i had this same experience in mountain view just two years ago; i think it was caused in part by my startup collapsing and my mind trying to make sense of what happened.
i had the same problem with being unable to sleep; the same sense of conversations and thoughts being unfocused. it was like tripping 24/7. i felt imbued with purpose and meaning; this life was a dream.
i was working at game closure (now weeby) at the time, and i thought the whole company was a front - what we were REALLY doing was putting together a team that was going to mars together. that explained why everything changed and the plans were always in flux - it wasn't really about building games; it was to see if we could work together and still get along while constantly being frustrated by plans that would be started and then dropped.
things were made worse by the fact that this was late 2012 and i really believed the whole "mayan apocalypse thing" was actually going to happen. something internal took over in early december - around the time things were "supposed" to go down, and it felt like i was living in a combination of snow crash, anathem, and "city at the end of time" - another sci-fi novel.
my mind was interpretting everything that happened around me as having meaning at 300 different layers. i could see contrails around people as they moved, as if i were able to see the multiverse unfolding around me. it was exciting and terrifying at the same time.
i tried telling people that i sensed something was wrong, but nobody was sure what to do. i kept telling people around me that there was an 'cacophany of mental imagery' - but i guess my ability to hold it together convinced people i was fine, until i wasn't.
It's interesting that both the author's story and one other in this thread so far both mention their significant marijuana usage.
While the "marijuana causes schizophrenia" hype is statistically exaggerated (and the opposite causality may actually be the case), it's still a good reminder to perhaps avoid or severely restrict usage if you have a family history of the condition.
Agreed - this is the biggest issue of cannabis legalization from a public health perspective, in my opinion. (I'm still for it, but with major safeguards in place). My brother developed acute schizophrenia after spending his late teens dabbling in psychedelics and smoking weed often, and I can't help but wonder if the absence of those triggers might have changed the course of the disease. Despite dabbling myself, if I ever have kids I'm going to try to make it clear to them what the stakes are for people with family histories like mine.
I think I had a taste of psychosis after smoking too much weed one time: I totally lost the sense of time, my brain was overflowing with all kinds of thoughts and fears, had some auditory hallucinations and totally misinterpreted people's behavior (everyone suddenly seemed hostile). Then a panic attack followed and I felt stuck in some crazy time loop that would never end. That's why i don't experiment with marijuana or other psychoactive substances, the effects are too similar to a mental illness in my case.
It happened to me at DEFCON. I was drinking a lot, and I ate an entire bag of marijuana popcorn, and probably some other stuff. I blacked out, but the stuff people told me I was doing was pretty weird. The stuff I remember about the crazy ward I woke up in involves sobbing, screaming, and being absolutely certain that the doctors were getting ready to remove my organs and sell them on the black market. I tried to escape but I couldn't figure out where the exit was. In the morning when I was finally sane again, I had huge cuts and bruises all over and bloody knuckles. I was told later I tried to punch a very pretty medic in the casino my friends were fireman-carrying me through, so I can't imagine what I might have done to whomever brought me to the hospital.
To this day i've never felt anything as extremely horrifying, and I also now know what it feels like to resign yourself to death. Incidentally, for months afterward, heavy drinking resulted in word salad. Once I drank too much at a club and tried to walk out of south beach, because aliens had taken over the island. There might have been other substances involved but I don't remember.
I've never done a study of my own experiments with pot, but generally speaking if I took it by itself, I was fine, with the usually documented side-effects. Other times i've tried marijuana (typically with alcohol) i've ended up like others have mentioned: misinterpreting behavior or intentions of others in potentially bad ways. Luckily by that point I was aware that my mind would simply make shit up when I was on drugs, so I would just hide myself until the effects wore off.
Sufferers of schizophrenia have also been shown to have a very strong preference for smoking tobacco, so the question still remains unanswered whether people with schizophrenic tendency merely have that similar preference for marijuana, and whether that use might also trigger or exacerbate the pre-existing mechanisms for schizophrenia in their brains.
Someone else mentioned bipolar disorder, and it's interesting to note that schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and bipolar disorders share a similar relationship to dopamine, and so the primary method of action of many anti-psychotic medications is to block dopamine reuptake.
Also interesting is that things like alcohol withdrawal, amphetamines, and marijuana deplete dopamine while tobacco, heroin, and cocaine stimulate its production.
I too found this interesting. I wonder also whether this particular individual was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. Sounds pretty similar to a bipolar episode of mania, and marijuana is a documented trigger for bipolar mania.
Proof by anecdote, n=2.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that two stories have little statistical significance, if any at all. Taking life decisions based on such information is, in my eyes, unjustified.
Watching my brother go through something similar has been one of the hardest things I've ever watched. He's pretty heavily medicated now and has struggles to maintain "normal" relationships or a work life... After years of taking care of him, though (and him actually graduating college and getting a job), I had to start focusing on my own life again. I still feel overwhelming guilt for moving away.
