are in touch with a higher or different reality. But their behaviour and thoughts are so bizarre that we could not possibly ascertain if this reality is real or not. We say it is not real and the brain has malfunctioned but wouldn't it be great if it was shown that they are intouch with something real.

I loved the scene in Terminator 2 when the terminator comes to get Sarah Conner from the pshyciatric hospital and her doctor who had doubted her all along has to witness the terminator coming to get her. Total class scene that I love James Cameron for.

I have had experiences of these 'higher truths' myself, although not to such a strong extent - usually (relatively mild) paranoia. It is strange - I am a scientist also, and certainly have Aspie tendencies, and people that know me see me as extremely pedantic - always picking up on logical inconsistencies in everything they say. But the times I have felt paranoid I have just been sure of being right even though I know it isn't logical, and know that previous paranoid episodes have later been shown to be ridiculous. It is just a feeling that turns reality upside down and makes everything sinister and unreliable and frightening.

The last time a few months ago, I found a nail clipper that had fallen from the balcony above my flat onto mine. I was getting slightly paranoid about this neighbour (who I never met) anyway - about her deliberately making noise to annoy me (I am very sensitive about noise). It was obviously her nail clipper. A few days later I got home from work and found that my door was not double locked as I normally do, Probably I forgot, but on finding the nail clipper gone from my balcony I was convinced that my neighbour had a skeleton key, and had come in my flat and retrieved her nail clipper whilst I was out. I was so certain of this for a few hours, then managed to talk myself out of it - it just seemed a rather risky thing for her to do just to get a nail clipper. However, I still wasn't sure that she wasn't coming in my flat when I was out. Luckily she has moved out now and my mood got a lot better (don't know why) a few weeks ago so I'm no longer worried about that. But I can logically see that it is all ridiculous and probably a consequence of feeling a bit stressed and not particularly happy (my moods change for no obvious reason). Still don't know how the nail clipper disappeared though.

I don't know whether the 'higher truths' are real or not. I don't think my paranoid ones are. Through episodes of depression/paranoia/hypomania/anxiety I have ended up with a rather unconventional view of 'reality' and the 'self' which are actually closer to the scientific view than most people get to intuitively. I don't just intellectually believe that the self is a transient pattern generated by the brain, but I am sure I have actually felt it at times. The time when I was ill, when I woke up in the morning and felt sure that I hadn't existed previously - I just came into existence with all my memories to give me an identity at that instant. The sense of continuity of self had temporarily gone. Having since had years to reflect about that, I am convinced that being ill has allowed me to see what the mind really is - or rather what it isn't. I deconstructed and when I was getting better I went through a phase of reconstruction where I regained my identity, albeit with occasional mistakes which made me recall childhood events, hallucinate, experience four different types of fear (one was completely new) and surprisingly, remodel my personality into a semi-extrovert one - what I'd always wanted as I used to be extremely shy. Still Aspie though.

Whether a psychiatrist would believe me talking about the deconstruction and reconstruction of my mind or not, I do not know. This is something I am still convinced about though. Even though I don't remember what it felt like to be like that, I still remember the insights I gained at the time, and the reasoning behind them. And knowing that does make me feel as though I know something that most people think is wrong in an intuitive way. When I was younger I used to feel sure that 'I' was a real thing, a definite identity that could not cease to exist. Most people think this - when I now say that I don't exist, most people think I am deluded, but I am absolutely certain that they are deluded - I know that delusion, I had it and I have regenerated it enough to live, and it is necessary to feel real, to live a productive life, but it is a delusion, I know this as the truth.

Being very logical, and also needing to understand what happened when I was ill, has led to this whole philosophy of reality, based on science as much as it can be (as a scientist this is necessary for me), but also on what I experienced. I guess that if I had had a more mystical bent, I would have found entirely different meanings out of my experience - would be easy at times to think I am God, if I believed in God.