
Understanding schizophrenia: What exactly is schizophrenia? - DanBC
http://www.paulmorrison.org/understanding-schizophrenia-what-exactly-is-schizophrenia/
======
ada1981
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ten years later, bipolar.

I didn't trust that western psychiatry could heal the underlying causes so I
basically just shut up about it for a decade.

After about 10 years, I was suicidal and couldn't ignore it anymore.

My intuition told me to find another way, so I started to research on my own.
I found a way through that involved MDMA therapy, NARM therapy, holotropic
breathwork, and creating a loving romantic relationship.

I now live symptom-free, with no medication, and am really grateful I trusted
my intuition and made my own path.

~~~
fbarred
I am very happy for you. It is great that you are able to recognize your
schizophrenia. Many people who suffer from schizophrenia also suffer from
anosognosia, which is a condition of not being able to recognize one's
illness.

A person close to me is suffering from schizophrenia. We found, to our
surprise, that anti-psychotic medications work very well. It changes a person
who is not able to function (delusions, disorganized speech, unable to focus
or carry conversation, very poor judgement and actions that result in total
loss of all possessions and homelessness) back to a person we know well and
who can be a normal member of society.

Unfortunately, they don't recognize any of their past symptoms. Eventually
they stop taking medication (which is logical on their part, because why would
you take medication, if you are not sick?), and a scary slide back begins.

Imagine, if sometime last week, family or friends came to you and told you
that you have schizophrenia, and that you should take medication because you
have delusions. You don't know what they are talking about. If this happened
to you, what would you do? This is the situation many find themselves in.

For any mentally healthy person out there who finds themselves surrounded by
loved ones telling them they may have schizophrenia and to please get
treatment - please do, even if that sounds ridiculous to you. If you are on
and off medication, keep a journal to record how you feel. Do not rely on your
own judgement alone - please listen to your friends and loved ones.

~~~
mikekchar
This kind of stuff is super scary for me. Although I don't suffer from any
mental illnesses (that I know about!), I take medication for high blood
pressure. At one point I was taking amlodipine which eventually caused some
bad side effects with swollen legs and the like, so I changed to a different
medication. Pretty quickly, I noticed that my life was dramatically better
and, for want of a better word, I wasn't in the least depressed.

I've never suffered from depression before, so I hadn't been aware of how
depressed I had gotten while taking amlodopine. After switching, I checked the
known side effects and sure enough depression is one of them -- to the point
where some countries have disallow its use!

It really surprised me how much this drug affected my life without my noticing
_anything_ out of the ordinary. What's even more interesting is that this
summer I got very stressed about work (something that has never actually
happened before) and ended up having a panic attack. So _now_ I'm wondering
about the new medication! It's crazy.

The big thing that I keep thinking about is, how much of my state of mind is
"me" and how much is my medication (or any other things, like drinking coffee,
or beer, or not exercising enough, or whatever). It's made me much more
conscious about monitoring my mental state and taking some actions rather than
just assuming everything is OK. But it's incredibly scary. I've had quite a
few friends with mental illnesses and this helps me understand a tiny bit
better what they are going through.

Oh, and +1,000,000 on the journal. It's the only way I can keep track of
what's going on in my head.

------
monotone666
I’ve been diagnosed with Delusional Disorder after a long term infection with
the Epistein Barr Virus. I spent a period of time in a deep psychosis. What it
seems like now is my brain trying to make meaning out of something traumatic.
I believed I was one of the most important people in the world when I was in a
state of shock. The delusion still persists despite heavy doses of psychiatric
drugs.

~~~
IAmGraydon
How does the delusion persist if you’ve clearly just stated that you realize
it’s a delusion?

~~~
kaoD
It doesn't matter if you consciously know something is false if your brain
still presents it as true.

Think anxiety. Or like on the movie A Beautiful Mind (I know it's a movie but
it happens IRL too). Or being under the influence of some psychedelics (you
know you're under the influence but it still feels like reality).

------
pygy_
I'm surprised the article still considers schizophrenia as a single entity,
when evidence points to there being several diseases with symptoms overlapping
to some degree...

~~~
woodandsteel
At the bottom it says that the next post will be on what causes schizophrenia,
and I imagine the author will get into the different diseases there.

------
rcdwealth
Schizophrenia is not a disease and never was. It is behavioral disorder.

Who is then defining what is schizophrenia?

Is it a physician? Does it have any pathological evidences?

The clear answer is NO.

So it cannot be a disease.

It is defined by psychiatrists by voting the "disorders" in their meetings of
American Psychiatric Association. Such disorders are then published in the
Diagnostic and Statistic Manual:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders)

Further, by researching, one will come to conclusion that those mental
disorders are added and removed as their assembly wants it. Or whatever the
lobby wants.

It would be good to review the writings of Dr. Thomas Szasz:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz)

[https://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-
szasz/...](https://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/quotes-
on-his-book-the-myth-of-mental-illness/)

For human problems there exist human solutions.

How can be a "disorder" which cannot be pathologically proven be "healed" by
taking more and more drugs?

