The Descent Into Madness: Schizophrenia

How does one go on to develop this most catastrophic of conditions, a much feared word, "schizophrenia"? Mental health America describes schizophrenia as a "serious disorder which affects how a person thinks, feels and acts." The more brain oriented National Institute of Mental Health states "Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder".

I start off this thread with these two points to point out the parallelism that exists between mind and brain. What happens in the mind also happens in the brain, with specific neurons associated with specific mental states, and these "states", together, make up one holistic package.

When a person develops schizophrenia, something just doesn't go wrong. It's more than that. It's not merely a gene doing 'this' or an environment doing that. We need to conceptualize this condition - as well as the mind, more generally - in terms of dynamics; the mind is like a rushing river, and at times, it can present itself like a whirlpool. Forces that are experiences, what the developmental psychologist Dan Stern brilliantly terms 'forms of vitality', rush into us and leave an imprint on our neurons; "that state" corresponds to a medley of physiological processes - proteins, lipids, sugars - exchanging information in the form of 'protons' across membranes. Cells are tiny. Proteins, the building blocks of cells, are even tinier. The elements that make up these proteins (amino acids) are essentially the building blocks of matter. And within the quantum world, 'protons' are apparently the currency of organic communication.

These 'things' are really processes, physically 'constituted' and maintained as structures, but they are always dynamic - following basic patterns - subject to the force of history (as genes) and the novelties of a live environment. Life moves, and so, with this metaphorical image in mind, lets return to schizophrenia.

But before, a point on dissociation. Dissociation is what human beings do to protect ourselves from negative affective states. It's really just the more basic 'defensive mechanisms' of lower, automatic creatures, that promotes survival by alerting the organism to threat and taking action to get away. Dissociation, as an entirely human process, is really about language and culture. It's what humans do to one another, how they make one another feel, and how mutual expectations emerge between people (as culture) which has the effect of inducing structural dissociation in the brain-mind.

One last point in emotion, and what emotion is for. People need to realize that emotion is an alert system - like pain - to the nature of the communication one is having with another. Each emotion has a dynamic psychological significance as an evolutionary adaptation to complex social reality. Happiness, for instance, is a mutually 'good' state which brings two or more organisms into contact. Like the attractions that form between chemicals, happiness is a force that draws humans into contact. It is obviously an evolved mechanism that serves the purpose of group selection by drawing us toward sharing a common intentional state.

But a far more complex emotion is shame. Depression and negativity is perhaps there from the beginning. And without another human being, happiness is an impossible emotional state. But shame is entirely social and entirely about regulating the emergent property of the "self". It is interesting to explore point as we see the push and pull that evolution is using to keep us "sharing" a common goal. Shame is there as the 'centrifugal' force that keeps a certain individual away from a feeling of relatedness to others, and thus, debilitated in his capacity to 'extend' his self in enlivened action. The centripetal force of attachment feelings - love, compassion, play - are various ways evolution has designed to create the type of minds we have; but the most complicated feeling, no doubt, is shame.

Why complicated? Because it's simply not that simple. Shame is experienced also as an emotion that conveys social knowledge: that you are worthless. As social primates, and as creatures that are endlessly attuned to the social-status significance of any feeling we have in a social environment, shame, or being shamed, lets you know you're low status. It conveys at different levels, to others, that you are undesirable, and to yourself, that you are worthless.

The complexity is this. Many of us do not just settle with negative shame states: we fight back. We fight back not consciously, but affectively: since the organism is simultaneously the unit of selection (and not merely the group) the organism experiences anger when shame is experienced; and this is because, just like all other humans, we are both aware of our own experiences AND aware of what the cues in other peoples experiences MEAN, in terms of our own experience. Since shame indicates weakness, it is detestable. And thus, we unconsciously and instinctively convert, or invert, shame into anger. No self aware person can honestly deny this.

This unfortunately long intro is for the purpose of normalizing the idea that humans are animals, influenced by the physiological 'forms' (genes) of past creatures in it's historical lineage (phyla). Dissociation is what we do to get away from negative experiences of shame, fear, anxiety, or depression, but is primarily mostly a fear response (defense mechanism) to shame and what it signifies - low social status. However, as I mentioned earlier, emotion is there to inform the organism of what is happening; it is meant to be felt (right brain) and then expressed in action (left brain). At the very least, for humans, when feeling is felt, there appears to be a fundamental need to UNDERSTAND (left brain) it in language (left brain); to take the image and feeling of the right brain, and contextualize, and 'weave' it into the complex narrative that is our lives. This, presumably, is a relic of the Pleistocene environment of our evolutionary development, where we lived in small bands of no more than 150 people. Our minds widened, to take in more social information. In this environment of 'historical adaptedness', speech and airing grievances was common, as bonds were tightened around ritual, dance and musical forms of communication.

