According to this paper people with schizophrenia have a diminished or disturbed sense of self (hood).
It a pretty difficult paper to read if you are not in to this kind of philosophy, but in my words SZ according to this paper can involve:
Hyperreflexivity (thinking about what it is to be a person / self, which for others would be implicit or hidden in the background) @NotSeksoEmpirico
Metacognition (thinking about thinking, what thoughts are) - something i experience daily.
Diminished selfaffection (a weakened sense of awareness or being in the world as a subject / person).
I wonder whether a weakened sense of self is also the reason why people with schizophrenia often have issues with drug, alcohol and nicotine abuse. The lack of selfcontrol when it comes to drugs can be a result of a low sense of self in general.
I remembering having problems with diminished selfaffection before I was on meds. It really felt like I was dissolved in the universe (at times) and had no sense of self or personality. Fortunately these cleared up with medication in my case.
I have a low selfaffection too. Sometimes I literally can’t relate or feel the words coming out from my mouth.
And good that you were helped by meds. I can’t function without a low dose of AP’s.
At times i get anxious not feeling or relating to my own words. But then i say to myself that the words coming out from my mouth are mine and i can relate to them objective after i said them.
@Om_Sadasiva@bluebutterfly
I guess I feel the same way. I even told my psychiatrist last week about my contention that the “overthrow of the minimal self” was the real takeway of sz, its purpose, and a key event in our path towards enlightenment.
I suffer from this a long time. My symptoms are like yours. Sort of an autopilot program takes over and theres little self there. Seems like this should be something the doctors should help with, but they only perscribe pills that make me worse. Its 2021 and the docters are medievil imo. They ask just 2 question, voices? Harm anyone? No, but I want to since I never got decent help from these so called legit advanced doctors. Real advanced there…yep. Its 2021 and you only get psychotropic pill pushers. Nobody with knowledge to help. Some people have knowledge to help too, but not them.
Yes, it’s very difficult if not impossible to treat this “diminished self.” Medicine cant change who you are, only the symptoms, but this is not a symptom it’s the way you are.
You can try not to be scared of this feeling or just ignore it. But it’s difficult, i haven’t found a solution to this problem. I just live with it.
and @NotSeksoEmpirico - i wish i had a psychiatrist like that, mine is okay, but we only talk meds. I guess we all are actors, and you do a pretty good job acting like seksoempirico
I interpret pragmatic self-defeat to mean that if you have big plans for doing something then you are pragmatic enough to realise that the Sz disability is going to get in the way and prevent you from succeeding. I kept my ambitions and plans in my job very low key because I knew that having big plans for the future were pie in the sky because the Sz will scupper those plans sooner or later.
I can relate. When I first experienced psychosis, it was like my sense of self was crashing down to be dissolved. Then there was nothing but voices, and my imagination took over. I tried to think, I was a philosophical person before. But all I could think of was insane stuff like things from the bible, and I’m not religious. Anything I imagined was my reality.
My sense of self has come back, piece by piece. Although I’m not fully restored. Time and medication helps.
@bluebutterfly In the literature, minimal self is a technical term that does no more work than to account for the ability to self-attribute experience (it is very minimal indeed when compared to notions of self that involve identity or morality and what have you). The loss of the minimal self thus defined cannot be self attributed accordingly without running into contradiction. This is pragmatic self defeat: the act of making the statement or attribution undermines what is attempted to be said.
@flybottle What would your response be to Shaun Gallagher’s distinction, when examining the minimal self’s different modes of experience, between the sense of ownership and the sense of agency?
