Dealing with cognitive impairment

I could rattle off a list of people on this forum who are fighting and clawing to achieve and be the best they can be. Hell, I will. You @SurprisedJ, @radmedtech, @elizabeth, @shutterbug, @mortimermouse, @CarolineC the list could go on. Those were just some, there are others and I apologize for not mentioning you, that was just a short list off the top of my head.

I could also run off a list of those who are mired, not in symptoms of schizophrenia so much, but in their belief that they are “impaired” and unable to do anything. I won’t name names but if you read the forum a bit you’ll see them.

I’m not talking about people who are severely symptomatic. This is a debilitating disease and some will be limited by it. But it’s not always symptoms that limit a person.

Not every book is the gospel.

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So what you are in essence saying is that people with problems should put up and shut up.

I’m saying that this impairment is often exaggerated.

How do you know this? I see no basis on which to make this claim.

I don’t want to get into the centre or something… This is just me, myself and I…

I wouldn’t say my impairments were over exaggerated as much as strongly reinforced by people who were acting on information given at the time…. Like the doctors. I look back and find myself a little mad at some of them for stuff they told me and encouraged me NOT to do in case of relapse.

My Mom fought long and hard for the med change that helped me get to where I am today.

The doc wasn’t going to do that on his own. As far as he was concerned… I was sedate and not bothering anyone… why risk it?

Doc’s who only see the worst… only say the worst.

I remember booking an appointment with my doc when I was doing great so he could see what a “doing great” me looked like.

Plus… it takes time and small steps and docs who encourage instead of discourage.

I think I was fighting against more then just lack of will power. I was fighting this illness and my doctors stigma… and my own stigma. It’s taken a long time to over come it… I still find myself slipping into sneaky brained thinking… NOW I have help getting out of it.

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It is my opinion, based on personal experience in both real life and on the Internet.

It is interesting that you write this in another thread.

If you don’t even believe that people fit neatly into the diagnosis, how can you possibly say that they are so terribly “cognitively impaired”?

Those people read these same kinds of statistics, and instead of treating you like an individual, they generalized and pigeon-holed you to fit with those statistics. It is that very generalization that is an exaggeration. “Oh, you’re schizophrenic? You’re impaired. Don’t try, just sit back and accept your ‘impairments’.” Some listen and accept, some refuse and see that they can do more.

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I would agree with this. There is a difference between acknowledging impairments and writing someone completely off.
By the time I met my wife I had been labelled a chronic schizophrenic and was destined for at best a group home and at worst a long stay ward. I was not considered a candidate for independent living. I had minimal skills and there was little attempt to develop them.
Then I met my wife and left hospital with her. She encouraged and taught me.
I wouldn’t say I’m highly functioning and I need help but I’ve managed to avoid the fate that was earmarked for me.
I may have a limited ability to live independently in the community but it is better than having been seen as having no ability.

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Just curious, how many years has it been since you had a schizophrenic diagnosis?

I can communicate fairly well, but I get confused and overwhelmed easily and I sometimes freeze up if there’s too much going on. I need help with some things, like calling in refills for my meds, because there are so many of them and I can’t keep track of it all. My mother helps out a lot, as does my boyfriend. I’m just glad I can still drive, so far I haven’t really had any problems with that. Actually, driving acts as a focus for me and can help me concentrate, but I do have to be careful not to let my mind wander, or forget to look both ways. I talk to myself in my head to remind myself of these things, and I get a little obsessive about some things. I worry about traffic lights, thinking they’ll turn yellow at the worst time and I’ll have to decide whether to go through or stop at the last second. I also worry about other drivers, I never trust turn signals and always wait for them to start their turn before I go. But I like driving overall, though not long trips. Which I guess is a good thing, since most of my friends don’t drive.

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Nothing wrong with being extra careful. Twice I made a left on red…that was before I was on meds and my thoughts were all scrambled up and spinning out of control. It’s under more control now. It’s strange that meds that would slow a normal person’s thinking make me think better.

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The schizophrenia diagnosis went sometime around 1983. I was then diagnosed schizoaffective mixed type for 22 years. Then for reasons which I think were more to do with a) the pdoc at the time having an interest in personality disorders (2) Bad blood between me and the psychiatric team the dx was changed to personality disorder NOS. In 2013 I found out it had changed to paranoid PD.
The treatment I receive is the same as if I had schizophrenia ie fortnightly depot and not the talk therapy usually seen as a first line treatment for PDs.