Today is different. Today's environments are unusually large (cities, where one ceaslessly encounters strangers) which means that are minds are often unconsciously primed towards vigilance, to 'be on guard' to the unknown others. Popular culture stokes our insecurities and undermines our sanity by forcing dissociative mental procedures into the institutional practices of modern day living. We are to pretend that we do not feel inadequate, although we are often presented with images of 'ideal' body's. We encourage greed by pretending that individual people "earn" success, as if family and early life environments don't bias and shape the way a person develops - by changing their brains, or giving opportunities. And most of all, were taught to flee - flee from negative feelings, negative emotions, negative experiences; were not helped to challenge or reflect in more complex ways on our struggles, and so, we seamlessly glide towards the cultural "basin of attraction"; doing what others do, because were genetically programmed to seek commonality with others.

Schizophrenia is a condition that emerges out of this complex process, in a person who was once a baby, who may have had parents with “genes” that bias him, but, at the same time, also had parents, or a parent, that was schizophrenic, and thus possessed a mind that presented in communication patterns of behavior that are oftentimes disorganizing for a developing child.

But if there’s no genetic bias, people still can develop schizophrenia. Psychiatry seems obsessed in proving that it is ‘genetic’, although we know that a person who didn’t have schizophrenia at one point can then develop it. Was the gene ‘silent’ and then ‘expressed’? Possibly. But we also don’t know of any gene. And we also know quite well that psychological trauma can induce breaks in any one, whether or not they possess the gene, it’s important to reflect on the relevant etiological factors, psychological and phenomenological, that precede the emergence of an actual break.
Dopamine pathways are off, so what does that feel like? It feels like a ‘rush’. A dopamine rush, as they say, is a feeling of ‘highness’, of excitedness, alacrity, exuberance. Fast talkers and people who can’t seem to wait to get something are experiencing a dopamine rush.

A necessity, then, in developing schizophrenia, is to be in a state of arousal – interest – towards something in your phenomenological world (whether in your head or your environment).

The left hemisphere is also the hemisphere of language, so dopamine and language are intimately tied together, so it’s not very surprising that schizophrenia induces massive psychological changes that seem to affect the left hemisphere more than the right. Thought disorder, for instance, is an experience of confusion with ones own mental experience; intention and thinking, which usually follow in that sequence, can be ‘dislocated’; thought may occur without intention (the dissociation of thought from intention) and thus produce involuntary ‘voices’ in ones head. But it’s also not just a left hemisphere thing. It’s also deeply, and maybe primarily, a right hemisphere thing.

Remember dissociation? When we feel something, this information is mostly integrated in the right hemisphere, before the left hemisphere “notes” it and perhaps thinks about it. But if the person has grown into the habit of not merely not acknowledging, but disowning and detesting elements of self-experience which they do not want to acknowledge, information between the hemispheres isn’t very balanced energetically. The brain seems to require the psychological transfer – yet, culture, society, the force of social status, creeps into our minds and guides our decisions. Such is what happens when one privileges the self, language, and looks above the complex dynamics that shape expressed realities.
A person with a strong defensive dissociative structure (from the nature of their early life environments) might possess enough ‘dissociated’, or, in the more romanticized Freudian version, repressed energy, understood in the sense of Sterns “forms of vitality”, to create tremendous “overload” for the left hemisphere during certain psychological experiences.
The linchpin, as always, is trauma. A severe emotional reaction can contain enough force to throw a mind into a new state of ‘self-organization’, so long as the mind is dislocated, or dissociative enough, a traumatic emotional experience could result in a psychological state of affairs that becomes chronic: schizophrenia.

The unintegrated emotional affects of the right hemisphere ‘roar’ back into explicit consciousness (left hemisphere) as thought disorder (the most debilitating symptom) involuntary accusatory and critical voices, and the traumatic hypoarousal that often follows a severe break: derealisation and depersonalization, as a schizophrenic break is truly a breakdown of the ‘psychological self-system’ of the organism.

Anxiety generates the changes and likely plays a big role in maintaining the new equilibrium, what we call “schizophrenia”. Fear, fear of the voices, of the thought disorder; and more crippling, the fear of not caring, of not wanting to be involved with the world. A person such as this is a testament to what avoiding self-knowledge can do to a human being; it can break them asunder, lost at sea, and leave them without a way to get back to land.

Social empathy, as mentioned before, is like the positive and negative ends of the battery meeting. It is truly an innate need that every human being is born with. We compartmentalize our minds to have it – high status, but more basically, a feeling of connectedness with others; but we can lose it when we become “overdetermined”; when we are willing to lie about what we feel and relate to our experiences with reference to the felt exigencies of our social worlds.