~~~
eigenstuff
I'm schizotypal, which is basically schizophrenia lite... pretty sure there's
nothing "behavioral" about my recurring auditory hallucinations of a brass
band playing nonsense music.

~~~
dsego
I think the parent is challenging the circular definition used by psychiatry.
Aka you hear voices, therefore you have schizophrenia and you have
schizophrenia which is why you hear the voices.

For example, I found the following texts thought provoking:

[http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2010/01/21/schizophren...](http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2010/01/21/schizophrenia-
is-not-an-illness/)

[http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2013/01/03/schizophren...](http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2013/01/03/schizophrenia-
not-an-illness/)

------
DanBC
This is the first post in a series about schizophrenia, and will discuss the
difference between schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis.

~~~
DanBC
(For clarity, I didn't write this article).

~~~
ryan-allen
Thanks for writing it. I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

------
drkstr
I have a good friend who was diagnosed with schizophrenia before he graduated
high school. It was very tragic to watch. Who was once such a bright and
capable person, can no longer function in normal society. I found it very
difficult to invite him places. Often times I would need to back him up in a
physical fight. He wasn't violent, simply incapable of seperating reality from
what he saw, often times taking the form of disturbing subjects such as women
or children being raped. And being the good person he was at heart, would not
let something like that go, but would rather confront it right on. At wich
point the person being accused of such a heinous act would do one of two
things; Realize the guy clearly has some kind of mental issue and leave the
area a bit shaken but no worse for wear, or more frequent the case, challenge
him to a fight, even assaulting him with deadly weapons in some cases. When he
wasn't engaged in some form of direct confrontation, he would be yelling
racial slurs at the tormentors in his head. And the torment was constant. I am
sorry to say there was even a period in my life when I stopped being a friend
and started being someone concerned with ones own social standing, wich of
course in my mind, had no room for any social pariahs tagging along.

Fast forward 10 years when his mother passes away, his other family had
written him off long ango, and we find our tragic hero homeless, with symptoms
noticeably worse than before. being the only person he trusted, it was up to
me to get him the help he needs. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
I gave him a room in my house, which was the least I could do really, and even
helped cosign for a car. But all of this mattered little in changing his
actual situation, which still seemed to be getting worse not better. The
challenge for me was balancing the line between being a friend, and being just
another person trying to convince him his mental model is faulty and he needs
treatment. For one reason or another he absolutely refused to go. He called
that place rape factory, and insisted he'd rather be homeless then spend even
a single night there. And who am I to hold the definitive truth on reality?
Where I saw dysfunction, he saw a "gift of sight," only a few are capable of.
In the end, I'm afraid that my unwillingness to convince him he has a problem
is coming more from a position of weakness rather than strength. Had I been
able to convince him to get treatment, than perhaps he wouldn't be in jail
today, and I wouldn't have lost the lease to my house; ultimately leading to
my own homelessness to this day.

Despite all of the headaches, I learned some valuable lessons from Ben.
Mostly, don't worry so much what other's think of you. Take life as it comes
without being so serious all the time. And reality is not some fixed thing,
and is mostly a function of the beholder.

