Aggression and violence in schizophrenia

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Hi. I’ve been having violence fantasies, hallucinations for many years. They don’t really bother me, I just wanted to share it with you and maybe read your own experiences, comments. There’s a good article about it, it is not long and it’s easy to read:

Neurobiology of Aggression and Violence in Schizophrenia

This wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicidal_ideation#Associated_psychopathology says: “It is well established that people with schizophrenia have an increased risk of committing violent acts, including homicide.”

and interestingly: “People who present with homicidal ideation also have a higher risk of suicide.”

My sincere regards.

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I’m curious about the study this came from, as everything else I have read has stated that we’re at a higher risk of being victims vs. perpetrators of violence.

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I heard its higher when we’re on drugs once

But not like we’re all walking around stoned

I question the validity of that study too

Seems like negative propaganda :thumbsdown:

When I was psychotic, I was scared, not violent

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The sources are at the end of that paper… there’s a meta-analysis there saying there’s an increased risk if and only if there is a comorbid substance abuse disorder. Meta-analyses combine lots of studies, I typically trust their results. Now is there a higher prevalence rate of substance abuse among schizophrenics than among non-sz, that would be the question. But yeah, it’s touchy.

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I’ve heard my former AA sponsor talk about “not being on the beam, and not knowing you’re not on the beam, because you’re not on the beam”. When I was psychotic I felt like I was on the beam and everyone else was trying to push me off. I was really mad about it. I think that is a common feeling among many sz’s. To bad this feeling will not yield to logic, or reason. Usually it requires medication to treat it.

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Schizophrenia made me nock a few people out. Almost killed some people due to delusions as well almost killed myself thinking if i did the things in my head i was gonna get life then I got diagnosed and started my way to recovery.

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I have a high risk of violence and am responsible for the mass murder of numerous fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. I need help.

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Killed a whole family…of chickens…ate them whole…whispers the smiling fox…

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You can find many studies on different issues in the world that say the exact opposite thing. I don’t put to much stock in this article. I’ve already read quite a few articles about schizophrenia and violence that claim opposite things.

My understanding is that most of the violence done by people with schizophrenia is a minority who are either unmedicated, or they are on drugs or that they had a history of violence before they got ill. These three factors seem to be the cause of most violence done by people with schizophrenia.

But hey, it’s a crazy world and it’s hard to know what to believe. There are still people who believe
that the world is flat. So basically you could find a hundred studies that say that people with schizophrenia are actually no more violent than the rest of society.

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There is a saying similar to this, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.

If you have violent thoughts you want to change that because you can hurt people or yourself which is basicily what violent thoughts can do.

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I used to be angry…i stopped placing expectations on every thing…now i smile at the ignorant and laugh at my demons…

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Precisely what my last psychiatrist told me when I shared my concerns with him about becoming violent. He told me no, I seem like a very gentle person and shouldn’t be worried about becoming violent. Even though I sometimes have flashes of violent thoughts.

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My, I belong in the violent thought category as I lost count the number of times my voices made me think that I was going to be killed in my sleep. I’ve tried to commit suicide when my voices made me think that they were going to kill me and my entire family if I didn’t drink draino while I was psychotic. However I remember when they were telling me to kill people(very rare for this to happen. like a handful of times.) in the room I would leave the room because I couldn’t deal with it. There were times when I thought I was being harassed that I would intentionally put myself in harms way in my mind. I would constantly hear from people that they were going to attack me as I walked by them. So I would stop and wait there for a while to give them the chance. At the time I thought this was okay because I would do something to show I wasn’t afraid while at the same time doing something completely normal just in case it was a hallucination. I have heard from people that it looks like an aggressive action so I should probably stop doing it.

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I was violent once when I was psychotic. I trashed a wardrobe. It was instead of beating up my kid. But after that I was pretty much locked up in my head and suffered from apathy.

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With me fear and panic has made me on occasion verbally aggressive. When I was faced with negative emotions I struggled to cope with.

