Sanity is just a form of conformity.

[II_Gyan_II]

@Mangetout

I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think there’s any way this can be descibed as being equally workable as the reality with which I am familiar.

But you wouldn’t know that until you adopted that reality, starting as a child

In the objection Lemur brought up, he suggested that the perceptions wouldn’t match (tactile, visual) and that one would figure out the “correct” situation. For that, you have to think of one of the sensations as primary and more accurate. But more likely, such a kid would reconcile the two sensations to make some sense. The kid would learn that if it feels like a continuous singular apple surface (while blindfolded), then there probably are two instances of the topology in the visual field. It’s very hard for people to realize that all tools of mental activity are honed as an infant. From recognising shapes and faces and all other perceptual skills. There was a good article about a 40-year old guy who was blind since the age of 2-3. He had some breakthrough surgery that restored sight. He then detailed in a journal what he ‘saw’. He complained of almost complete lack of depth perception, among other quirks. Just like language development, the neural art of seeing or other senses has to be developed synaptically, starting as an infant. And a lot of how you perceive the world, depends on what stimulus you get and what base substrate (your brain) the stimulus is processed through.

[DSeid]

Gyan, visavis your predictions:

the perceptions wouldn’t match (tactile, visual) and that one would figure out the “correct” situation. For that, you have to think of one of the sensations as primary and more accurate. But more likely, such a kid would reconcile the two sensations to make some sense.

Such is indeed exactly the case, as this bit from this week’s Science illustrates in the situation of a conflict between the “gesture” of a phoneme being in conflict with the sound of the phoneme:

when children imitate their first words, experiments have shown that they (unlike another imitator, the parrot) are guided by the “gestural” features of the sound–that is, by the actions of the mouth rather than by a sound’s acoustic features. A well-known trick to demonstrate this is known as the McGurk effect: If you watch someone pronounce the syllable “ga” while listening to a recording of someone saying “ba,” you will likely hear “da,” a sound anatomically between the other two.

[Scarf-Ace]

The way I see it is sanity is essentially the degree to which a person’s behaviour can be understood by others. If your behaviour cannot be understood then people (including mental health professionals) infer automatically that you are not sane.

In order for you to be “sane” you have to act in a way that is 100% transparent to everyone. Fall below 70% and you’re weird, 50% and you’re probably either locked up or on your way.

[cichlidiot]

@DSeid

And as social creatures our world to understand includes the behaviors of others, and being able to fathom their mental states and motivations in order to interpret and predict their behaviors.

I was with you for a lot of what you wrote, but I’m not so sure about the ability to fathom a person’s mental state. An example of what I’m stuck on. My brother wakes me up in the night and tells me there’s a group of teens outside prowling around the cars. He appears anxious and upset while asking me to go look. Looking outside to the driveway, I see nothing but the vehicles and wonder if the teens have run off. I turn to my brother to question him further, and see he is still very agitated and now upset with me since I don’t see the individuals he is adamantly pointing at.

Are you saying in the above quote, because I don’t understand exactly why my brother is seeing people that aren’t there and what his motivations are for seeing them, it might just be a misunderstanding?

AHunter3 says:

I may be doing well (or well enough) at predicting behaviors and understanding mental states of others to get by generically, but still may disturb others who become unsure of their ability to understand my behavior and therefore predict what I might do next.

My ability to understand my brother in the above situation is explained by him being schizophrenic. I don’t see where the unsureness comes in there. I don’t need someone else to tell me there aren’t teens around the cars, in the same way I don’t need someone else to tell me my brother is not Jesus Christ or that my brother can’t levitate.

@DSeid

What I call reality is as much an internal subjective experience of the outside world as what you call reality or what anyone else calls reality. Call them all delusions because none is reality itself.

I’m stuck here, too. I can see reality being subjective in the example I gave above, in this way. Maybe I notice it’s really cold outside and especially dark. Another individual might find the temperature to be less cool, and being a spelunker by trade (heh) fairly well lit. This I see as subjective. As to whether there are people prowling the cars, that only my brother can see, I don’t see as subjective. I don’t see how I’m delusional in this.

@AHunter3

In my opinion (albeit an opinion backed with lots of informal observation), this phenomenon is strongest among people who have done the most “conforming” – that is, not merely that they are normative and typical of their community, but that they became that way by copying what people around them appear to believe and mimicing their behavior on purpose in order to fit in.

As far as normative and typical, I guess I see it more as black or white in the example I gave. Either there’s teens prowling around the cars or there’s not. I can believe that my brother really see the teens while knowing they aren’t there. And yeah, I may know that other people (the community) aren’t going to see the teens either, perhaps thereby strengthening my stance. At the very base of it though, I won’t see them, whether I have other people present to agree with me or not. Mimicing behavior in this instance doesn’t seem to apply, since I can’t make my vision mimic other members of the community.

[DSeid]

Cichlidiot,

What I am saying is that you can successfully understand your brother’s mental state and to some extent predict his behavior because you have some reasonable theory about how his mind works (albeit a different theory than that which you hold for most other people). You can fairly successfully interpret and predict the behaviors of many others because of these theories of mind that you possess. Just like you can successfully predict whether or not kids will be there if you went out to the car.

