I actually meant that unless you kind of carve it out and insist on it yourself, there’s not much social space for being an “out” schizophrenic. People shy away from you. Employers (not to mention prospective employers) are likely to discriminate against you if they know. You would probably find it a deterrent to lotsa action if you listed it on your personal ad along with other personal characteristics. When people know you’re a schizzy, even when you’re doing quite well you can get the feeling they’re watching you and expecting you to start frothing at the mouth and weilding lethally sharp weapons; and when you’re having an off day and you get frustrated and short-tempered or you feel overwhelmed, observably so but no more so than other people get, let’s say? Oooh, you’re decompensating, call 911!
There’s no general social acceptance of “OK, that’s how you are, and so you handle certain stresses different, but you’re cool in your own way, hooray for diversity and pluralism, far out the guy working in the next cubicle is a schizophrenic, I never worked with a schizophrenic before”.
(Actually many people have, but for all of the above reasons most of us don’t imprint that fact on our tee shirts)
And all that makes a difference in how a schizophrenic is likely to feel about him or herself. Yo, you’re a disease. You’re dangerous. No one would want to be like you if they had a choice. You belong in a cage so other people don’t get hurt if you go nutso. And you sure wouldn’t want to hang out with and associate with other people who are the same way, that would be the worst, that would be just like being locked up with them except you’d be doing it when you didn’t even have to!
Ah, so I did misunderstand. I thought you were suggesting that the symptoms of schizophrenia were a product of an unwelcoming environment. I agree with your point that there is a high level of stigmatization of people with schizophrenia.
I see also that you do acknowledge that there is something distinct going on with folks with schizophrenia. I would add that in addition to responding to a lower threshold of stressor, folks with schizophrenia are more likely (by definition, in fact) to show a set of related symptoms than other people. So, for example, if you mean to suggest that under certain circumstances everyone might experience delusional thinking or hallucinations, I might, with some caveats agree with you. However, they generally haven’t also shown a markedly diminished range of emotional expression, or significantly impaired self-care behaviors. Similarly, others might show some of the latter and not the former.
I do agree that we have imperfect measures and imperfect treatments for schizophrenia. Anyone making a claim that we have anything like insulin for diabetes would be very wrong. On the other hand, we do have a set of medications, some of which work well for some people and poorly for others.
But, I have two questions for you. I seem to recall in the past (and to some degree here) your opposition to the “chemical imbalance” theory regarding schizophrenia. If you do agree that there is “something” going on that distinguishes people with schizophrenia from others, what do you think the origin or cause of that something is?
Secondly, how do you feel about assertions akin to those made by the OP that symptoms of schizophrenia are not unwanted or impairing, but are merely aspects of “different but equal” functioning that should be embraced (in this case, regarded as spiritual experiences)?
I should amend the above to add that I don’t particularly like the phrase “chemical imbalance,” but I don’t think that what the term connotes is particularly erroneous. We can be pretty comfortable that the source of the difficulties that people with schizophrenia experience is localized to the brain, right? That pretty much suggests that there is either something distinct with the structure or the function of the brain that distinguishes people with schizophrenia.
The function of the brain is neurochemical, and we haven’t found any structural anomalies that help to explain schizophrenia. So, if we interpret “chemical imbalance” to mean “something is different about the neurochemical function,” what is wrong with that?
Chemical Imbalance, etc — First off, the large loud caveat: I don’t freaking know, I don’t pretend to know, and I damn sure don’t engage in massive public miseducation, bad-policy implementation, or forced-treatment behaviors based on the pretense that I know. My WAG, based on personal experience, other folks’ anecdotes, and various fragments and snippets of things I remember reading, is that people have different predispositions for handling “stresses”, predispositions that may be biological (which in turn could be genetic, could be congenital, or could be precipitated in some other fashion) OR could be nonbiological (the lifetime psychological development pattern of the individual, etc); call that whole mess Constellation A, if you will;
Second, we live in stressful times. In the concurrent thread about the ration of living people to all people who have ever lived, the whole “when did ‘people’ start” question arises; one person says 25,000 years ago ‘we became us’; another says 120,000. Those numbers seem way low to me (Here’s a site/cite putting ‘us’ at 300,000 years old). Anyway, I believe, as many sociologists do, that although we tend to think that we as individuals make up our own minds and reach our own conclusions about priorities, ethics, beliefs, attitudes and whatnot, for the most part it is ‘society’ that ‘thinks’ these things and individuals mostly pick from what’s on the menu of currently active ‘memes’, thus adding their own little individual nudge to the massive vectors of ‘society’ mulling these huge matters over across the course of several generations…
(by now you’re wondering if I’m having one of my off days, aren’t you? hang on, I’m getting there, I promise!)
