Thought this was a good overview of positive and negative symptoms for people:
Negative Symptoms
The negative symptoms of schizophrenia are passive in nature. They affect the person’s thinking, emotion and behavior and can be the most devastating of all the symptoms. Three of the most common are flat affect, alogia, and avolition.
Flat affect
Flat affect is a common characteristic which means that the person shows little or no emotional expression or response.
Alogia
Alogia, which refers to impoverished thinking, occurs when the person’s speech is very limited in terms of content and lacks spontaneity.
Avolition
Avolition refers to the person’s inability to initiate and participate in any activity or task which is goal-oriented, such as dressing himself, performing a work-related function, or preparing a meal.
I can do what’s listed as avolition but have difficulty thinking of goals to pursue(apart from losing weight).
I also struggle with showing initiative . When I did the gardening group some years back I would always feel flustered unless told what to do next.
Other negatives for me are low drive and motivation.
I also have little ambition. I tend to drift from one day to the next without much purpose to my life.
Don’t exactly have flat effect but tend to have muted reactions to positive stimuli and heightened ones to negative stimuli.
Sometimes I can talk quite a lot and others I struggle to think what to say or it’s like engaging in conversation requires too much effort.
The negative symptoms I have are definitely harder to reduce than the positive ones.
I have all of the negative symptoms, it’s been several months though, I wasn’t like this. I was super motivated since I was diagnosed a few years back, I don’t know what happened to me. Let’s see if sarcosine would help/
Its true that the negative symptoms are more worse, I have suffered a long time with a lack of motivation, and it is quite crippling, I can’t work because I can’t maintain a job, I lose interest too quickly and life is so gloomy and grey. I feel like a child in an adult’s body. Need a lot of care, I’m not that independent.
My boss asked me to pick up more shifts today, then I would be working full time and loose my disability. I said NOPE SORRY, I can’t. I feel crazy today and these meds are not cutting it for me! I have neg/pos symptoms and I’m sick of it!
The psychotic bipolar will have some or all of these, as well. But he or she will flip back and forth between the manic positive and the depressive negative. (Believe me, I know about this. Without meds or mindfulness, I am a tennis ball.)
