I wonder what is more likely to cause the severe symptoms of schizophrenia. Is severe traumatic experience a precursor moreso than genes and normal human behaviors? If someone were to live a loose life and not a normal one, like a hippie lifetsyle without structure–would that also be a prescursor? What about drugs? Do drugs like LSD and cocaine cause schizophrenia?
I just went one month without abilify and had no serious withdrawal. My dad wants me to keep taking the pills though because he thinks I will become psychotic. Its hard to separate withdrawal psychosis from the sudden buildup of dopamine and actual psychotic illness. so I dont know if I really have schizophrenia or not. and i usually get labeled bipolar by a pdoc who doesnt know my prior label.
how subjective is schizophrenia analysis? My mom was hospitalized without being a danger to herself or others. She was taken straight to the police station and then hospital. She is continuing her injections but is med-resistant and only improving a small amount and is afraid of my dad because he committed her. Luckily they only kept her for three days and I think the hospital wasnt helping. She was delusional but not harming anyone. I thought it would help her but they didnt.
My mom says its trauma related and that mental illness has been put on us. She’s upset about a lot of things but she seems to need structure.
My dad is overworked and tries his best to take care of everyone. He doesnt get much credit but he’s scared of what would happen if I were to become psychotic again so i Understand his fear–but I have never been able to get off the abilify…the longest was a year…
I have hope/faith that I can still recover someday and not need pills. The break from taking abilify has helped me more than hurt me. I felt a calm relief. But then I felt some anxiety start creeping up today and I told my dad i hadn’t taken it for a few days but its been a month.
My dreams become chaotic when I’m off Abilify. Thats like a sign that I’m getting worse…my dreams lose pattern or stability and I confuse dreams i’ve had with actual moments in time.
They call it an antipsychotic because 60 years ago they gave a pill that lowered dopamine to a delusional person and the delirium went away. NOTHING is known about schizophrenia, literally.
According to ancient psychoanalysis there is neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. They would become the 3 structures.
But this is being updated and nobody talks about these things.
If it is known that there are twins who both end up developing schizophrenia.
In my case, I began to develop schizophrenia due to bullying, which could be considered a repetitive trauma since it is bullying on a daily basis.
It is speculated that psychosis is formed in the first year of age due to an extremely overprotective maternal upbringing of the child, which separates it from reality and does not allow it to connect with the outside.
But nothing is known unfortunately.
Anyway, 100 years from now this will be resolved. We are no longer going to be alive but hey, we have comfort for our grandchildren.
Usually for someone to be diagnosed with schizophrenia or somewhere on the spectrum they need to meet a certain set criteria. Hallucination and delusions being part of it.
You shouldn’t stop your medication. The more set backs you have the harder it is to recover. Over time with medication I was able to gain insight into my illness and understand I have schizophrenia.
I do believe LSD played a role in me getting schizophrenia. The more I used the more I became dethatched from reality. Drugs are mind altering substances and in a lot of cases mind altering not in a good way. Paranoia can happen when using drugs. Some people it goes away when they quit some people it doesn’t.
I haven’t heard voices in years but I know I still have schizophrenia. I still have visual hallucinations and I get paranoid. Sometimes I become self aware of it sometimes I don’t until after the fact.
Apparently you’re not that bad off since you can type. When I was completely schizo I could barely tie my own shoes. I was really far gone.
I believe that in most cases people can have a predisposition for sz and then environmental triggers can bring it out. I believe the predisposition is genetic.
I agree with this theory. There are plenty of people who go through trauma and don’t end up with SZ/SZA.
I wonder if things were different, would I have developed SZA anyway? I remember having a bad hallucination when I was around 9 or 10. Was scary. I told no one, of course.
70-80% of people with sz have some form of childhood trauma. So trauma is actually one of the most significant factors in developing sz, along with genes. And it makes sense, because chronic hallucinations are relatively common among people with trauma-related disorders as well.
It should be investigated how it influences “in real time” in the brain of a person who is being bullied at school for example.