Have you seen a religious person inspire a cripple to try to walk when they can’t and they fall hard to the ground when reality disagrees with their belief. In order to succeed in my dreams I have to recognize my limitations, I want to give presentations and pitch my business ideas, if I do not recognize that I have problems more than average then reality will disagree and I will fall hard. On the other hand, it just means that I have to try harder than average to accomplish the same things. So recognizing my problems allows me to work with them and not ignore them. You can not correct a problem you do not know you have. Ignoring problems will catch up to you eventually. My biggest inspriation and metaphor for my life is this guy with no legs who conquers the appalachain trail. My trail to conquer is my social enterprise dreams and my no legs is more of a mental impairment challenge rather than physical disability of no legs. I asked my self why does this guy try to do something that takes so much more effort to accomplish than everyone else. His story is meant to show people that what ever problem or skill you lack you can overcome it by your own will. So my disability is percieving reality correctly, it will take more work to percieve it correctly and I can document the challenge for others to see and be inspired by, its is a philosophical quest unique to my being. Nietzsche was inspiring by his overcoming of his intense pain problem and this caused him to heighten his will power and can explain it well to the world. My story is similar, the universe has set me up in a way where I must develop an extreme amount of will to succeed in realizing dreams. Eventually I hope that my overgrowth of will power will help others grow in this respect.

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In a sense, I grieve for people who are never experience a pain or discontentment of some sort, to me they seem to lack a fundamental component of human nature, which is a desire for a world that is better than the current state of things. The pain/discontentment is your understanding of what is not ideal and your desire to make it ideal. Pain is who you are. Pain and the acts it inspires is the becoming of the change you want to see in the world. (Gandi said become the change you want to see in the world). You are what you do and you are the eternal changes you make in this universe. What’s worse is when people are numb to the pain inside them, their being officially cut off from what they do with their lives.

Practice practice practice.

Your limitations are a wall. Hit it often enough, hard enough, and it will move. Just not enough that you will notice the change immediately. You will spend a couple frustrating months before you suddenly realize you are doing things you didn’t think you could do, or that everyone else told you was beyond you. My experience is that 99% give up well before they see this positive change. Once you understand that this improvement is real and consistent, hitting the wall becomes a source of pleasure (mostly).

My 2 cents.

10-96

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I have a combination of fastness and slowness. I’m slow to figure out what’s happening in real life, but what’s happening in my own head is fast and chaotic…and not in sync with what’s really going on. I’m truly in my own world.

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I can’t. I have really scaled up the number of people I can handle and the period I can handled them for, but I am nowhere near being able to do it on a daily basis. I can take a large crowd at two 8-10 hours bursts for up to two days in a row, but this costs me two days of higher functioning immediately afterward. I will have voices leaking in, delusions, paranoia, aliens. My ability to work properly is always diminished. A regular classroom is not on my menu now, or, I suspect, in the future.

I’m just happy to be able to DJ or photograph a wedding. That’s good enough for me for now. :smile:

10-96

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Speaking for myself and strictly myself, there are some limitations that I have not been able to completely get around. My crowd tolerance is mostly a hard limit that I have not been able to push much in the last five years. My short-term memory is still el-crapola and requires a LOT of note taking.

A lot of the fears I had, particularly public speaking, public interaction, and agoraphobia, boiled down to this:

Probably 75% of the problems I have had to face down because of my schizophrenia were more the result of bad habits I developed while symptomatic and then found myself either afraid to or unwilling to try and break once I was healthier.

10-96

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Fitting neatly or not neatly is not necessarily down to whether someone is cognitively impaired or not. There are lots of other reasons why a diagnosis may be an inexact/partial fit.
Some people will be very impaired,some people mildly impaired and some people not at all. At no point have I said that being terribly impaired is applicable to all.

Maybe we need to distinguish Cognitive Impaired SZ from no impairment SZ. Or make CI distinct from the diagnosis? This would help identify our needs, problems, and solutions better.

This site can help measure impairments: http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/
I have noticed steady improvements in planning and reasoning, but focus is bad.