I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis. She thinks she's in some kind of Truman show that she calls "the game". Since none of her friends or family are willing to admit to it, then we must be in on it.
We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.
We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.
Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.
If you have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia it's starting to seem like drugs that seem harmless like marijuana (specifically THC?) can definitely bring it out. At least, that's what seemed to happen to my mother and another friend.
I believe since the 80's it's been well-established that people with a predisposition to schizophrenia have a greater risk to break out into psychosis when taking hallucinogenics. Even with today's clinical trials, they will exclude those with a family history of psychosis/schizophrenia.
I have more friends mucked up by LSD like drugs than any other type - at any rate three of them and I don't have much in the way of junkie of alcoholic friends. I say LSD like as they all took other stuff. From my n=3 data I'd say if you do it more than once a week for more than two years you have a good chance of ending up like your friend.
My friend had a very similar episode with a psychosis, but turned out to be bipolar, not schizophrenic. Sounds very similar though!
He was smoking a lot of weed leading up to and during the psychosis.
Ended up in psychiatric ward for a month, which was followed by a couple of years of depression/introspection/therapy, but is now doing great with lithium.
> whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside
Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known. It seems to me that these drugs create a feeling of having accessed great knowledge, but the "knowledge" is just whatever nonsense your brain conjures up on the fly, like a dream world that makes sense while you're asleep but whose logic falls apart the moment you wake up.
Of course there's a downside. It's a tale as old as time. Some new miracle cure comes on the scene and people promote it without relaying the risks. You see this with mushrooms, pot, etc going back to snake oil and silphium. I've never looked into it, but I would bet that there are no medications that exist that don't have some sort of side effect or increase in risk of some negative outcome. So if someone is pushing a cure/medicine its best to assume there is risk, even if we don't yet know the risk.
> I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis.
Schizophrenia is not defined strictly enough that it's possible for you to be right or wrong when you say your friend has it.
> We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor.
It is not just schizophrenia, any mental health condition is isolating, others cannot understand it. I have OCD,ADHD etc so I know it, that's why we prefer who have been or going through same thing than normal people.
People who reject in-group socio-economic norms and isolate themselves from their previous in-group may or may not be mentally ill. If they were in one of those cults that programs their members behaviors incessantly, then it's entirely plausible that they became sane and escaped from a community of insane people.
For example, I've met several people who reported the set of symptoms and behaviors you describe - but in their case, 'the game' involved the fact they came from a wealthy extended family whose entire existence revolved around hanging onto their pool of capital and ensuring some rogue family member didn't gain control of the capital, which funded all their connected lives (including this guy, who was able to travel the country and go to music shows solely because of his family-linked trust fund). The game they all played was keeping the family members that controlled the capital happy, rather than going out into the world and finding jobs, making their own money, and being self-sufficient.
There's just not enough information in your post to evaluate whether the example was escaping from a cult or being indoctrinated into another cult, who is sane and who is crazy, etc.
I have schizoaffective disorder, induced by a bad trip from marijuana. It was like the 3rd time I had tried weed, and I naively took too much.
For me psychosis feels like pattern matching going on extreme overdrive, while at the same time memory goes to shit. It's truly an awful illness, and what's worse is that the current medical treatments are bad. I've been fortunate enough where I can get by on a low dose olanzapine, but for many people they simply don't work at all.
Even though I'm doing well enough to function normally and hold down a good, well paying job, it's impossible to find a partner. If I were to have kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services. I am strongly in support of these screening services - the disease is truly horrible.
There has been little progress on treatments for schizophrenia, the mechanism of action of these drugs has remained the same for decades. The side effects are almost as bad as the disease, which is why so many schizophrenic stop taking them. The only novel medication recently released is Cobenfy, which I have not tried yet.
The most striking thing, is the absolute certainty of the thinking. They feel as if their thinking is crystal-clear, and that they are the only one that "sees the patterns."
Currently, they're doing well. I know of others, that are not so fortunate.
It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use. They are better off chewing tabs of acid. I've not used it in about 45 years, and I've heard that today's pot is a heck of a lot stronger than what I remember.
> I am holding out hope that schizophrenia has some basis as an autoimmune disease
From article:
Increasingly, researchers consider schizophrenia to be a “meta-syndrome,” encompassing multiple symptom dimensions/clusters and arising from intersections of diverse underlying mechanisms
So while autoimmune might be the cause for some people, other people have other causes?
