Do you believe sz is cause by a chemical imbalance?

i don’t know how to make a poll so I’ll just ask the question, do you believe psychosis is caused by a chemical imbalance? For what reason, is that something you’ve been told in a very direct way? Was it presented to you as a fact?

What proof can you provide that this is the case? As far as I know there are hypotheses as as to what causes schizophrenia (faulty wiring, synaptic pruning, dopamine, glutamate, environment, trauma e.t.c). Do you realize that these are hypotheses and not facts?

Let’s start a discussion.

To make the topic a bit more specific and personal, what do you believe was responsible for causing your case of sz? What proof do you have of it?

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Loss of grey matter causes negative symptoms…chemical like glutamate dopamine also causes sz… overall its a complex…

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Shameless bump, I forgot to ask, WHO told you sz is caused by a chemical imbalance? Was it your pdoc or who? Did they present you with proof?

I think chemistry can cause and also can help scz, but bumping to dark energies ( people or things with dark mind) can cause scz too,

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The proof that it’s chemical is that when I take my antipsychotic I don’t go psychotic.

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Yeah that dopamine d2 receptor is something. I just wonder why it doesn’t knowcknout our inner monlogue… maybe it does

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When I was first diagnosed, I was sent to “psychoeducation” about my illness, where psychiatrists and nurses and doctors came and told us all about schizophrenia, and one of the things they told us was that is was partially due to chemical imbalances in the brain.

So yes, I believe so.

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No, I dont believe a chemical imbalance is the cause. They have tried to convince me of that and I dont believe their story. Recently they have stopped trying to convince me and admitted that in my case probably trauma and med use were the cause of psychosis.

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No.

The problem with that theory pansdisease already pointed out.

The other problem is that there is no way to determine what are the “right” amount of chemicals for “normal functioning”.

Then it came to my attention somewhere else that they determine this theory based on something faulty that doesn’t actually tell you anything about someone’s current brain chemistry.

It’s just like people trying to suggest depression is something to do with your hippocampus just because scans show it to be an affected area.

Well, if you get a cold or something that makes your body hot you don’t think the fever is the cause do you? Yet that seems to be how they look at it…

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I tend to wonder if classic “radio transponder brain” scz can develop if there is no concept of such a belief in the first place while taking into account there is not serious damages to the brain.

I think there is a physical component and an informational component as that is what the brain is before or after scz anyway. Information causes chemical effects, and therefore those cause informational effects. It’s a circle that cycles round and round.

My assumption is that if there is no suggestion in the environment about “radio transponder brains” be it from mythology, movies, or just off time thinking to oneself, then the information is not present to cause any chemical/physical actions whatsoever, therefore there are no sub sequential information to cause a sub sequential chemical/physical reaction over and over and over in a cyclical fashion such as an obsession or ritual or what have you until the memories of this world and self view are so laden like a candle being dipped in wax over and over that the only way to react to the information incoming and processed made available in the brain by every mental processor as they overlap each other informationally is in “a chemical way.” That is a physical reaction to information due to informational layers embedded in the memory by chemical/physical actions.

Think about how dreams and PTSD works.

It is discussed that if the memory layers of the PTSD patient could be removed, then the person would no react to the information made available in the brain in a Panicking sort of way. That is because the memory of the traumatic events overlays the information; both inductive and deductive information.

Dream information is sourced from memory. It is simply a process of a kind of connect the dot sequencing that takes place without external stimuli or awareness on a level to put the processes into check. What you see in a dream is bits and pieces of things you’ve seen or thought about in real life being sourced from memories. As the dream plays out it has no external reality to make “what comes next” scene by scene as it plays out, so it sources the “other informational input” which is the memory similarly to how I’m piecing together what I’m saying right now. There is a sequence of things, so that if A, B, and C, then obviously not E through Z. When the dreaming brain has to fill in the next piece of the event without external stimuli, it has to pull something that vaguely fits the parameters.