… well, until about 10,000 years ago, our ‘way of living’ was hunter-gatherer; the entire body of our literature, legends, and folk songs across all our various cultures is largely a mental retrospective of ‘society’ deciding how we should be in a new context, that of agrarian people. We’ve mostly arrived at attitudes and perspectives and rules of conduct about all that, but my sense is we didn’t do so rapidly; that there are still aftershock-ripples from that shift in how we live. But meanwhile, through the 19th and 20th century (albeit with some early roots predating that) we’ve been transitioning again from agrarian to post-agrarian. As ‘society’ and therefore as individuals, we’ve got a headful of precepts, beliefs, assumptions, values, priorities and whatnot that developed in response to agrarian society but which don’t fit, nor do we have, as of yet, clear and coherent answers well-suited to our more modern situation. To summarize, even though as individuals we’ve been living in a modern technological society all our lives, to us-the-species it just happened and we’re still very much discombobulated about it.
Whether historically or only as urban legend, there’s the oft-repeated story that there was a Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”. We do.
Now, I’ve said of schizophrenics that we’re more inclined to display certain cognitive and behavioral phenomena “in response to stress”, and yeah, most of us have seen the fucked-up version of that, and also seen how intractable it can be for lot of people (they just don’t ever get back out of “like that”). Well, within the schizzy-libber community, lots of us think that that’s just the ugly & socially visible tip of a not-so-ugly iceberg; that the larger pattern that links us is that we’re less inclined to embrace and participate in social memes when they don’t seem to “fit”. Go ahead and roll your eyes, you’re entitled, but we’re the “differently minded”, the brave misfit ones, the ones more predisposed to bail out on bits and chunks of shared groupthink.
Now let’s play social psychologist, OK? As I said, we tend to think of ourselves as very individuated critters who make up our own minds & reach our own conclusions about what is and what oughta be and so on — but mostly we don’t. As humans we are very dependent on getting and returning feedback, comparing notes, reassuring each other that the answer to “did you see what I saw?” is yes, that your notions match my notions. When we don’t get that, we don’t know what to expect of each other, we dont’ know how our own behaviors are going to be interpreted. When this process breaks down we become isolated. We become mistrustful and scared of other people. And, lacking the reality-testing feedback other people would normally provide, we very easily adopt a belief or an impression that actually doesn’t hold water and, as it fails to get hooked and tossed on the discard pile, we build on that, and it’s very very very easy to end up with one hell of a mental house of cards, and to put large emotional investments in them. So, umm, us brave rebellious freethinking rebels are (yeah) quite often fucking nuts, and (sadly, disastrously) often have way too high an emotional investment to just back out and get better traction on matters emotional and cognitive. Notice in all this that there’s an underlying notion that ‘normal sane’ is regarded as flawed, so it doesn’t represent a good startover point? But a better one can be damned elusive.
So that’s it in a <ahem> nut shell…
We think we’re good for each other even if we do often find each other difficult company, for some of the same reasons we’re difficult company for you ‘normal’ folks and also for some of the same reasons we find you ‘normal’ folks difficult company.
Self-help mutual support groups (and even less “therapy”-sounding names for the same thing) are good for us. We can remain “as nutty as we wanna be” and yet stay grounded more often.
Finally, for every slasher and weird unwashed guy walking down the fucking center stripe of Lexington Avenue “blessing” the cars as they whiz by, there may be 20 or 30 of us attracting far less attention, some of us on meds and many of us not, and you just never read about schizophrenics living relatively stable lives, coping, functioning, and liking who and how we are, but we’re here. Really.