As humans we look for a simple A therefore B story. Even then most people in my experience are either (a) poor at spotting cause and effect or (b) go into denial e.g. many political arguments
> kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services
Have to? Do you mean you would want to? Or is there some compulsory force where you are?
This post convinced me to never try marijuana again.
I've tried 3 times, last time was a bad trip, I went into a very cold state (was shaking) and I was seeing random visual images every second. It felt like my brain was telling chat gpt to generate a random image on the fly none stop.
Anyways I was fine the next day, but I'm not trying it ever again if there is some risks associated with it. I took a low dose (half gummy).
Interesting, I had some really bad experiences with weed and the pattern matching thing strikes out to me as on these trips I experienced a ton of visual geomteric shapes and came to believe our intelligence is based on pattern recognition and spent 5 years, not to much avail, thinking about them.
As someone who is currently dating someone with history of psychosis, I have vested interest.
90% of the time she is truly the most amazing, compassionate, full of life and thoughtful person one can ever meet. Then there are times when it’s truly awful. She can barely sleep at all, leaves house without telling anyone seemingly thinking the presence of third person around. And she strongly feels others around are judging her hard, giving non verbal communication. It’s truly awful.
I didn’t know to the full extent her symptoms when we started dating. But one thing that was clear was she could barely sleep at night. Or sleep too long. There was no “normal sleep cycle”.
Over the time, some triggers are noticeable. Places with crowds, bright lighting, or sometimes stress at work. Aripaprazole so far seems to be holding up, no one knows for how long. I hear meds become resistant at some point. I don’t know what future holds. Kids are probably not an option. Although she very much wants it.
Very worth it to read the follow up research paper that moves away from this cliff-edge hypothesis, highlights other ambiguities, and attempts some self-correction.
If genes that increase schizophrenic risk increases cognitive abilities you should find people who have high polygenic scores for schizophrenia without having schizophrenia test well on these cognitive abilities. I'm not aware of any of data that shows this in a convincing matter. I think I've seen a few small studies but nothing that replicated this on a large scale. And most of the studies show they score worse on cognitive abilities.
The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.
1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring.
2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.
Right after the time I was diagnosed (~36), I started to become weirdly good at some stuff.
Music, for example. I've been playing for almost two decades and couldn't progress after a certain level. This changed almost overnight, and I started to learn new instruments very quickly (now I play guitar, bass, drums and piano). I'm not a genius at them, it's not what I'm trying to say. It's just that the pace at which I learn is very different from when I was younger, I can do things I never imagined being able to do.
Somehow, I also acquired some ambidextry. This might be due to learning the instruments. I now can write with both hands (not at the same time, dominant hand is still faster and more acurate). I also developed a second, completely different handwriting (now I have two "fonts" I can use naturally).
I got worse at dealing with people. Everyone seems to be in a haze from my point of view, and it discourages any kind of meaningful relationship. I can pretend though.
I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component is involved in all of this (my father was ambidextrous though, but he acquired it in childhood), it seems purely psychological. I am also skeptical about the stereotypical triggers people often associate schizophrenia to.
Last year I was reading about Havana Syndrome. That was the thing that most resonated with the kinds of psychotic events I had. Weird sounds and voices that seem to come from nowhere, dizziness, balance problems, insomnia, headaches. By the time I got to a doctor, these effects were not there anymore (they last a very short time, at least for me). I was diagnosed by describing them to the psychiatrist. Since the first episode, it has happened again a handful of times. I have learned since that Havana syndrome is not a thing anymore, but there are no official explanations other than "it's likely to be psychogenic". I also wouldn't qualify for it (apparently, only diplomats and spies had it).
Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.
The cliff theory is an interesting one. I don't have any kind of schizo propensity, to my knowledge, but I did, for a brief period of my life, have what I call a "firemind" experience.
During that period I spent an unhealthy amount of time alone. I also spent tons of time reading. During that time the ability of my brain to free-associate seemed to absolutely explode. I felt like I could see a pattern or form a connection between almost anything whatsoever. I read symbolism in everything. The few times I did see friends during that time, I remember them being kind of shocked at the callbacks, linkages, etc. that I was able to fire off instantaneously at the board game table.
My brian no longer works like this. I underwent several lifestyle changes and it seemed to really rewire me. I'm much more logical in my thinking now, but it's taken practice, and the shift was gradual. Every now and then I kind of miss the "semiotic aptitude" I had in those days, but I wonder if I was really just teetering on the edge of a cliff. Maybe a few more months of isolation would have pushed me over the edge.