He's a veteran (did not go to war, though, discharged with the health issues) so it's been even harder watching him try to make sense of it all with a system like the VA.
My youngest brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 4 years ago (though it took over a year of him having symptoms before getting a diagnosis). It's been incredibly difficult -- he's had a couple runs through the hospital and it was terrifying to see him there, and to see the confusion in his face as to why he was there. Through the wonderful care of my Mother, he's been stable for the last two years and has insight into his illness, which means he takes his meds and generally is open about talking about when he's symptomatic. It's a constant battle, though, and it's hard to face the fact that he'll never get better.
My wife and I attended a 12-week NAMI course (taught by my Mom, actually) and it was incredibly beneficial. The course is designed for anyone coping with a family member with a mental illness. Check out http://www.nami.org/ for resources and to see if there is a course in your area.
Good thing he lived in a country with a sane healthcare system. Imagine getting this in the US and having poor or no health insurance and having no family nearby.
Yep, that he had a healthcare worker visit him weekly after his diagnosis is huge. I have ADD, and when I get on new health care, the options they provide for treatment/care are really really poor. When I was at university, it was much different though, they offered weekly sessions with a psychologist as well as hands on time and task management training.
The larger health care options in the US are basically: go to a group meeting once every 4 months, and meet with a doctor maybe once a month at most, and receive a lot of suspicion. It's pretty shitty, hugely time consuming and offers very little in the area of actually improving my condition and behaviors.
You mean like denying schizophrenics access to the best drugs?[1] Sure the article is from 10 years ago, but NICE does have the reputation for denying access to new drugs.
"Thousands of people with schizophrenia are being denied modern medicines on the NHS, according to campaigners."
For instance, we actually have tried something like the NHS in the US, it's called the VA, and it's much, much worse than the regular US healthcare system.
Its interesting, his descriptions of some of the early signs--inability to sleep with thoughts moving in odd directions, slow uptake of speech, disconnected situational awareness--are very similar to the sensations I get when (as a diabetic) I misjudge my insulin and my blood sugar drops dangerously low. I'm sure there in no relation, but I can sympathize. The first few time it happened to me were all in the space of a few days and I was convinced that I had a brain tumor or similar.
Yeah, hypoglycemia sucks. I was diagnosed hypoglycemic back in high school, after two episodes of blacking out between calculus and band class. I also feel spacey and disconnected and unable to process language when my blood sugar drops, and just before blacking out I'll usually start either laughing or crying uncontrollably. When blacked out I can still walk though. The second time I walked straight into a pole, according to my friends, though my memory stops a good 20 feet away from the pole, just after saying, "I think it's happening again," and starting to laugh even though I was terrified. I have a brief memory of standing in front of pole, then nothing again until a good ten minutes later, in front of a water fountain in the school office (which is where my friends steered me).
When it first happened I literally thought I was losing my mind, due to stress or a tumor or something. When the doctor calmly said, actually that just sounds like low blood sugar, let's schedule a glucose tolerance test, it was a huge relief. I was on "second lunch" due to my class schedule, and wound up getting permission to eat a protein bar during calculus so it didn't happen again in school.
Another really good read covering what it's like going through psychosis is "And Then I Thought I Was A Fish" by Peter Welch, covering a three year long psychotic break he had after taking LSD. (He's the writer of http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks, a hilarious blogpost I saw linked on HN a few months ago).
He really needs to lay off the illegal drugs and the constant TV, concentrate on his real life, and get a nice quite place of his own. As someone who hears voices occasionally (not that odd considering studies show auditory hallucinations can come from caffeine and lack of sleep), just a TV going somewhere in the house three rooms away can make it a lot worse. I can't even image what it is like for someone "with plenty of hash", diagnosed schizophrenic, and who mentions so many TV shows constantly being watched in the article and even by his parents. Marijuana and constant TV might be fine for some people, but if you are hearing imaginary voices, maybe you should lay off. The situations in TV and particularly the shows he mentions, like Breaking Bad, are really not the sort of things you want a paranoid schizophrenic mind to seize upon. You may wake up thinking the cops are after you just like your favorite TV show.
Hmm... lately I've had the "things falling over" sensation a lot. I'll jump and move towards an object because I think it's falling, but it's not. Does this happen to normal people too?
It just means that enough people flagged the post that it set off the flame detector, which takes it off the front page and disables voting. It almost certainly wasn't anything one of the admins did.
Still, it's very sad that this community as a whole isn't open-minded or mature enough to discuss mental illness. I guess it's not surprising, but stories that make people feel uncomfortable are very frequently flagged off the front page.
That said, HN is still the source of some of the highest-quality discussions of various (non-controversial) topics on the web.
Similar story happened to a friend of mine, all of a sudden she starting seeing eastern-style patterns everywhere, on people like tattoos and so on. Too much pot.
I have noticed several posts related to mental illness recently. What is this in relation to? Deep learning? Productivity via mental health? Fill me in.
