Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman
Thursday 27 November 2014 06.00 GMT
The symptoms of psychosis were once dismissed as the meaningless product of diseased brains. A new report recommends clinicians take them more seriously
“Although it is a waste of time to argue with a paranoid patient about his delusions, he may still be persuaded to keep them to himself, to repress them as far as possible and to forgo the aggressive action they might suggest, in general to conduct his life as if they did not exist.”
This quote from Clinical Psychiatry, a hugely influential textbook in the 1950s and 1960s, epitomises the way in which unusual mental states were generally understood for much of the 20th century. Delusions (such as paranoid thoughts) and hallucinations (hearing voices, for example) were of interest purely as symptoms of psychosis, or what used to be called madness.
Apart from their utility in diagnosis, they were deemed to be meaningless: the incomprehensible effusions of a diseased brain. Or in the jargon: “empty speech acts, whose informational content refers to neither world nor self”. There’s a certain irony here, of course, in experts supposedly dedicated to understanding the way the mind works dismissing certain thoughts as unworthy of attention or explanation.
Do you ever think it might be a delusion that you know more about schizophrenia and psychosis than all the university researchers and medical researchers around the world who spend their lives and $billions in laboratories studying schizophrenia?
We will never know unless you prove it. Even Bobby Fisher and Boris Spatzky lost eventually to superior players. You’re making some awful big claims.
Fair enough.
More awful big claims.
IF…IF…that is true then you owe it to the world to make your knowledge available to other people or other forums rather than just a SZ. support forum, right? True knowledge sometimes seems to rise to the top, like cream in milk. Why don’t you do something with your knowledge that AIDS schizophrenia researchers? Sure you can dazzle us here. Could you do the same to the above mentioned by SZ.admin? You have to understand our skepticism about someone who claims he has all the answers to schizophrenia. If your claims about schizophrenia are correct than it is world news that should rightfully be on the front page of every newspaper with the headline, " Man Unlocks all Secrets to Schizophrenia", or “Man solves all of Schizophrenia’s Mysteries”.
If you know so much why are you wasting your time here and why are you not enlightening all the poor dumb, lying scientists? What you’re basically inferring is that you know more about schizophrenia than any living person. Or more than any other person in history. You can dumbfound me all you want. I stand by what I wrote. Why don’t you take your findings and use them to help people? Seriously, if you have all the answers you could change the world. But you seem to want to drive home your points on these forums and apparently nowhere else.
I would say both. There’s only so much we can do for each other. But in fact I have personally been helped on these forums. In fact just coming on here every day helps me.
Does anyone besides yourself subscribe to your theories?