This is fascinating, and makes me wonder if human intelligence itself is such a cliff edge trait. For most of human history our advanced intelligence has obviously been a benefit, but now we see, as people and societies become wealthier and better educated (both correlated with intelligence), their reproduction rates drop precipitously. Perhaps we've overshot the intelligence cliff and evolution is now gradually pulling us back. (Evidence of this would be less intelligent people having more children on average than more intelligent ones.)
Humanity is changing so quickly nowadays, biological evolution most likely doesn't matter at all anymore, at least for the kind of questions and time scales you're discussing.
Schizophrenia can coexist with extreme levels of intelligence and lucidity.
A schizophrenic member of my family argued in divorce court that her husband, a leading physician at one of the most famous medical institutions in the world, was secretly involved in outrageous nefarious activities.
The stories were all fiction but she was so convincing that the judge awarded her a ruling in the divorce that ruined her husband financially and took an emotional toll.
Is it possible that the pro-schizophrenia genes persist because they offer other (non-neurological) benefits, e.g., lower risk of cancer? Siblings of patients with schizophrenia are less likely to develop cancer, and in several studies these patients had lower risk of developing cancer despite higher prevalence of smoking.
There’s no such thing as a “pro schizophrenia genes”. There are only genes that increase the risk of schizophrenia, and this is probably due to environmental variables.
Exchanging a risk for cancer for a risk of schizophrenia is not a win-win situation. You’re just switching one set of risk genes for another.
R.D. Laing was saying the same things 50 years ago.
" We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.
In these circumstances, we have all reason to be insecure. When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build."
"Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already entails grave risks."
Julian Jaynes' theory is always interesting to think about. I self-diagnosed myself as schizophrenic in my late teens and I still stand by my diagnosis 20 years later. I do believe it is a spectrum though and the degree to which one is schizophrenic is not static, and I don't think it's even necessarily a bad thing.
Though it doesn’t mention it by name exactly, I think a related idea for systems that are optimized close to a point of phase change is “the edge of chaos”
For your consideration: the theory of "Positive Disintegration" developed by Kasimir Dabrowski does help to explain the capacity and reality of schizotypal disorders. The easiest way to explain it, is that human brain potential for "over-excitation" leads to personality development; this is natural and human. The stages of personality development are not guaranteed to succeed and proceed correctly. Most cases of schizophrenia may be a result of failed re-organization, or a failure to develop the final, executive, function. In cases of "arrested development," this process may be delayed till later in life. This is the so-called mid-life-crisis, which also can fail, and then you get adult onset schizophrenia. This is all emerging research thats usually locked up in foreign language journals. Almost no medicine to be sold here, AMA and APA are not interested...
Genetics is messy - as I understand it most genes don't code for a single thing, so assuming evolution is "selecting for schizophrenia" that only implies that there is an evolutionary benefit to some of the things controlled by the same gene(s) that control schizophrenia, that outweighs the disadvantage of schizophrenia.
Homosexuality is interesting from this perspective too - common enough that evolution has to be selecting for it, yet basically fatal to reproduction, so what are the benefits that evolution is selecting for? Is it advantageous to groups, or maybe the same genes confer an individual benefit to non-homosexuals?
Do you think schizoid personality disorder has actually anything in common with schizophrenia, apart from aptitude and even preference for social isolation?
I wonder if Autism would be even simpler to explain with a cliff-edged fitness function. Because there seems to be a high correlation between extremely intelligent people and people on the spectrum. Maybe the group of genes rewarded for high intelligence/creativity/quantitative ability also, by accidental design, inhibits social capacity.
> Maybe the group of genes rewarded for high intelligence/creativity/quantitative ability also, by accidental design, inhibits social capacity.
Maybe living in a world with neurotypical people who immediately dislike you [0] 'inhibits social capacity' after years of traumatic experiences piling up.
[+] [-] suzzer99|8 months ago|reply
We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.
We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.
Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.
[+] [-] winrid|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] prophesi|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] krstffr|8 months ago|reply
He was smoking a lot of weed leading up to and during the psychosis.
Ended up in psychiatric ward for a month, which was followed by a couple of years of depression/introspection/therapy, but is now doing great with lithium.
[+] [-] roarcher|8 months ago|reply
Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known. It seems to me that these drugs create a feeling of having accessed great knowledge, but the "knowledge" is just whatever nonsense your brain conjures up on the fly, like a dream world that makes sense while you're asleep but whose logic falls apart the moment you wake up.
[+] [-] andai|8 months ago|reply
(Not to condemn psychedelics, I just think the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the "it's totally harmless" direction.)