Many schizophrenics have difficulty in forming theories of the minds of others that successfully predict the behavior of others. They attribute motivations to them that are significantly off base and that lead them to make predictions that are incorrect. (BTW AHunter’s apparent ability to successfully understand how others think and his excellent communication skills have always made wonder if his diagnosis is accurate - but I’m no shrink) As social creatures this incorrect perception is perhaps more devasting for function than seeing an object that isn’t there if you reached to grab it.

As to the rest, I do not think you appreciate how much of what you “see” really isn’t there but is a creation of your mind every minute, every second. Basic perceptual process lead us to complete the picture every second around massive background noise to make up perceptions of completeness that are usually, but not always correct. This is repeated at all perceptual and cognitive levels: we use hardwiring and learned expectations to create the reality that we experience and we only have our individual internal subjective experience as that which is truely knowable (the basic position of solipsism). They are not considered delusions (or illusions if you prefer) because they work at predicting what will happen when we reach out and touch, when we go out to the car, etc. (This success at prediction is what we mean by “correct” as used above.) If a schizophrenic’s differences were helping him better predict what would be there when he went out to investigate, or in some way to better survive (or to survive better) and to pass on his genes, then he would not be diseased. Since it ususally does not do so, then a disease state exists.

[AHunter3]

DSeid:

AHunter’s apparent ability to successfully understand how others think and his excellent communication skills have always made wonder if his diagnosis is accurate - but I’m no shrink

Why, thank you

Skills I learned from my colleague Laura Ziegler. Instead of raving and rambling about “reality is whatever you conceive it to be, and your sanity, which you advocate forcing us to conform to, may be lunacy to us”, as I was often doing, or ranting and wailing about “nazi jackbooted needle-weilding soul-stealing brain vampires from hell”, as others in our little anti-psychiatric activist contingent were doing, she went into every confrontation speaking icy cold, reciting facts and laying out premises and conclusions in the most linear and logical way possible.

It is a form of pre-emptive self-defense against being cast as a nut.

Not everyone with a headful of unusual thoughts can do it. Consider ciclidiot’s brother. Like me, he has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Is he capable of incorporating the following observations into his world-view? -:

• cichlidiot, and perhaps nearly everyone else as it turns out, doesn’t see the teenagers prowling around the cars. This may be one of many things that cichlidiot doesn’t see that “I” (cichlidiot’s brother) perceive. So at any rate, there are things that “I” see that cichlidiot (and other people in general) don’t see.

• cichlidiot and other people who don’t see things as “I” do may either get upset or come to regard me as someone who isn’t OK in the head when “I” try to draw their attention to things that aren’t real for them. Particularly so if “I” get upset that they don’t see them and don’t understand why this is important!

• As upsetting as it is to “me” when other people don’t see/understand something that is important and worrisome to me, it ends up being more upsetting if “I” press the issue and get them all concerned. So I need to recognize these situations when they occur and make light of them and back off from the topic.

I know one schizophrenic who stays mainstream and doesn’t see shrinks, who relies on this kind of thing with regards to voices and auras.

The hardest thing for most of you on the other side of things to acknowledge is that these things may be real. Not just real “to us” in the sense that your four year old nephew’s invisible friend is real, but real in a way that would actually make sense to you if you fully understood.

Not always, of course – sometimes it’s as meaningless as radio static. I can remember sitting in a dorm room carefully tipping cigarette ashes from the tip of my lit cigarette onto growing ashpiles that sat on top of an array of Lincoln pennies, which were the “J C Pennies” because they were helping me conjure and concentrate the bending of events around my will in my endeavor to fulfill prophecy concerning the second coming of Jesus Christ – the “J C” of the “J C Pennies”, you see!? And this fulfillment revolved most centrally on my bearing of God’s message to the people, a new covenant for our time, an explanation that would shed further light on what had been said before and settle age-old conflicts pertaining to sex and sexuality, good and evil, and how to live. This message I had before me, scrawled in pen with arrows and diagrams, written on the back of xeroxed class assignments and syllabi. Oh yeah.

So from your vantage point on the other side, you would know, had you met me right then, whether these concerns and obsessions were in some fashion deserving of the attention I was giving them or were the product of delusional thinking?
The array of “J C Pennies” and the ashes? radio static, delusional stuff, nonsense.

The bending of events? ummm…I have reason to think most folks are not comfortable with the idea that I believe such things, I very seldom discuss that stuff with folks who neither drop LSD nor attain similar mental states through other means.

The writings on the back of the assignment papers? published, in part. Inspired an academic career that mired down. More than a double handful of SDMB posts also inspired by them, and a personal web site as well.

The second coming, the God’s modern message to the people thing? ummm… I would cautiously suggest that insofar as this world is not, as of now, a sufficiently “changed” or “saved” world, it is probably premature to identify anyone as its savior. I would offer the postulate that God does not send or draft people, but rather instead takes volunteers, including those who volunteer to do whatever it takes to entirely fix the world and make it as it ought to be. As a side note, I would suggest that if Jesus of Nazareth had gotten kicked in the head by a random camel and died before his 6th birthday, sooner or later someone else would have gone to God and asked if they might serve…the failure of any individual messenger not constituting a permanent failure of the message being conveyed. Me, I have aspired to many things I turned out to be not particularly good at, but one’s reach should exceed one’s grasp.