I wonder, how far can the therapeutic alliance go in helping someone who has schizophrenia to piece their minds back together? Thought disorder, can, indeed, be helped with talk therapy and communicating. Even more successful are touch therapies which play upon the most primitive parts of our brains, and thus can prime higher centers to feel emotions similar to those felt in early life.

Relationships are healing because faces, voices and touches are our primary modality of influencing one another. We all know the cliché “just say anything with a smile, and people will believe you”. This is mostly true because people want to feel certain ways – to be recognized, liked, desired, by others. We pay attention to feedback – everyone, all of us, and we only feed ourselves false information when we tell ourselves we are not like that. Yes, we are, because it is what comes with having a human body.

Therapies based upon compassion and which promote mindfulness, as well as ideas about how the mind operates, are perhaps the best ways to help someone who has descended this far into the netherworld of consciousness. Compassion, for some incredible reason, proves itself quite able to “make order” out of chaos. It just knows what do – how to direct the cells of our brain – to operate together more fluidly.

I had a hard time following you but as some with legit PTSD, bi polar disorder, ADHD, and intermittent explosive disorder I can tell you that a lot of these problems begin manifesting from what I call fracturing or traumatic experiences that happen at a young age.

It effects your ability to function socially which is also the worst part about it. You need to find a social group that understands where your at and tie into heavily in order to begin the healing process. Also you probably need medication for a while to help stabilize your emotions and to keep your thoughts organized.

I get lost in paranoia to the point of not being able to function. It makes it hard for me to get along in work environments.

It's a tough gig and we're not setup in the US to deal with it. It's a big problem here that's getting bigger as we lose our sense of community and we lose our emotional connections to one another. Abject materialism is a major cause for this. Lack of fanily community and basically the breakdown of the tribe is destroying the collective mind.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Society is a Schizophrenic mass if you learn how the world really looks, to them its a schizophrenic, they way i see it, if you can live in a bubble without hurting anyones elses bubble, contribute to society as a whole. Then who cares what your bubble looks lile.

I forgot to mention.

For some reason spirituality seems to really help people who are bi polar or schitzo.

Meditation/ faith/ chakras/ diet/ whatever sounds good to you.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The weird thing is, you put Thoughts and ideals with a modern physical disorder, or wait thats the problem with pseudo science field of Psychology, you cant disagree or agree with someone who is sick on paper. Is it physical ? No,
Bottom line, you dont fit into Society, thats the whole message.

a reply to: Hyperia

Mystics = schitzophrenics

a reply to: Astrocyte

Shizophrenia is nothing more than the government manipulating modern satellite and nanotechnology against chosen individuals-- the government attacks activists dissidents and whistleblowers, and also attacks everyday citizens to cover their tracks;

Mind Control..

The gov is practicing and experimenting with mind control, and people and psychiatrists are easily fooled by this technology;


See videos under psychotronic torture-- lots of movies on this topic as well;

So where does a paranoid schizophrenic fit in?

I'm a bit worried I could lose it, no history in my family but I am known to talk and answer myself, I'm never lonely tho.

originally posted by: tony9802
a reply to: Astrocyte

Shizophrenia is nothing more than the government manipulating modern satellite and nanotechnology against chosen individuals-- the government attacks activists dissidents and whistleblowers, and also attacks everyday citizens to cover their tracks;

Mind Control..

The gov is practicing and experimenting with mind control, and people and psychiatrists are easily fooled by this technology;


See videos under psychotronic torture-- lots of movies on this topic as well;

Sorry but that just isn't true. Schizophrenia isn't a new condition, and it has been around far longer than our government or country has.

a reply to: Astrocyte

> a person such as this is a testament to what avoiding self-knowledge
> can do to a human being; it can break them asunder, lost at sea, and
> leave them without a way to get back to land.

Avoiding pain today can product even greater psychic pain tomorrow.

Follow me, as I lead you toward self-knowledge and
what I hope will be Self-Awareness.

When anyone is open, they are moving away from pain.
This is first spiritual principle one must learn.

It may not feel that way at the time, but it will pass.
You might feel ashamed to confess you sin, but that
feeling will pass. It will be replaced with a blissful
emotion that can rise to the level of ecstasy.

- Ecstasy (emotion), a trance or trance-like state in which a person transcends normal consciousness
- Religious ecstasy, a state of consciousness characterized by expanded spiritual awareness, visions or absolute euphoria
- Ecstasy (philosophy), a term used to mean "outside itself"

Suffering is a normal part of life and when we learn
to run through the wall of fire (rather than run away
in fear) then have learn a very important skill. With
that skill a person can look "outside itself" and see
that taking a difficult unpleasent path is the only
way to get to the station in life the aspire too.

