The ''Anatomy'' of Mental Illness

Mental illness is a vastly different interpretation of events within and without a particular individual. He/she most likely sees what others see, but interprets it differently due to a fixed set of conditions. What are those conditions - varies from case to case.

A mentally ill person constructs a world based on his/her perception of what passes for reality. The reason why mental illness is rampant in this day and age is simple: we are being bombarded by stimuli from all directions. As a result, not everyone can process all the data without glitches - leading to major malfunctions - along the way.

For instance, whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

You probably know the only way to interact with a mentally ill person is to understand what their ''code'' to reality is - and then use it. Just like using a particular form of lingo to communicate with others.

People who fancy themselves Napoleons, Hitlers, Stalins.. there is no way you can convince them they are wrong. Unless you tread carefully and apply a fixed set of mental principles they can respond to. Then, and only then, do you have a chance.

reply to post by FlowThruSpace


Very well put! (I am very close to someone who is mentally ill.)

reply to post by FlowThruSpace


How does this work for the plethora of all mental illness then.

You're thinking psychosis, I would assume, given you refer to schizophrenia and then imply it's more common now due to excess external stimuli.

And not referring to mental illness as such, with your assertion, as it would not relate to all mental illness such as munchausen by proxy.. or anorexia..

I know what you mean by the amount of external stimuli we're exposed to. I suffer greatly from sensory over load. And it makes it impossible to think. But I am not schizophrenic, nor do I display any symptoms of it.

Mental illness goes far beyond the old guy up the road who stares at the tree for 9 hours a day...

Well, according to your definition, I don't know anyone who isn't crazy. Even the people judging our illness are judging it on the beliefs they are taught. These beliefs of the people evaluating things are not always based on scientific evidence, they are based on consensus of the time. Some of that consensus is real but much is based on a belief of what is taught to us. These teachings contain a lot of conditioning that has developed through the years, some good and some bad. I would not put my complete faith in the medical industry here in America, the motive to expand the industry and keep their workers employed is too great to trust it.

reply to post by winofiend


Indeed, mental illness goes far beyond the old guy you so aptly mentioned. The pattern of thought is what matters - the rest are expressions.

reply to post by rickymouse


Exactly. This begs the question: how can psychiatry usurp its right to determine who's sane and who's not?

reply to post by FlowThruSpace


Just because millions of people believe something is right, it doesn't necessarily make it right.

FlowThruSpace
whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

It's a major malfunction. No need to guess.
DSM 5

Schizophrenia is characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior, and
other symptoms that cause social or occupational dysfunction. For a diagnosis, symptoms must have
been present for six months and include at least one month of active symptoms

The clue that it's a malfunction and not just 'seeing through the veil' .... disorganized speech and behavior as well as occupational dysfunction. Seeing through the veil wouldn't cause that. If anything, a person who could see through the veil would be more in touch with the universe would probably function better, I'd think. They'd have more understanding of what was going on and more understanding of why we are here ... so there would be less stress of 'unknowing'. IMHO

reply to post by FlyersFan

FlowThruSpace
whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

This is an odd quote, are you schizophrenic or been diagnosed as such? Like another poster said, i don't think there is much doubt that it's a major malfunction. Some people's brains simply don't work right. Some people have varying levels of functionality. The brain is very complex. But having someone in the family who suffered from this i can tell you it is quite obvious they are malfunctioning mentally. There is no deep meaning to their mind that you need to understand, a broken clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean the clock has hidden truths. I think trying to understand broken people is by-product of empathy. They want to try to understand so they can quantify and come to terms with it themselves. You see it with women writing men in prison who are serial killers.


V


V

Variable
reply to post by FlyersFan

 

FlowThruSpace
whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

This is an odd quote, are you schizophrenic or been diagnosed as such? Like another poster said, i don't think there is much doubt that it's a major malfunction. Some people's brains simply don't work right. Some people have varying levels of functionality. The brain is very complex. But having someone in the family who suffered from this i can tell you it is quite obvious they are malfunctioning mentally. There is no deep meaning to their mind that you need to understand, a broken clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean the clock has hidden truths. I think trying to understand broken people is by-product of empathy. They want to try to understand so they can quantify and come to terms with it themselves. You see it with women writing men in prison who are serial killers.


