If someone asked you to describe what schizophrenia is like, what would you say? What are your experiences?
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I describe it simply. I say my perceptions of the world aren’t trustworthy. Usually this doesn’t result in question begging but it can sometimes. I’m quick to educate if someone says to me “so how many personalities do you have?”
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I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. I describe as hallucinations, delusions and moods like really hyper or really sad
I have a hard time describing my experiences with sz. In some ways, I’ve said before, it’s like being attacked by a pack of dogs periodically… I also think it’s like a horror movie that other people can watch and be scared of and then just go home, while I’m trapped in the movie and can’t leave. Another analogy is of being held hostage. No one knows, but I’m a prisoner being held by a monster…
Almost no one asks me what it’s like.
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Prodromal schizophrenia is like a pseudo-enlightenment, you feel like you’re being filled in on the mysteries of the universe, but it’s really you making ■■■■up and thinking it’s the truth, but those apophanies (opposite of epiphanies) stick and rule your way of thinking.
Eventually you stop being able to function, and might even start hallucinating voices and visual artifacts by the time the schizophrenia fully expresses itself.
It’s truly unfortunate, and the hallucinations don’t let up unless you’re really concentrating on something.
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It’s like dreaming while you’re awake. For me it’s visions and voices in my head. The general sense that you’re dreaming adds to the detachment from reality that is a hallmark of the disorder.
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Schizophrenia is literally like a waking dream. Scientists have found that the brain regions responsible for forming dreams are active in a schizophrenic even while s/he is awake.
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Like hearing voices in the air
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FOR THE CURE! Mental health benefit
February 23 Saturday 7:30pm
Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Auditorium
Bloomington Indiana
Maybe put that in the “Say Anything” thread.
Schizophrenia is like feeling you’re having a headache 24/7 every day for 38 years. But ten times worse.
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I take an optmist’s view. It’s a disease that is treatable with medication and therapy. When properly medicated, positive symptoms go into remission. Left are unwanted negative symptoms and med side effects. My negative symptoms are blunting affect and reduced social drive. Side effects include weight gain and sleeping quite a bit. I work on negative symptoms with psychotherapy. Side effects are mitigated with exercise, a healthy diet, and proper sleep hygiene. It is a disease that costs the US $63 billion annualy. Every dollar spent on preventative mental health saves $7 in future costs. Expect to see changes in legislation to fund prevention of mi and sz not just for monetary reasons but more importantly to improve quality of life.
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Id say it’s like dreaming while still awake, or like you’re the only person on earth with sense but really youre all over the place. It all makes sense to me but not to anybody else, which in my case led to self doubt which was preyed on by people who had no clue what i was experiencing but they wanted a part - the only most important part - in the miracle cure recovery. It also feels like youve lived for a lot longer than you actually have, it makes you think you have the intellect and wisdom of someone older but really im just cynical for no justifiable reason
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I would say that it’s a belief, and humans have done it for 40,000 years. It’s when I started to believe in stuff that the ancient and pre-history humans believed in, and I lived by it, and I pretended that I had a kind of secret, special, pretend world that I could communicate with my mind to things and people. I did it until I could carry on both sides of the conversations, and it was with any thoughts, feelings, things I saw or heard, things I did physically…anything that could be sensed or thought in the mind.
It truly is “skhizen phrene” or as others have put it, “bicameral mind.” These mean split mind or two chambered mind.
It is to be the self, and to be the “non-self” self which takes various forms.
It’s to live in a pretend world when minds are interconnected with not only people minds but invisible, pretend things’ minds some of which have the control of everything. It is living as if the mind exists forever.
Something that I had to do that would interest you which helped reverse this mistake of mine was to realize what information is regardless of information in a book, movie, song, video game, computer code, or mind. Once I realized clearly what information is, I could understand what my mind is.
The mind is a lot of predicates just like whatever anyone says, writes, etc. It’s all describing. Just info like shreds of different books’ pages blowing around in a little storm in my head.
I then could do something that might surprise you. I could realize that my mind was information, and it represented myself, other people, the environmental world, all different kinds of information etc, and what I call rifters.
A rift is a split or break in between two plains. The mind rifts naturally with all of the other things that renders in us which I listed above, but a rifter is what the sz’s call the voices. It is a dialogue of two or more personalitous ideologies which are fighting, getting along, or whatever. They, it, he, or she…it doesn’t matter. These including the one you would expect me to call “I” inhabit this brain like rabbits in burrows in the same hill.
My brain adapted this way like one adapts to a language, a culture, a sport, a science, a musical instrument… These are adaptations to this real world, but this rifter phenomenon is an adaptation to a fake, pretend world or simply a paradigm constructed of false predicates. I pretended it was real for a long time, and in order to adapt to it, I developed the bicameral split mind which is something like you would recognize about the shamans who are sz, bicameral, split minds pretending to be in mental communication with things when they are only communicating between matter that constitutes the brain. They read their own minds, and that makes them feel as though their minds have been read by someone else. They cannot realize that the “rifter/s” are themselves.
I am information. That is what is mind. Therefore I know that I am neither the rifter nor I. There is neither rifter nor any “I.” That sounds bizarre to most people, but it’s information, and the only thing the distinuishes the two apart are the predicates like different words describing the same subject word.
I have a brain organ and other organs. My liver makes a bile, my bones make blood, and my brain makes a phenomenon called mind. My brain calculates and processes information, then it renders it the way a computer does. The result is the mind, and that mind is not anyone but information.
When I know this about my mind, then the rifter vanishes. And when I know that this mind is some kind of info stuff that my brain produces like my other organs produce stuff, and my brain is a little broken from past experiences and religio, culto beliefs, then the whole world with everyone, everything, and my body and everything inside are a paradigm that I can understand and grasp as some gunky thing that a brain organ is making. That paradigm is a pretend world. It is not rational.
Knowing these things gives me far more control than I’ve every had in 20 years as an sz. It is life changing. I can knock the chair out from under the rifter or voices at will and even game and mock it with success until it’s gone. I’m in control of my mind, and that’s what matters. I get better at it all of the time.
I don’t pretend anymore. I have to be realistic. I have constantly be alert to whether or not my mind is becoming fake and false, whether the feelings are meaningful or justified, and so forth, so that I’m not melting down, fumbling and stumbling, stuttering and attracting negativity. I have to be able to discern what is a true or practical mind apart from what is a bunk or diluted mind. I simply add up the whole mind into a complete paradigm, and then I throw that trash away. Throw it away with everyone, everything, all of the feelings, meanings, and the whole world as just some screwy trash gunk that this brain thing is making. I don’t need it. I don’t need anything in it because it’s getting me killed in the real world with real people and real things going down in the moment. I can’t afford that bio waste. It’s like puss leaking from a soar, and I need to stay hygienic or rather sanitary…i.e. sane, rational, practical, on time, on cue.
That works for me. 
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I would just say it sucks and it’s a good thing you don’t have it.
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It can’t be described in words
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How I would describe schizophrenia is loss of contact with reality and social life
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Schizophrenia is a social construction. On the other hand, “craziness” as an informal category of folk psychology, redeems itself precisely on account of its malleability and demans for a contextual understanding
I don’t know about you guys, but, with my experience of it, I’d say it’s pure torture from beginning to end. Nonstop torture. (And in my case, it went on for over 30 years.) And then one fine day, if you are lucky, it all ends, with the right meds.
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I’d say sza feels as if you are living with another person in your head - two people sharing a brain. And the other person is evil. And walking thru mud in the fog
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