~~~
corporateslaver
I have a sibling who’s in and out of the mental hospital. It’s easy to show
support in the early days, but ten years in when they still have psychotic
breaks and most around them have given up is when the real test starts. Glad
to hear your story and wish you the best. For myself I’ve vowed to never
forget the person who was there before the illness. You still see the glimpses
here and there

~~~
dsego
I also have a sibling like that. But there's no ifs or buts, when the
situation gets worse, off to the institution you go until you get back to
normal. At first, you cry and sob, it's hard seeing them strapped to a bed.
But tough love is the best love, when everything else fails. Now he is on
injections and there is no more horsing around about taking or not taking
pills.

------
progr4mmatic
Maybe this is because I've been watching Maniac but I've been thinking about
this. My hypothesis is based upon the idea that the brain's main purpose is to
make sense of the world and to do that it makes predictions and theories of
"world" as it goes about.

Schizophrenia just seems like this process on overdrive where some of the key
processes involved with keeping this overall process stable go awry. One of
these minor processes is probably a belief process where the brain classifies
things by True / not True. Since minor psychochis can occur to recreational
drug users using psychedelics that make their mind more open to ideas, this
seems to make sense to me.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
It seems more like a defect in attention, but not a deficit; it’s an
overabundance of attention to irrelevant details that the brain ascribes
significant meaning to. The reason I have this hypothesis is that ADHD
patients tend to have lower concentration of dopamine, whereas schizophrenics
have a higher concentration than normal.

An example would be ascribing significant meaning to an event that is random.
But for the schizophrenic the event isn’t random, it’s the result of a
persecutory delusion, at least in the paranoid variant. It looks very close to
religious thinking, but in a negative way: “The dry cleaners I go to are
secretly a front for a shady government organization that is attempting to
study my every action”

~~~
derefr
On a lower level, the brain has two hierarchies of synapses: a top-down
processing hierarchy, driven by the neurochemical AMPA, and the bottom-up
processing hierarchy, driven by the neurochemical NMDA. These hierarchies have
salience passed back and forth between them by dopaminergic and adrenergic
signalling from other brain regions. Whichever side of processing is
"dominant" at the time, is training its dual to respond with the signals the
active side is receiving, in response to the signals the active side is
sending. Additionally, the bottom-up processing hierarchy is wired to your
senses and your motor neurons.

In short, the top-down processing hierarchy is "the model", and the bottom-up
processing hierarchy is "the evidence." The brain switches between using the
evidence to train the model (when the evidence is salient and the model is
weak), and using the model to predict and "fill in for" the evidence (when the
model is salient and the evidence is noisy.)

It would make a lot of sense to me if psychosis were simply a result of
chronically overdriven AMPA signalling, such that evidence is always being
"fit to" the existing model, with the bottom-up hierarchy never being granted
enough dominance to use the evidence to _correct_ the model.

~~~
jyounker
This is fascinating. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent and relatives. My
interpretation has been that the disease is a defect in the systems that
weights between internal models and external evidence.

It’s interesting that to know that there might be a fairly straight forward
mapping of the to brain chemistry/neural mechanisms.

Do you any references the AMPA signaling pathways and associated neurological
structures that you can recommend as a starting point?

------
da02
My landlady's son is schizophrenic. Could a diet of alcohol, pot, and sugar
and carbs make the condition worse?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Alcohol and pot, yes, though use of the two are common because of addiction
and self-medication. The other two, no.

~~~
andai
Ketogenic diet showed better results in treating bipolar disorder than
medication. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia seem to have to do with mutant
mitochondria which metabolize differently. Fed a normal (carb-heavy) diet they
are unable to produce sufficient energy, which leads to neurological
degeneration.

~~~
rimliu
I think link to sources would help here.

~~~
krageon
A finding of this magnitude which was actually proven in a way that the post
seems to suggest would not be something you see only in one hacker news
comment, because it would be _huge_.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
This.

Not to mention all of the other variables to check, such as simply putting
less energy into food prep (less stress) and so on.

------
monotone666
40% of cases of schizophrenia are from the immune system attacking synapses in
the brain.

~~~
loceng
Do you have any links to research or papers on this? Thanks.

~~~
monotone666
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0235-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0235-x)

~~~
mpol
Thank you.

Any tips for lowering inflammation? I only know of these; lower intake of
alcohol, sleep well, kurkuma, aspirin.

Just as a datapoint, I suffer from psychosis and experience a good response to
aspirin.

~~~
loceng
CBD oil is a very powerful anti-inflammatory; CBD can be more effective for
people if mixed with some THC, CBD counteracts the psychoactive properties of
THC, however I believe THC is contraindicated for the diagnosis of
schizophrenia?

~~~
mpol
Thank you. CBD oil is something worth to try out then.

THC delivers the high in the weed. I know people who use pot, but I stay far
away from it.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
probably a good policy - THC exacerbates the inflammatory symptoms that CBD
alleviates. There's a theory that older people who used to self-medicate with
CBD-rich cannabis in their youth are now doing more harm than good because of
increased breeding for higher THC content.

------
browsercoin
it'd be great if you also dove into the other less known schizotypees like
_schizoaffective_ and _schizotypal_ aka "Schizophrenia _Lite_ "

I think people have an idea of what schizophrenia looks like but they might be
surprised by other very closely related disorders.