Could you elaborate on The Game? What did she say about this?
[+] [-] giantg2|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|8 months ago|reply
Schizophrenia is not defined strictly enough that it's possible for you to be right or wrong when you say your friend has it.
Here's a discussion of the change in diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV to DSM-V, which has the side effect of describing what the criteria formerly were and now are: https://psychcentral.com/schizophrenia/dsm-5-changes-schizop...
Has your friend seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(1997_film) ?
[+] [-] nerdyadventurer|8 months ago|reply
It is not just schizophrenia, any mental health condition is isolating, others cannot understand it. I have OCD,ADHD etc so I know it, that's why we prefer who have been or going through same thing than normal people.
[+] [-] fennecbutt|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] iamnotagenius|8 months ago|reply
Might be depersonalization. I had suffered from it in my twenties; everything feels fake, although you know it is not.
[+] [-] Saul1998zx|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] absurdo|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] e1ghtSpace|8 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E61Hup6hWWc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSWS6rNv0I
[+] [-] photochemsyn|8 months ago|reply
For example, I've met several people who reported the set of symptoms and behaviors you describe - but in their case, 'the game' involved the fact they came from a wealthy extended family whose entire existence revolved around hanging onto their pool of capital and ensuring some rogue family member didn't gain control of the capital, which funded all their connected lives (including this guy, who was able to travel the country and go to music shows solely because of his family-linked trust fund). The game they all played was keeping the family members that controlled the capital happy, rather than going out into the world and finding jobs, making their own money, and being self-sufficient.
There's just not enough information in your post to evaluate whether the example was escaping from a cult or being indoctrinated into another cult, who is sane and who is crazy, etc.
[+] [-] comrade1234|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Throwaway42754|8 months ago|reply
For me psychosis feels like pattern matching going on extreme overdrive, while at the same time memory goes to shit. It's truly an awful illness, and what's worse is that the current medical treatments are bad. I've been fortunate enough where I can get by on a low dose olanzapine, but for many people they simply don't work at all.
Even though I'm doing well enough to function normally and hold down a good, well paying job, it's impossible to find a partner. If I were to have kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services. I am strongly in support of these screening services - the disease is truly horrible.
There has been little progress on treatments for schizophrenia, the mechanism of action of these drugs has remained the same for decades. The side effects are almost as bad as the disease, which is why so many schizophrenic stop taking them. The only novel medication recently released is Cobenfy, which I have not tried yet.
Personally I am holding out hope that schizophrenia has some basis as an autoimmune disease. There was a cancer patient who had a bone marrow transplant and ended up being cured: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/schizophre...
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|8 months ago|reply
The most striking thing, is the absolute certainty of the thinking. They feel as if their thinking is crystal-clear, and that they are the only one that "sees the patterns."
Currently, they're doing well. I know of others, that are not so fortunate.
It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use. They are better off chewing tabs of acid. I've not used it in about 45 years, and I've heard that today's pot is a heck of a lot stronger than what I remember.
[+] [-] robocat|8 months ago|reply
From article:
So while autoimmune might be the cause for some people, other people have other causes?As humans we look for a simple A therefore B story. Even then most people in my experience are either (a) poor at spotting cause and effect or (b) go into denial e.g. many political arguments
> kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services
Have to? Do you mean you would want to? Or is there some compulsory force where you are?
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|8 months ago|reply
He might be interested in looking up THC, glutamate and schizoaffective disorder. Here’s a good start.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0374-8
[+] [-] ashoeafoot|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _xtrimsky|8 months ago|reply
I've tried 3 times, last time was a bad trip, I went into a very cold state (was shaking) and I was seeing random visual images every second. It felt like my brain was telling chat gpt to generate a random image on the fly none stop.
Anyways I was fine the next day, but I'm not trying it ever again if there is some risks associated with it. I took a low dose (half gummy).
[+] [-] andoando|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] petra|8 months ago|reply
One other possible immune system link is the relationahip between the parasite toximoplasis gondii to schizophrenia.
If I'm not mistaken that's the paper about that:
https://dbc.wroc.pl/Content/39095/PDF/1031.pdf
[+] [-] bettercallsalad|8 months ago|reply
90% of the time she is truly the most amazing, compassionate, full of life and thoughtful person one can ever meet. Then there are times when it’s truly awful. She can barely sleep at all, leaves house without telling anyone seemingly thinking the presence of third person around. And she strongly feels others around are judging her hard, giving non verbal communication. It’s truly awful.