V


V

No, there's a theory schizophrenia is actually allowing you to see more and you lose touch with your surroundings. It's enough to look at forums to see what is meant by ''mental illness.'' We instinctively know who isn't exactly sane.

reply to post by FlyersFan


How could you possibly claim to know what seeing "through the veil" would do to anyone? Psychiatry/psychology can't even claim to know what seeing something "we know is really there" will do to a person.

The world of psychiatry is a field in which humans like to think they understand, but in reality there is no proof of anything. There is simply experienced data that is recorded and there are anomalies to such data time and time again. Thus why the world of psychology and psychiatry is changing on a daily basis, helping us to further pretend like we understand the human mind.

It has gotten to the point now where anything that doesn't agree or fall in line with majority opinion or majority action, is considered some kind of mental illness. The world of psychiatry has failed miserably, and while there are a few fun things to be learned from examining the human mind, the way we have structured the field, in my opinion, takes us back in progress rather than forward.

reply to post by FlowThruSpace

A mentally ill person constructs a world based on his/her perception of what passes for reality. The reason why mental illness is rampant in this day and age is simple: we are being bombarded by stimuli from all directions.

Very thoughtful and great insight,
however to a large extent its ubiquitous because of self serving "analyst - priests" rise to power and entrenching the industry through case law with the help of the State.

www.szasz.com...

"Perhaps most radically ... Thomas Szasz deemed mental illness a mythic and monstrous beast, and proclaimed that 'mental illness' was a fiction. Insanity, he has continued ever since to claim, is not a real disease, whose nature has been progressively scientifically unveiled; mental illness is rather a myth, forged by psychiatrists for their own greater glory. Over the centuries, medical men and their supporters have been involved, argues Szasz, in a self-serving 'manufacture of madness.' In this, he indicts both the pretensions of organic psychiatry and the psychodynamic followers of Freud, whose notion of the 'unconscious' in effect breathed new life into the obsolete metaphysical Cartesian dualism. For Szasz, any expectation of finding the etiology of mental illness in body or mind -- above all in some mental underworld -- must be a lost cause, a dead-end, a linguistic error, and even an exercise in bad faith. 'Mental illness' or the 'unconscious' are not realities but at best metaphors. In promoting such ideas, psychiatrists have either been involved in improper cognitive imperialism or have rather naively pictorialized the psyche -- reifying the fictive substance behind the substantive. Properly speaking, contends Szasz, insanity is not a disease with origins to be excavated, but a behavior with meanings to be decoded. Social existence is a rule-governed game-playing ritual in which the mad person bends the rules and exploits the loopholes. Since the mad person is engaged in social performances that obey certain expectations so as to defy others, the pertinent questions are not about the origins, but about the conventions, of insanity. In this light, Szasz dismisses traditional approaches to the history of madness, as questions mal posés, and aims to reformulate them." --From: Porter, R., Introduction, in Porter, R. and Wright, D., eds.,The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); pp. 1-19; p. 2.

Having first hand close experience with a sufferer for 10 years I studied, saw and concluded that mental illness "treatment" is based on pseudo science, ego stroking, pharmacology dispensing, pharmacological cocktails, big dollars, mental incarceration. All hail to the Priests of the New Psychiatry Orthodoxy Religion and their Bible the DSMV. The definition of disorders increases exponentially at a rate akin to interpetrations of the Judeo/Christian Bible

TKDRL
How could you possibly claim to know what seeing "through the veil" would do to anyone? Psychiatry/psychology can't even claim to know what seeing something "we know is really there" will do to a person.