Different but Equal — I think I kind of covered this in the process of addressing the other, didn’t I? Well, the “snake pit” condition — the fucked-up-and-stuck-there, that’s very different but it isn’t equal and you know it and I know it and even most of the folks stuck there know it. I hope I made sense when I described how we think of it. Getting on a tangent and too invested in it to ever get back out. (What also happens is that you do want to back out but you end up instead with a fractured mosaic of feelings and thoughts you can’t reconcile with each other. Too much emotional investment in your ‘cards’ to really embrace ‘Normal’ no matter how much you desperately want to get the fuck out of the House of Horror, but wanting out is huge so you can’t embrace anything in it either).
Do we think we’re more creative, brighter, less “borg”, more insightful, and all that silly self-serving bullshit? Oh, you betcha
Sometimes you folks end up agreeing with that assessment.
Oh, one other thing, in case it isn’t obvious: for a person who has rejected some significant part of the conventional ‘memes’ and crafted or embraced some highly unusual alternative and built upon it, there’s going to be a shortage of order and stability in their life compared to the life of most folks (due to the lousy reality-testing / reassurance matrix other folks get from each other), and such a person tends quite often to compensate by getting really ritualistic and/or defensively protective of other orderly patterns they may have in their lives.
So far from being more free and less inhibited and less upset by change, we can be quite the opposite in many areas of our lives.
Who is supposed to care for these people? Society, family? One of my family members is schizophenic and cannot/will not hold a job. She actually recieves disability, but spends it all on cigarettes and alchohol. (Helps all that “free thinking” I suppose) Her bills are all paid for by her son, who has no freedom at all now. If it were not for him she would be homeless. Or maybe she would take her meds.
We would commit her (we have in the past) but she would have to be violent, ie a threat to herself or others, for that to happen. She hasn’t been (yet) so here we are, stuck again. In order to commit her, we have to have her arrested and jailed, and after several months of waiting she would go to trial and be declared insane. And then she would be put into a state run mental hospital. In Mississippi. We have already done this a number of times, and it is both expensive and emotionaly draining, and nothing changes AT ALL once she is released. We don’t do it for fun, or to be mean, or because we don’t like her, or because we can’t handle her being a non-conformist. Or because we are part of the Star Wars Conspiricy (which is what she thinks). We do it because she is SICK and we miss her, and wish she could get better, and this is no way to live. Not for her and not for the people charged with her care.
So, AHunter3, I am happy for you. If you can function with this disease, great! But what about the people who cannot function? What does your movement say about them? Are we just supposed to deal with this, forever? What about her neighbors, who she terrorizes? I respect what you are trying to say, I really do, but I think you are glossing over the real, actual facts of life for a great many people suffering from this disease. Or condition. Or whatever you want to call it. I am genuinely curious as to what you think we should do.
I didn’t miss that part, and I think it’s a very good thing. There isn’t anything like that where she lives though. And that is my point;this kind of help isn’t available to everyone and the people who can’t avail themselves to it need something too. God knows the government isn’t doing anything.
Look, this is a major sore spot for me, and I hope I haven’t offended you. She lives in semi-rural Mississippi, with her son, who had to move into a house on her street to care for her. There is nothing available (believe me, we’ve looked). I just feel offended at the idea that she’s living some sort of “alternative lifestyle”; she isn’t. She isn’t touched by God, either. She is just sick, aggressive, and impossible to deal with.
Like I said, for people functioning with schizophenia, great. But for people who aren’t functioning, forced medicine, being locked up, etc. may seem cruel, but it often the last choice for families who do not know what else to do. People who are out of options. I’m not predjudiced against her, or you. I would be happy to meet you, work with you, live near you, whatever. As long as you are functioning. You can say any weird thing you want, but once you begin destroying property, threatening me, whatever, it is my opinion that your rights end, and my rights begin.
But for people who aren’t functioning, those treatment options are very often not an improvement over “nothing at all”.