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It’s not illegal to have violent fantasies and engage in sanctioned violence like fight gyms or the military

it is illegal to dropkick a dude waiting at a crosswalk because you feel like he would put up a good fight

this study is part of why I dropped neuro and went for clinical…it’s because the more people publish and ramble about the cause of something, the less they actually know. It is like they are talking to themselves while they are trying to figure it out, or keeping a journal while figuring it out, it means…at the bottom line…that “it” has not been figured out.

1000 studies on the genetic cause, a new gene every week, a new answer to the question every week, means they are all wrong, like the boy who cried wolf, is the scientist who keeps crying “eureka” yeah no one listens to them because they say “eureka” every Friday at 5PM just when they are let off work.

now the huge collaborative studies compounding over a dozen research sites, like the one they did for autism with over 1000 autistic brains, yeah, those hold more merit because they are better data to generalize from…but guess what…they concluded “no significant differences between autistic and typical brains, yo” and that ruined everyone messing with a lab rat’s day

Like @flybottle said, meta-analyses are better to listen to, they are better data, and bigger loads of data as well.

Also, we are more dangerous when we are ■■■■■■ up on some other drugs, but the problem is that a lot of people with what we have remain intoxicated on loads of crap like alcohol. I was violent outside of a gym once, and that was when I was on antidepressants and alcohol and nothing else but still some preworkout left in my blood from earlier that day.

I am pretty studious and I exercise for health on the good stuff, the new antipsychotics…

there is a slogan in research, it is “garbage in, garbage out”, meaning shitty data such as sampling rich white people on vacation and then saying that they represent humans, period, is garbage in (rich white people on vacation are garbage when it comes to representing all of humanity) and the conclusion are the garbage we get out (like statements such as “Fiji brand bottled water must be inexpensive and plentiful, as everyone in the study was seen drinking it at any given moment”)

see you gotta become a researcher

LOL jk it is not for everyone

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ditto, except the draino suicide was pills and self-inflicted wrist cutting suicide. Your voices might be violent, but that doesn’t mean you have to be violent. I learned this the hard way. I now have scars on my wrist that will never go away, but thankfully, my voices went away (except for their periodic “echoes”). I am now stable thanks to meds and don’t have violent imagery running amok in my head anymore.

Agree with mortimermouse that your thoughts are not illegal. I had one therapist who was seeing me for childhood trauma and she said that violent fantasies are one way—perhaps not the ideal way—to deal with trauma and anger.

I once emailed a french researcher because of the way his research was summarized in medwatch or somewhere like that…it made it seem like sz’s were naturally violent. He actually replied to me (!!!) and after telling me that my French was not understandable, we conversed in English. He sent me a ton of articles he wrote up, which clearly said what @flybottle said, drug use/alcohol use + sz leads to a higher increased risk of acting out with violence. Emphasis on the drugs and alcohol.

I’ll go find that email, maybe I can cite the sources here…be back.
Good luck!

EDIT: found email
Here’s one of the many sources he sent me: Violence and duration of untreated psychosis in first-episode patients - PubMed

CONCLUSIONS:
Earlier treatment of first episode psychosis might prevent some homicides. Personality factors and substance abuse may be more important than psychotic symptoms in the development of aggressive behaviour in patients with first-episode psychosis.

here’s another one, also mentioning personality factors and substance abuse: Violence among people with schizophrenia: phenotypes and neurobiology - PubMed

We hypothesize that schizophrenia preceded by conduct disorder is associated with a combination of genes conferring vulnerability for both disorders and altering the effects of environmental factors on the brain, and thereby, with a distinct pattern of neural development. Some evidence is available to support this hypothesis. By contrast, offending among adults with schizophrenia who have no history of such behaviour prior to illness may result from the changes in the brain that occur as illness onsets, and that are further altered by comorbid conditions such as substance misuse, or by the progressive changes in the brain through adulthood that may result from the illness and from the use of antipsychotic medications.

I also have to wonder how much of our subhuman treatment by the system and against sz (i.e. use of restraints) causes anger, trauma, and paranoia that also contribute to violent thoughts. Just a thought, though. :slight_smile:

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