The brain makes a synthetic virtual reality during waking hours, and it makes a synthetic virtual reality during sleeping ours. The one in the day is based on inductive information from out of the brain and internal information such as memory and do forth, but at night there is little to no inductive information available.

Although when the brain can pull any sounds, lights, or physical moving, it will use those to produce the dream with, so you can talk to people in their sleep.

The brain is a very layered paradoxical phenomenon.

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They used to say that it was caused by a chemical imbalance of dopamine in the brain. Now, they say they don’t know what causes it. @far_cry0 is right about the gray matter and the negative symptoms.

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Doctors infer a brain chemical imbalance by the observation that treatments that block the action of certain chemicals in the brain ameliorate psychosis. There are, however, no clinically useful tests to measure brain chemicals in schizophrenia.

There is no neuroanatomical ‘proof’ of schizophrenia (though there is no such ‘proof’ that headaches exist either). There are some neuroanatomical correlates to schizophrenia (increased lateral ventricular size and corresponding decrease in gray matter), though such findings are not specific enough to be of diagnostic utility. The condition is detected through a clinical assessment

There are PET scans that utilize special tracers for dopamine receptors that show unique characteristics in schizophrenic patients. These scans are not necessary to make a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia, but they confirm that schizophrenia is a “hardware” problem rather than a “software” problem.

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Yes and no. Excessive gray matter loss and abnormal white matter development - which may occur in utero as a result of genetics or prenatal difficulties, and/or later epigenetic factors which are known to influence brain development - ultimately leads to chemical and electrical abnormalities. These are not fully understood.

Interesting fact: people who were victims of human trafficking have extraordinarily high rates of sz. And I can’t think of much of anything more toxic to normal brain development than that.

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I was told by my pdoc that it was because my brain had too much dopamine. How the know that psychosis is because there is too much dopamine, I would like to hear. Do they experiment on people with psychosis right after they die to find out which chemical is to much in their brain?

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I believe its based on a number of things and probably varies person to person. Chemical imbalance, yes. But also environmental factors and genetics have to do with it.

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We simply don’t know enough.

I tend to think we’re in the ball park. Dopamine agonists help reduce positives in most folk so I’d say we’re on the trail but we are sitting in the cheap seats.

My depression was described by my psydoc as a chemical imbalance and I don’t think that is unacceptable.

Scizophrenia is a little more complex I think in it’s interactions because you get both positive and negative symptoms. Medications don’t explain how that works consistently over the populace.

Saying that. We are 1%. Cheap seats…to get those good seats behind first plate you need some better technology!

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I don’t know and I’m not much into the technical aspects. My doctor told me that it is caused by imbalance of certain chemicals in the brain. He said that medicines correct this imbalance and cure the patient. Earlier I used to believe that Psycho analysis of Sigmond Freud would be helpful in curing the disease. But it turned out to be a big failure. So, what is left? Medicines. I beleive in them.

There is no other option left.

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They can test for neurotransmitter levels in deceased brain tissue. Past studies have compared donated brains of people with sz and other illnesses and healthy people. These brains are donated with the permission of the owners, before they die. So there’s a fairly small number of brains available for study.

Today though, they can measure various brain chemicals in living people with spinal fluid, and using radioactive tracers and brain scans, they can measure them in the brain - not only the overall level but where exactly in the brain they are high or low.

Dopamine seems to be a problem, but it’s not the whole story; it doesn’t explain treatment refractory sz. There seems to be multiple chemical pathways to being psychotic.

There also seems to be different chemistry involved during different illness phases and probably with different genetics.

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I think it is because the meds work so it has to, right? I’m just happy the meds work because otherwise I’d be stuck in an asylum for the rest of my life :frowning:

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My psychiatrist told me I had too much dopamine in my brain. I don’t think they know for sure. In studies on twins, if one twin gets schizophrenia, then the other twin has a 50 percent chance of developing the diseases also, but may not. Therefore even if the chemical imbalance/genetics theory is correct, there must be other causes that trigger an episode. No one knows what these are for sure either

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