And the argument that “It would help some people who don’t understand that it would help them” is just not a sufficiently good argument for coercive do-gooding, even if those treatments were not often destructive in the extreme.
Be that as it may, I’m really sorry your family is going through this. I wish there was a “wonder treatment” I could recommend that would just “fix the problem”. To be quite honest about it, the shrinks I go up against politically? They wish the same thing.
Are you sure there’s no user-run group anywhere close by? Have you tried the folks at university medical services (or whatever they call it) in Oxford, or Jackson? Or Memphis if you’re in northern MS?
Let me say it again: What should we do? Even if we had something nearby, she wouldn’t go. See, she’s fine (in her own mind). We’re the ones with the problem. So what if the house if full of rats because she left rotten food all over the house? And I’m sure the neighbor’s kids don’t mind being chased down the street by a screaming naked woman who peed on their porch. The neighbors don’t mind either! It’s not redneck-ville or anything, where she might get shot for going into someone’s house without permission in the middle of the night to accuse them of sending radio waves into her brain. The cops and everyone will understand that she’s just a free thinker. (Actually, great credit goes to the police, who have always been very kind and understanding).
Look, I respect your position, I do. But what do you do for someone who refuses all treatment, even just therapy, and becomes a threat? You say it’s not an improvement over nothing at all, but I’m saying it IS.
And, I just want to say, I’m not attacking you personally. I re-read my posts, and I see that I sound very angry. And I am very angry. But not at you. I think you have an overly rosy picture of the situation a lot of people are in, but I think that’s proably a good think. People with schizophenia need advocates, and I do not want to return to a time when anyone could just be locked up for acting “strange”. This is something we have been dealing with for many years now, and I am bitter and angry about it. I hope you understand that I admire your position, I just think you are misguided (at least in some cases).
We may not like the decisions that our family members make; those decisions may make us terribly miserable, on top of which we may be additionally miserable because we think those decisions are going to bring them pain.
But that’s just flat-out not a fixable problem.
(If you wanted to try to have her declared legally incompetent, that’s a different story, but the standards are (and/or should be) really strict. If she knows who she is, knows she’s in Mississippi, has a pretty good idea what year this is, and can explain how a person gets to the bus stop or buys a loaf of bread, the court isn’t likely to find her incompetent — or shouldn’t at any rate)
Competent people get to make decisions we think are massively NOT in their best interests. And which make us miserable in other ways. That’s just how it is.
I’m a psychology student, and i’m partially with AHunter3 on this one (apart from that I don’t think schizophrenia is due to some kind of spiritual experience). I’d add the provisio though that if “mentally ill” people take up their right to make decisions for themselves that their condition not be used as a scapegoat in law; if you believe you’re capable of making decisions competently, then you forfit your right to plead (or be found) insanity (aside from occasions when non-schizophrenics could too).
Oh, and I get your anger — I’m glad you care so much for your sister, without which you would not feel so much of it.
But you may be the ones with the rose-colored glasses. I understand wanting to believe that the treatments offered in psych hospitals for people in that condition will really help them, and for some people they may;
…but for others it’s like being gang-raped and then a third of your intelligence and capacity for feeling anything permanently burned to dust, leaving what’s left of you to shamble and drool away the rest of your life. Involuntary psychiatric treatment is one of the most invasive forms of personal assault.
If anyone were to try to force mind-altering treatment on me against my will, I would consider that situation to morally authorize me to use deadly force to repel them.
Everyone who does things has some mental state that played a role in them doing those things. Our intentionality is heavily composed of who we innately are (our biologies, our personalities, our intrinsic dispositions toward things), and also of the context in which we make our choices (our social environment, our personal history, etc). If we’re going to start treating either or both of those factors as “determinisms” that “made” a person do what they did, where do we stop?
While I’m not enamoured of the overall workings of the criminal justice system, I want a “one standard fits all” on accountability, because we sure as hell aren’t getting the rights without the accountability.
I break the law, lock me up and charge me. Meanwhile, you don’t get to lock me up for what you think I might do tomorrow. Sounds like a very good tradeoff to me.
