

Explaining Schizophrenia [comic] - mapleoin
http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/133179.html

======
izendejas
I got to live with a schizophrenic person who subleased after a roommate left.
I gained a better understanding for people who suffer this horrible disorder.
It validated my theory that many homeless people are schizophrenic--yea, go
figure, homeless people who aren't lazy. It's very difficult--stupidly so--to
get these people help. They have to threaten your life (or theirs) to get them
any kind of help, which undeniably is not good enough yet, so they wind up
abandoned by their families, in prison with a horrible mix of drugs, etc.

My case was no different, I had to kick him out because he wasn't paying rent
and was causing distress to my other roommates. I would have done the same
with a sane person, but I must admit I felt bad because the guy was kind, he
just couldn't keep a job, so he couldn't pay me. He still owes me like $600,
but I've never contacted him about it. I figure he has a hard enough time as
is.

------
rjett
Does anyone here have friends or relatives who have been diagnosed with
schizophrenia. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with it. Someone
I know was diagnosed, but later the diagnosis was changed by another doctor to
manic depressive with bipolar (we were told that it was too early to say
affirmatively what the prob was). Every 9 months or so (for the past 3 years),
he has episodes where he or someone else has to check him into the hospital
because he's delusional (usually paranoid, having delusions of grandeur,
sometimes threatening).

~~~
izendejas
Read my other post, but I'll elaborate here. People with schizophrenia
definitely "hear voices." I've read a bit about this and forget the exact
scientific theory for why this happens, but my high-level understanding is
that the "self" part of their brain is disconnected from their consciousness
so--i'm sure this has happened to everyone when they're very sleepy--when they
hear "recordings" of voices, they aren't aware of the fact that their mind is
producing them.

The person I roomed with heard angels and demons. He was very religious, so
it's logical to see how he arrived at such conclusions. They usuallly slip
into such "episodes" when under stress. I remember one day, he came in very
angry, jumped into the shower, punching the wall yelling at "Satan." It was
surreal, but I kept my cool because I had read a lot about this. The most
insane part was trying to talk to him about the voices. In his mind they were
real. And when I implied they weren't, he would become stressed because I
didn't understand him/believe him. At this point you relize, reality is so
insanely relative to your experiences and how your mind processes stimuli. Any
"bad" wiring in the brain and you're either too religious, or too rational, or
too "insane" to hear voices that aren't there.

------
goodside
"Sufferers are no more dangerous than anyone else. Don't believe me? Then look
in the paper and you'll see most crimes are committed by the sane."

This is a fallacious argument. Non-schizophrenics outnumber schizophrenics by
a huge margin. Schizophrenics could, hypothetically, be ten times as dangerous
and most crimes would still be committed by sane people.

This study is somewhat outdated (1990), but: "The crime rate among male
schizophrenics was almost the same as that in the general male population,
whereas among females it was twice that of the general female population. The
rate of violent offences was, however, four times higher among the
schizophrenics." <http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/3/345>

In other words, making friends with a schizophrenic should make you about as
afraid of violent crime as making friends with four non-schizophrenics would
make you, assuming your friends are representative of the general population.

~~~
rwhitman
Agreed. This comic was incredibly misleading. I've known more than one person
with the disorder and they've all had violent episodes.

------
jessriedel
"Most crimes are committed by the sane" does not imply "Suffers from
Schizophrenia are no more dangerous than anyone else".

------
Rauchg
This is a good video of a patient that presents a traditional schizophrenic
disorganized thought process: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGnl8dqEoPQ>

------
Alex3917
"Even with these side-effects, people who suffer schizophrenia are still far
better off than if they'd been left untreated."

Except for that this directly contradicts the research, which shows that A) In
the U.S. patients are doing far worse than they did in the 50s before drug
therapy was introduced and B) patients in developing countries where they use
less or no drugs at all do dramatically better than patients in the US.

~~~
asdflkj
Link to research? I'd like to see how it was done, being that in so many
developing countries mental illness carries a huge stigma. Patients may do
better according to their family members, for whom the inconvenience of hiding
the patient is less bad than the shame of others' finding out.

~~~
Alex3917
Check out the book Anatomy of an Epidemic that just came out. The first 110
pages cites at least a couple dozen studies on this.

------
gnosis
For a good, unromanticized, fictional account of schizophrenia watch
"Revolution #9"

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253586/>

------
mtarnovan
"The illness effects memory" Another comic comes to mind:
<http://xkcd.com/326/>

------
horseass
Some chick in some ramachandran youtube video, if I remember, said a giant
black widow told her to cut her shirt with scissors or it'd bite her. And
there was a conspiracy against people people who's name started with 'j'. The
movie naked lunch is kinda schizophrenic.

~~~
horseass
Well I rate your rating -1