Growing public awareness and dialogue on issues that affect a lot of people. Plus high profile suicides and other incidences in the startup / tech industry.
[+] [-] MarkPNeyer|11 years ago|reply
i had the same problem with being unable to sleep; the same sense of conversations and thoughts being unfocused. it was like tripping 24/7. i felt imbued with purpose and meaning; this life was a dream.
i was working at game closure (now weeby) at the time, and i thought the whole company was a front - what we were REALLY doing was putting together a team that was going to mars together. that explained why everything changed and the plans were always in flux - it wasn't really about building games; it was to see if we could work together and still get along while constantly being frustrated by plans that would be started and then dropped.
things were made worse by the fact that this was late 2012 and i really believed the whole "mayan apocalypse thing" was actually going to happen. something internal took over in early december - around the time things were "supposed" to go down, and it felt like i was living in a combination of snow crash, anathem, and "city at the end of time" - another sci-fi novel.
my mind was interpretting everything that happened around me as having meaning at 300 different layers. i could see contrails around people as they moved, as if i were able to see the multiverse unfolding around me. it was exciting and terrifying at the same time.
i tried telling people that i sensed something was wrong, but nobody was sure what to do. i kept telling people around me that there was an 'cacophany of mental imagery' - but i guess my ability to hold it together convinced people i was fine, until i wasn't.
[+] [-] hexagonsun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkPNeyer|11 years ago|reply
https://plus.google.com/107304794162956058165/posts/LUDoquxe...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] riemannzeta|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceallen|11 years ago|reply
While the "marijuana causes schizophrenia" hype is statistically exaggerated (and the opposite causality may actually be the case), it's still a good reminder to perhaps avoid or severely restrict usage if you have a family history of the condition.
[+] [-] Thevet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lafar6502|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|11 years ago|reply
To this day i've never felt anything as extremely horrifying, and I also now know what it feels like to resign yourself to death. Incidentally, for months afterward, heavy drinking resulted in word salad. Once I drank too much at a club and tried to walk out of south beach, because aliens had taken over the island. There might have been other substances involved but I don't remember.
I've never done a study of my own experiments with pot, but generally speaking if I took it by itself, I was fine, with the usually documented side-effects. Other times i've tried marijuana (typically with alcohol) i've ended up like others have mentioned: misinterpreting behavior or intentions of others in potentially bad ways. Luckily by that point I was aware that my mind would simply make shit up when I was on drugs, so I would just hide myself until the effects wore off.
Don't do drugs, kids.
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|11 years ago|reply
Someone else mentioned bipolar disorder, and it's interesting to note that schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and bipolar disorders share a similar relationship to dopamine, and so the primary method of action of many anti-psychotic medications is to block dopamine reuptake.
Also interesting is that things like alcohol withdrawal, amphetamines, and marijuana deplete dopamine while tobacco, heroin, and cocaine stimulate its production.
[+] [-] riemannzeta|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fifthesteight|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HarlowDuDy|11 years ago|reply
He's a veteran (did not go to war, though, discharged with the health issues) so it's been even harder watching him try to make sense of it all with a system like the VA.
[+] [-] _pgmf|11 years ago|reply
My wife and I attended a 12-week NAMI course (taught by my Mom, actually) and it was incredibly beneficial. The course is designed for anyone coping with a family member with a mental illness. Check out http://www.nami.org/ for resources and to see if there is a course in your area.
[+] [-] coldcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codezero|11 years ago|reply
The larger health care options in the US are basically: go to a group meeting once every 4 months, and meet with a doctor maybe once a month at most, and receive a lot of suspicion. It's pretty shitty, hugely time consuming and offers very little in the area of actually improving my condition and behaviors.
[+] [-] arasmussen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comrh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|11 years ago|reply
"Thousands of people with schizophrenia are being denied modern medicines on the NHS, according to campaigners."
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2538621.stm
[+] [-] javert|11 years ago|reply
For instance, we actually have tried something like the NHS in the US, it's called the VA, and it's much, much worse than the regular US healthcare system.
[+] [-] abruzzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowpewter|11 years ago|reply
When it first happened I literally thought I was losing my mind, due to stress or a tumor or something. When the doctor calmly said, actually that just sounds like low blood sugar, let's schedule a glucose tolerance test, it was a huge relief. I was on "second lunch" due to my class schedule, and wound up getting permission to eat a protein bar during calculus so it didn't happen again in school.
[+] [-] mklim|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrankenPC|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollerith|11 years ago|reply
But I wouldn't worry too much if that is the only symptom you share with the OP.
[+] [-] Paranoidhacker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnbiche|11 years ago|reply
Still, it's very sad that this community as a whole isn't open-minded or mature enough to discuss mental illness. I guess it's not surprising, but stories that make people feel uncomfortable are very frequently flagged off the front page.
That said, HN is still the source of some of the highest-quality discussions of various (non-controversial) topics on the web.
[+] [-] vermooten|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justaman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benologist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjwbell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] templeos2|11 years ago|reply
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