But who is going to take care of her??? She may know where she lives and how to buy a loaf of bread, but who will pay the bills? Should we just let her be homeless? Who is going to care for her? You say it is her choice, but she isn’t capable of caring for herself in any kind of resonable way. Sure, it’s her decision. And she made it. She won’t take her meds, she won’t get help. And it has completely destroyed her son’s life. So what about him? Where is his decision? What kind of a choice is this for him?
Despite how I sound, I am not a big porponant of forced medicine or locking people up. I think the reality of the situation, in our country as it currently is run warrents it at times, but I would really like to see some sort of state run group home or something. That’s what I wish for. But it isn’t what I have. So, as things are, what would you have us do?
As I said, I wish there were easy (or even just “easier”) answers.
In some ways (not all ways but some ways) the fuckedupness of her mind is a red herring; you’d have many of the same issues if you had a sister you loved dearly but who was a thief and a liar (but could function in society) or a physical bully with a bad temper who battered family members (but could function in society), what would you do?
While I suppose some people would pursue the avenue of pressing charges, most folks would either continue to put up with it or would sadly dissociate themselves from their family member, even if they still loved them, because of how they were being treated.
I know it’s harder when you perceive her as being incapable of coping with life without family support, but she is sitll responsible for her own actions. She doesn’t get to take you for granted. It’s possible that you may be able to communicate to her that if she wants the support of the family she has to make some behavioral compromises, and maybe you can come to an agreement about what the terms of those might be, and maybe, having done so, the situation will improve. But <sigh> I would not hold my breath…
We’ve done user-run group homes, believe it or not. We’ve even done user-run absolute-freakout violent crisis centers. (Yep, in both cases with no one who isn’t themselves diagnosed mentally ill anywhere on site). But it’s damned hard to get funding. Far more mainstream & medically-oriented programs than those have trouble getting funding. Throwing chemistry at the problem and passing involuntary outpatient commitment bills is popular because it’s cheap and easy. Real solutions are likely to be expensive and cumbersome and their administrators unsure of what to do until they’ve had a chance to try different things. And even then there would be no magic wands.
Look, the truth is, you and I mostly agree. I’m pissed off about the entire situation. I don’t want to just drug her up, or put her in some awful place, but sometimes it reaches a point where it’s like, what do you do? When the neighbors call the cops, what do you do? They’re frightened of her, and I don’t blame them. I love her, but I’m scared of her too. If I lived next to her, and I had small children, I don’t know that I would act any differently (well, I would, but only because of my history). So, she goes to jail; we can’t just abandon her. You don’t just abandon her. You get a lawyer, you try to make a system understand when it’s fundamentally set up to NOT understand, and then she gets tossed in a mental facility and put on drugs and restrained. Because that’s all there is. There’s no money in fixing it, no one cares, and as soon as she’s minamally functional they kick her out, because there’s 10 other people in line for that bed, and we should just be thankful because, hey, at least she has a support system. Well, I’m not thankful. I remember her before she got this sick, and I miss her. This is not a some mkind of alternative lifestyle for her, she is SICK. The voices she hears say awful things. There used to be a loving, interesting, intelligent woman there, and now there’s a raving lunatic.
And that’s why I posted, because the idea that she’s “touched by God” or something is total crap. I don’t have any answers; I don’t think there really are any. But I find it totally offensive that this is some sort of positive development for her, because it isn’t. It just isn’t. And maybe medicine isn’t the cure all, I don’t know. I know I’m not letting her go to jail, and I know I’m not letting her wander the streets like this. You say she is responsible for her own actions, but how can she be when she doesn’t understand the consequenses for what she does? That’s why we have an insanity defence.
I realize I’m rambling, so I’ll hush, but I still stand by my original statements. I do not think she isapable of making her own decisions, because she is fundamentally INcapable of being informed. But I am also morally (and for the most part, legally) incapable of forcing her to be treated. Every couple of years, it gets totally out of control, and the government steps in and forces it, and I don’t blame them either. And the fuckedupedness of her mind is NOT a red herring, not to me. If she was a bully or a thief she’d be in jail and I would still love her, but this is a sickness, and it is not her fault. She cannot help how she is.