The bullying related to schizophrenia and that is already proven by clinical studies.
As long as they cannot see what is happening in real time in the brain and can only analyze postmortem brains, nothing will change, but technology will advance and that will be resolved.
They have longitudinal studies showing how trauma causes similar changes in the dopamine system, similar structural changes in the brain, similar cognitive deficits and is related to later sz development and increased stress responsivity.
So while the technology you’re talking about is not there, the relationship isn’t actually that poorly understood.
And postmortem studies are not that needed anymore, it’s mostly neuroimaging studies these days.
I dont think trauma caused my schizophrenia. I know because I’ve had a fairly happy life. My mom showed early signs of psychosis and my parents nearly split over it.
The main reason I’m allowed to stay with my parents is because my dad knows I can’t help having schizophrenia. I have tried willpower it doesnt work. I’m strong-willed but that will backfire when my symptoms return.
I am taking the medication again. I had misplaced the prescription but i found it.
There are a lot of things you can do to try and regulate dopamine, but taking a medication seems to be the most effective for me at keeping it at bay.
I make poor choices when I’m not thinking clearly.
If I had taken lsd or shrooms before I was medicated I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. I Never took drugs that I know of before I had schizophrenia. It just started happening and I didnt know why/what was going on…little things all boiled over…my ears were ringing, I was talking to myself all the time…I couldn’t handle silence because I thought everyone was reading my mind. I was at a quaker boarding school and we had 30 minutes of silence every day and I Couldnt handle sitting in silence. I couldn’t shut off my brain…it just kept building and the pressure of school. Then the students were all using drugs and partying all the time…
I think the school and environment played a role, but also just me–I didn’t make sense in that situation. I was unhappy I was just eroding slowly losing parts of myself…I couldn’t keep it together.
I have perspective sometimes and sometimes I have a selective memory of things. I’m happy there’s a medication that helps keep someone from slipping
Well, from what you say I suppose that in the not too distant future there are going to be important advances.
Hopefully I can see them at least 40 years old.
I personally think that when they attack you psychically it affects your neural circuits.
Aside from all the psychological horse-shite , i believe its just a mixture of genetics and your upbringing. There is usually a major “life-event” that causes it, and you to break from reality. Its your brain compensating for the trauma.
Its just the way we are wired. No point crying over it.
I read online a lot about if the trauma causes sz, all the articles said there is no solid proof that trauma causes sz. Very little of those who go through trauma actually develop sz. The most solid theory so far is genetics 70-80% (Wikipedia sources), rest of the triggers are drug use and stress.
The heritability of sz is 70-80%, which is an accurate number if interpreted correctly, but it is likely that a significant portion of that is gene-environment interactions which can’t be neatly categorized in the genes or the environment part of the estimate. Which would explain why trauma might play such a large role in spite of a high heritability.
The science is evolving here, and a lot has been done in just the most recent years. A causal link is not firmly established, but that goes for most other factors as well, particularly drug use, where the causal link is pretty questionable. Among all environmental factors, trauma is likely the most significant one. And we know from heritability studies that gene-environment interactions play a much larger role in sz than previously assumed.
An example of a gene-environment interaction when it comes to sz would be that for a lot of people with sz, both the genes and the childhood trauma are necessary components in developing sz, and that without either component, sz couldn’t have developed. So the cause is both and neither part alone.
I still believe that genes alone can cause sz in some cases like mine. I don’t have trauma or ptsd and never did illegal drugs except for weed like a few times. I had sz symptoms way before I tried weed.
I think that might be a possibility. But there are no SNPs that are highly predictive of sz, so it might also not be the case. Conversely, it is also possible that sz could be almost entirely due to trauma in other cases.
I don’t know what causes schizophrenia but if we accept it is some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain, then anything that causes certain chemical changes in the brain could lead someone to develop schizophrenia. Genes and drugs are common explanations, but trauma also leads to changes in brain chemistry so I think it’s a possibility.