You don't read much in the metaphysic section of the library, do you?

reply to post by FlyersFan


What has that to do with the subject? If the theories about multiple dimensions are correct, people seeing "beyond the veil" could all be seeing very different things. I don't really go to the library much at all, why bother, when I can get any book I want on the net and toss it in my ebook reader I was always bad about forgetting due dates

But my point is, ten different people see something messed up, like say a monk pour gasoline over his head and strike a match. You get ten different reactions, and that is seeing something "real". They cannot predict those types of things, how can they have even a prayer at getting it right about things they know nothing about?

Maybe the "crazy ones" are seeing some more violent and scary dimensions, and maybe even seeing a few at the same time, confusing the hell out of them. Who knows.

Variable
reply to post by FlyersFan

 

FlowThruSpace
whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

This is an odd quote, are you schizophrenic or been diagnosed as such? Like another poster said, i don't think there is much doubt that it's a major malfunction. Some people's brains simply don't work right. Some people have varying levels of functionality.


V

That's fine. What we need to do then for the sake of this discussion is determine what seeing through the veil is and why persons who can see through the veil demonstrate what some would say are symptoms of mental illness namely schizophrenia.

FlowThruSpace

Variable
reply to post by FlyersFan

 

FlowThruSpace
whether schizophrenia is actually a major malfunction or the ability to see through the veil into another dimension is anyone's guess.

This is an odd quote, are you schizophrenic or been diagnosed as such? Like another poster said, i don't think there is much doubt that it's a major malfunction. Some people's brains simply don't work right. Some people have varying levels of functionality. The brain is very complex. But having someone in the family who suffered from this i can tell you it is quite obvious they are malfunctioning mentally. There is no deep meaning to their mind that you need to understand, a broken clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean the clock has hidden truths. I think trying to understand broken people is by-product of empathy. They want to try to understand so they can quantify and come to terms with it themselves. You see it with women writing men in prison who are serial killers.


V


V

No, there's a theory schizophrenia is actually allowing you to see more and you lose touch with your surroundings. It's enough to look at forums to see what is meant by ''mental illness.'' We instinctively know who isn't exactly sane.

We don't have to assume that this 'seeing through the vial" causes schizophrenia. Certainly there are those that just incorporate other information into the realm of a whole reality. Extra reality doesn't guarantee any symptoms. Maybe some behavior variations maybe not.

PTSD seems to be the number one symptom of a person having their idea of norms and reality altered by another reality.

Schizophrenia is a Neurobiological disorder. Most people don't have the understanding that with schizophrenics it's more then just psychological. With Schizophrenia there are psychical changes that take place in the brain once the person becomes ill. Once the illness is triggered it destroys parts of the brain. A schizophrenics brain mass can shrink by up to 10%. They literly loose grey matter. Schizophrenia is hereditary and passed on in our genes. Scientists have located 2 genes that are linked to schizophrenia. These genes can lay dormant a persons entire life and they may never get the illness or they may become active and the person get schizophrenia.

I have paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar. I've suffered 2 severe psychosis's in my early 20's. I've been to the farthest reaches of insanity and back. I wasn't always schizophrenic. My life was pretty normal until I started coming down with the illness at age 18. I got good grades in school. I was well liked by my peers. I played football all throughout school. All until one day my life was ripped apart by this illness. At one point a doctor told my mom that I would have to be institutionalized for life and that I would never be the same.

It's been 18 years since my last psychosis. My mother never gave up she did everything she could to get me the right help. As of the last 10 years I'm 90% symptom free. I still take medication ever day out of fear of having another psychosis. I'd rather not take any chances of having another psychosis. I worked to hard to get to where I'm at.

TKDRL
What has that to do with the subject?

You said this - How could you possibly claim to know what seeing "through the veil" would do to anyone? My response is ... go read the metaphysical section in the library. (THAT is how I can claim to know what seeing through the veil does). There is a ton of information from people who can 'see through the veil'. None of them behave in a manner that is anything close to this mental illness. And that is what schizophrenia is.

