Over the years I have had many different thoughts about schizophrenia and have done some very interesting readings on the topic ranging from medical science to postmodern cultural analysis. From the medical readings I have developed an idea that schizophrenia has a range of related conditions and symptoms and connected to personality traits. On the other end in the postmodern writings schizophrenia has a kind of essence that is represented by a resistance or a critical opposition to modernity. From this range of ideas I have kind of synthesized an unusual belief about schizophrenia that it is a larger phenomenon than just isolated individual incidents of disease, but a structurally stable dimension of psychosocial thought and behavior that can be functional as a positive producer of culture (call it postmodernism) and dysfunctional as a negative producer of culture (call it psychiatry or modernism). I use positive and negative because in the positive case it is productive of its corresponding traits and negative because it produces the inverse of its qualities.
Anyway as a basic example the contemporary covid19 crisis revealed a resistance to medical power in society which by analogy was distinctly schizophrenic. Paranoia, phobia, delusional ideas, resistance to treatment, agitation, etc were all present in this culture. This observation coupled with a basic understanding of anomie meaning normlessness makes me suspect that there are psychosocial or sociogenetic causes that are a direct result of maybe evolutionary adaptations to modernity that are for some reason countercultural.
So what do you think is schizophrenia just a disease or a broader phenomenon?
That kind of thing, ya. But I was thinking even further like an introvert will be sort of detached from social and have their own ideas about things unlike someone who is kind of group normalized. Or another dimension is individualist or conservative, so there will be by extension schizophrenic aspects of that aswell.
I think szs would like to live without doctors but we can’t. We are swept up by the tide of their “necessity”. Those of us who were hurt deeply and early in life have no one to trust and life becomes a sz nightmare.
Thanks chordy. Thats the other thing I think about, how schizophrenia creates a need for psychiatry. Reminds me of the question “who made who”, and a pretty good AC/DC song. Schizophrenia is as powerless as a dysfunctional state as any could be but what it produces is powerful in both what I call positive and negative culture. that is if the positive culture is actually schizophrenia.
I just got hired at a technology company and I am going to be responsible for the IT needs of residential and small business clients. Sitting at a computer by myself fixing a problem is a calm environment.
Its fascinating to me how these personality differences which are based on neurochemistry and genetics determine in large part the makeup of society such as who performs what roles or how people interact. That you have schizophrenia which is a disability but also an introvert that inclines you towards certain work goes to show that if schizophrenia is a larger cultural phenomenon it is hard to see because you will have people who have some schizo traits but functional ones like introvert which are schizorelated
I think in some cases schizophrenia can be more enviornmentally caused rather than just genes. If it was so provable that genes played the main role then we would be able to treat it more appropriately with better medicine. But if the general consensus is right, it just blows my mind to think that you can genetically pass on things like hearing audible voices in waking life. But then again i dont really care anymore about what is the cause. Every explanation for it ive heard is super boring to me so far.
I honestly dont understand much biological science. My interest lies mainly in the essence of the disease and its analog in society. Whether genes are producing it or environmental conditions alter the neurochemistry of our brains or something else is beyond me.