I didn’t know to the full extent her symptoms when we started dating. But one thing that was clear was she could barely sleep at night. Or sleep too long. There was no “normal sleep cycle”.
Over the time, some triggers are noticeable. Places with crowds, bright lighting, or sometimes stress at work. Aripaprazole so far seems to be holding up, no one knows for how long. I hear meds become resistant at some point. I don’t know what future holds. Kids are probably not an option. Although she very much wants it.
[+] [-] boston_clone|8 months ago|reply
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-evolutionary-genetic...
In any case, a fascinating read and well-worth it to explore the linked citations, especially by Crow and Nesse.
[+] [-] JamesBarney|8 months ago|reply
The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.
1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring. 2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.
[+] [-] alganet|8 months ago|reply
Right after the time I was diagnosed (~36), I started to become weirdly good at some stuff.
Music, for example. I've been playing for almost two decades and couldn't progress after a certain level. This changed almost overnight, and I started to learn new instruments very quickly (now I play guitar, bass, drums and piano). I'm not a genius at them, it's not what I'm trying to say. It's just that the pace at which I learn is very different from when I was younger, I can do things I never imagined being able to do.
Somehow, I also acquired some ambidextry. This might be due to learning the instruments. I now can write with both hands (not at the same time, dominant hand is still faster and more acurate). I also developed a second, completely different handwriting (now I have two "fonts" I can use naturally).
I got worse at dealing with people. Everyone seems to be in a haze from my point of view, and it discourages any kind of meaningful relationship. I can pretend though.
I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component is involved in all of this (my father was ambidextrous though, but he acquired it in childhood), it seems purely psychological. I am also skeptical about the stereotypical triggers people often associate schizophrenia to.
Last year I was reading about Havana Syndrome. That was the thing that most resonated with the kinds of psychotic events I had. Weird sounds and voices that seem to come from nowhere, dizziness, balance problems, insomnia, headaches. By the time I got to a doctor, these effects were not there anymore (they last a very short time, at least for me). I was diagnosed by describing them to the psychiatrist. Since the first episode, it has happened again a handful of times. I have learned since that Havana syndrome is not a thing anymore, but there are no official explanations other than "it's likely to be psychogenic". I also wouldn't qualify for it (apparently, only diplomats and spies had it).
[+] [-] natnat|8 months ago|reply
Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.
[+] [-] voidhorse|8 months ago|reply
During that period I spent an unhealthy amount of time alone. I also spent tons of time reading. During that time the ability of my brain to free-associate seemed to absolutely explode. I felt like I could see a pattern or form a connection between almost anything whatsoever. I read symbolism in everything. The few times I did see friends during that time, I remember them being kind of shocked at the callbacks, linkages, etc. that I was able to fire off instantaneously at the board game table.
My brian no longer works like this. I underwent several lifestyle changes and it seemed to really rewire me. I'm much more logical in my thinking now, but it's taken practice, and the shift was gradual. Every now and then I kind of miss the "semiotic aptitude" I had in those days, but I wonder if I was really just teetering on the edge of a cliff. Maybe a few more months of isolation would have pushed me over the edge.
[+] [-] tempestn|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] staunton|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] varjag|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|8 months ago|reply
A schizophrenic member of my family argued in divorce court that her husband, a leading physician at one of the most famous medical institutions in the world, was secretly involved in outrageous nefarious activities.
The stories were all fiction but she was so convincing that the judge awarded her a ruling in the divorce that ruined her husband financially and took an emotional toll.
[+] [-] drgo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lokar|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|8 months ago|reply
Exchanging a risk for cancer for a risk of schizophrenia is not a win-win situation. You’re just switching one set of risk genes for another.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|8 months ago|reply
" We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today. In these circumstances, we have all reason to be insecure. When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build."
"Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already entails grave risks."
[+] [-] zingababba|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] boardwaalk|8 months ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos
[+] [-] discoutdynamite|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] HarHarVeryFunny|8 months ago|reply
Homosexuality is interesting from this perspective too - common enough that evolution has to be selecting for it, yet basically fatal to reproduction, so what are the benefits that evolution is selecting for? Is it advantageous to groups, or maybe the same genes confer an individual benefit to non-homosexuals?
[+] [-] PaulHoule|8 months ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
[+] [-] scotty79|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahbard|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mandmandam|8 months ago|reply
Maybe living in a world with neurotypical people who immediately dislike you [0] 'inhibits social capacity' after years of traumatic experiences piling up.
0 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8992906/
[+] [-] hyperhello|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]