Mental illness isn't something to be ashamed of. It can happen to anyone. But to try to glamorize it and make it into something etherially connected is doing the victim of schizophrenia a whole lotta' harm. They have organic problems ... not 'connected across the veil' gifts.

wantsome
Schizophrenia is a Neurobiological disorder. Most people don't have the understanding that with schizophrenics it's more then just psychological. With Schizophrenia there are psychical changes that take place in the brain once the person becomes ill. Once the illness is triggered it destroys parts of the brain. A schizophrenics brain mass can shrink by up to 10%. They literly loose grey matter. Schizophrenia is hereditary and passed on in our genes. Scientists have located 2 genes that are linked to schizophrenia. These genes can lay dormant a persons entire life and they may never get the illness or they may become active and the person get schizophrenia.

There is no evidence that Schizophrenia is a neurobiological disorder.

Various genetic, organic or pathogen-based causative factors have been hypothesised for the emergence of Schizophreniform symptomology but to date, despite over 100 years of research, medical science has yet to identify a specific biological antecedent.

Current biological research seeks to explain the aetiology of Schizophrenia via various domains; neurodevelopmental models of psychosis suggest that cerebral damage and reduced volume of brain mass associated with the disorder may originate during gestation and that the onset of psychotic symptoms are the end-product of abnormal brain development, inflammatory processes and immune response, rendering Schizophrenia a neurodegenerative disease (Altamura et al, 2012). Other research has focused on non-genetic infectious factors, such as the parasite Toxoplasma Gondii, with elevated antibody levels having been found in Schizophrenia patients by numerous studies (Fuller Torrey et al, 2012) and observable effects on human and animal behaviour noted via the mechanism of parasitic symbiosis.

Traditional models focus on neurochemical imbalances; the efficacy of antipsychotic treatment continues to be based around the dopaminergic hypothesis (Kapur, 2003). However, despite multi-factorial approaches, there remains no biological or genetic “test” for Schizophrenia, and no definitive evidence to suggest that Schizophrenia is a unitary disease-entity (Tandon et al, 2008). The diagnosis has been described as being “replete with examples of theories that have remained unproven, but still held with tenacity by their proponents,” suggesting that “Schizophrenia” is in fact a conglomeration of similar syndromes with overlapping symptoms and phenomenologies (Keshavan et al, 2011).

In addition, the reduced volumes of brain mass typically seen in Schizophrenic patients are due to damage caused by neuroleptics rather than an innate disease process (Moncrieff & Leo, 2010).

As Schizophrenia continues to be diagnosed via pathological criteria and first-line treatment is focused on pharmacological intervention, it is interesting to note that 1 in 3 patients are classed as treatment-resistant (Suzuki et al, 2011), which illustrates the ineffectiveness of disease-based interpretations and the need for greater focus on understanding and treating psychosis from a psychological perspective. Furthermore, it gives credence to the notion that psychosis may be a manifestation of unprocessed trauma (Varese et al, 2012), with “symptoms” such as voice hearing being a symbolic representation of this suffering; by eliminating positive symptoms via medication, an important opportunity to understand, contextualize and recover from the experience is lost (Romme & Escher, 2011 pp 385-393).

The Continuum model of psychosis provides an integrated understanding of the psychological processes underpinning “Schizophrenia”, as well as explaining the blurred, non-discrete boundaries between other mental disorders and the over-lapping of symptoms. Turkington & McGovern (2001) suggested a hierarchy of psychopathology, or spectrum of disorders, ranging from stress responses to psychosis, and emphasised that factors such as an individuals genetic predisposition, psychological make up and external environment determined where on the continuum of mental disorder psychiatric symptoms would likely manifest.

Cognitive models of psychosis adopt a holistic, humanist approach and are based on a hypothesis of stress-vulnerability, suggesting that predisposing social, biological and psychological factors interact with adverse life events, triggering a psychotic response. Experience of trauma, social disadvantage and isolation are seen to influence the development of negative schemas and core beliefs, which in turn influence interpretations of the self and others; research suggests that sufferers of psychosis tend to have negative self-perception, which directly relates to the development and maintenance of persecutory psychotic belief systems (Jolley & Garety, 2011) as well as the social withdrawal, inertia and lack of motivation typically characterised as “negative symptoms.”