This skill is one we must use over and over in life.
Being "skillful" means we can look "outside of self"
or look beyond the ego desire or self interest and
see a Higher Purpose. We will use this skill over
and over. Each time we do, we grow in wisdom,
compassion, empathy, and understanding.

Pain can be endured, or we can numb our pain with
drugs, entertainment, sex, and intrigue addiction,
and general pleasure seeking. Our culture pushes
the drugs on us... encouraging us to experience
these distractions and we are more then happy
to indulge, if only it would dull our psychic pain.

A willingness to suffer (to endure healthy pain)
in the NOW MOMENTS will save us from the
psychic breakdown that result from a lack
of openness with others and ourselves.

Courage Now, and Peace Tomorrow.
This is a rule, one ought to follow.

Being closed, makes pain your bedfellow.
Being open, lets the sunlight sanctify you.

When you've had enough, let it go.
Reclaim your bliss as you would
reclaim a sunset or a rainbow,
by finding joy in the moment.

Build your memory palace out
of good memories, and let the
rest of it fall away. If all you
recall to memory are happy
times, guess what....

Be honest with yourself about
what you want, and then go
out and get it.

Be honest with yourself about
WHO YOU ARE. Then LIVE it.

Be honest, and cast away the
fear of shame, or the fear of
being laughed at. Drop pride.
Embrace TRUTH.

Reject False Authority and
live your true AUTHORITY.
Live in LIBERTY.

Know LOVE
Be the LIGHT
Encourage others.

The opposite of Reclaim:

harm, hurt, injure, lose, abandon, forfeit
destroy, endanger, ruin, waste, forget

Do you want any of these in your life?
If the answer is no, then go RECLAIM.

a reply to: onequestion

shhhh

a reply to: supermarket2012

define instincts, define primate and define human and define society, its new

a reply to: Hyperia
Not all of them. Just the ones who are able to hang on and gain from the experience. Plus since they can't socialize right they have the ability to see what others can't. They make great shamans in tribal cultures.

I won't talk about the variables involved in that though.

a reply to: onequestion

There was a huge difference between the HN and the HS as a specie, the most important attribute was the social adaptation skills. HN had a more successful society the HS lived in warmer climates, Tribal mentality vs a Society structure.

reptilians i tell you, Its those darn reptilians, oh sry forgot, its a theory!

Now im gonna see which HS i can toy with.

a reply to: Hyperia

I don't know what your talking about but a majority of my problems began manifesting strongly after a serious traumatic head injury that happened during a car accident when I was 23.

a reply to: onequestion

Ooooh, brain damage, then its different

a reply to: Astrocyte

From your post I assume your are in the mental health field or studying for it. I would suggest you read the book The Road Less Traveled, written by well known psychiatrist and best-selling author, M. Scott Peck.

More and more mental health professionals are slowly agreeing that man has a spirit and this spirit can become sick as well. When a man's spirit is sick no medication will help or solve this person's sickness. Releif must come from the spiritual world. By attempting to diagnose all alleged physcological/mental conditions as being either a physical or mental condition rules out any further examination of the patient. Sickness goes beyond the physical and mental conditions and misdiagnosis can lead to further damage.

If medication and therapy work within the psychiatrical and physcological world then why are there so many people confined to asylums?

I support most therapies for mental treatment and believe that many have a mental disease HOWEVER not all. When a patient can move items around the room without touching them, tell you specifically of your past, speak out your darkest secrets in detail, speak a dead language with 100% accuracy or float in the room then this is not a mental sickness and attempting to explain the unknown in medical terminology is arrogant and stupid. Nothing more than job verification.

Man consist of a body, mind (brain that can think) and a spirit. Not all thoughts are generated inside the mind but can come from external means......the spirit world and when medicine recognizes this then new information will be available to treat the mentally impaired. Right now mental health has reached its maximum capacity. The only thing that will change will be its definitions of theories they have.

S&F for you even if you disagree.

a reply to: Astrocyte

OR

It can be the descent into Greatness!

Many Well known people have problems and one of those is being 'Schizophrenc'.

I am one of those, it wasn't passed down to me, it came about from my Life Experiences and drugs later in Life!

I am now however doing great things in my Life!

There is a thin line between genius and madness. All reading this have to see the article titled "What a shaman sees in a mental institution". Some of the most brightest individuals were introverts and had what some would call personality disorders. Einstein was known to be extremely socially awkward and would mutter theorems to himself. Tesla was an introvert preferring isolation, allowing the mind to be uncluttered by external influence. He also had vivid hallucinations even in a room full of people. And yet some of his greatest discoveries came came from his moments of altered consciousness.