People diagnosed with the same mental illness can be quite different, and research must address this

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I have seen a person suffering from sz…he says he doesnt have anxiety or depression…but i have it…so having similar diagnosis but not similar symptoms … he even doesnt take any med for sz …but i cant live without medication…so freaking day is today…

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It just goes to show how little understanding doctors/scientists have of mental illnesses. It’s a real shame.

I don’t think it will ever get any better. Maybe 30 yrs from now but in the mean time we are not living.

Sh!t life, sh!t world.

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@GentleSoul life in any form is precious…
Of course we’re missing out on a better life but no matter…
We live and hope for the best and, maybe at some point in the future,
there will be better treatments for schizophrenia…
In any case life in any form is precious.

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I think it shows that schizophrenia, bipolar, etc., are really on a spectrum, a continuum, and they vary from individual to individual.

And the diagnoses are all so subjective. It is based mainly on what we say to the psychiatrist who only talks to us for a brief amount of time before making a diagnosis.

My initial diagnosis was Borderline Personality Disorder. Later she changed the diagnosis to Paranoid Schizophrenia.

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I have always wondered if they should reverse engineer medicines. I always hear people say “change meds”. Or “try a different combo”.

People change through out life. We have brain changes as we age, via infection, etc.

But the medication is always one consistant chemical.

Yes, they might have to change still. But what if each one medicine represented one particular subgroup of an illness?

The only reason i bring this up is because medicine being used off label. Anyone remember the 800BadDrug commercial claiming boys/men with ADD/ADHD where given an AP and developed breast?

That was so odd i had too look it up. No where in 8 hrs of reading did i see either disease caused psychosis. Why were they on AP???

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I was thinking recently maybe a new sub-category of “expressive type” and “repressive type” could be made. So someone with clinical depression who actively presents as very distraught, miserable, gets into fights because of anger etc could be diagnosed as “major depression expressive type” vs someone who has no outward signs of depression however still suffers and may experience deficits in function in other areas of their life would be known as “major depression repressive type”.

Then there could be a different therapeutic focus for each of these types. Expressive types would learn how to gain mastery over their emotions and not let them control their behavior. Repressive types would learn how to safely express their emotions and how to reach out socially to get help instead of isolating themselves.

I say this because people who are “repressive type” tend to be ignored by society and end up not getting the help they need whereas expressive type typically get recognized early on. (Think the person who everyone thought was fine and had everything going for them who shocks everyone by killing themselves one day) The stereotypical image of mental illness is expressive type and I think this would help broaden the view of mental illness and have people understand that it comes in different forms and doesn’t always have clearly observable behaviors.

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i’m all for the concept of schizophrenia being broken up more. Not just into subtypes but clusters of symptoms. Maybe a categorization based on chronicity or pattern of remission. There definitely needs to be a category for hallucinations with 70% of patients struggling with auditory ones. Better yet break them up based on the type of hallucination, maybe the frequency as well. So in the future we can just analyze the clusters someone presents with and plan for treatments based on that. There definitely needs to be a visual hallucinations cluster.

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