I shall close by noting that I am aware of enough other people who utilize the concept of “God” to think I can get away with not treating “belief in God” as one of the ones I need to say “ummm” about and be wary of tossing around without lots of linear explanatory caution. But I can “do atheist”, too, developing new neutral terms and laying down some careful definitions before I posit experiences and belief systems that to the atheist runs the high risk of being constituted as “not in touch with reality and therefore to be dismissed”. It’s the same process.

[cichlidiot]

@DSeid

As social creatures this incorrect perception is perhaps more devasting for function than seeing an object that isn’t there if you reached to grab it.

Ahhh, the lightbulb goes on. I get what you were going for, finally. Instead of my thinking about how my brother may be thinking about what I may think (or how I may respond), I’ve always figured he was too busy trying to reconcile the nonsensical things into sense. The local newsman apparently has the ability to repeat my brother’s thoughts on the newscast at 5:00 and 11:00, therefore, my brother has a bug hidden in his pantsleg. I figured with the amount of time it must take to struggle with the images and sounds he experiences, and turn them into some semblance of sense, he didn’t really have time to predict what other people might think. I’m still not convinced he does make it to that step, though I could appreciate that AHunter3 does (even before it was pointed out, heh).

The reason I am not fully convinced, is the reasons he has given when I question him on this subject. Since he is Jesus, though it’s a secret I’m not supposed to share, he has made me forget. That is why some of the things he says may sound strange. He does not preface his thoughts which he shares with me, with that information. Instead, he shares that with me (the forgetting), when I question him about why no one in his family thinks he can make it rain popcorn balls, when he insists we all saw it and seems confused when we don’t remember. I’m willing to believe he may at some time, try to predict what we will think, but for the most part, he seems more focused on discussing the event, and compounding the event to fit the questions. I do however take your point (quoted), and see that it must be more devastating in a lot of aspects to him, for us not seeing the teens or remembering him raising the dead, etc., than his actual struggle to rationalize it to himself.

If a schizophrenic’s differences were helping him better predict what would be there when he went out to investigate, or in some way to better survive (or to survive better) and to pass on his genes, then he would not be diseased. Since it ususally does not do so, then a disease state exists.

I agree, to some extent. I can’t help but question the surviving better, though. Not that I don’t agree he would probably have a better existence or survival if he could better predict, but that there’s still the matter of a “break” in the first place. If I could jump back in time, and tell my brother before he had his first break, that the break would occur and continue to occur, and give him a choice. A choice to either better predict or to not have the break at all, I have a feeling he would choose to not have the break. You know, the saying, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” would you rather fake it, or have already made it. By bringing solipsism into the picture, I feel you are saying my reality is just as real as my brother’s. But, because more people may agree with my reality, does not make it any more real.

I believe that my brother’s reality is just as real to him, as mine is to me. I’d leave it at that, but there’s still something there. If he successfully predicted how a lot of us would respond to his reality, there is still the matter of how he responds to it himself. The fear he feels when the teens are prowling the vehicles, the despair or sadness he feels when he is unable to contact the girl he brought back from the dead, the isolation he feels when we don’t share his memories of levitating during his football games, and the struggle of grouping his perceptions into some form of sense. I note that you said survive better, but what about the ability to productively or even actively live. Not just day to day survival, but living life. His reality at present, does not appear to allow him to do that, and I think even he would agree with that assessment. I’m guessing the same is probably true for a lot of the homeless people with a similar diagnosis. I still believe there is more to this than not conforming to the majority, in other words, I believe what you call a disease state still exists, whether he can successfully predict/pass on his genes or not.

[cichlidiot]

@AHunter3

• cichlidiot and other people who don’t see things as “I” do may either get upset or come to regard me as someone who isn’t OK in the head when “I” try to draw their attention to things that aren’t real for them. Particularly so if “I” get upset that they don’t see them and don’t understand why this is important!

While I agree that I may feel disturbed watching my brother get down on all fours and meow like a kitten, I think there’s a bigger problem than whether I see or even understand the reasoning behind his actions, or even whether I think he is okay in the head. Agreeing that his reality is as real to him, as mine is to me, there still is the problem of my brother’s other behavior, not involving what I perceive as hallucinations, etc. His apparent inability to remember (or maintain the motivation?) to bathe or eat. His lack of contact with the outside world, and the loneliness he mentions, as an apparent result. His not having worked one day, since his first “break” at age 18, and the dependence he has upon others as a result. His calls to the police for help, in a state of panic, for reasons that are real to him. In my reality, the very real threat of the police themselves, showing up with guns drawn, holding them on everyone in the house until my brother’s reality has been explained. Besides the obvious disadvantages of not bathing, the physical ones of having no teeth left to speak of, and hospitalizations (unforced) for self-neglect. The ability to function, and perform other necessities (eating, drinking) to survive/live.

Where you have the J C Pennies, he has the bare mattress (no bedding at all), so black it looks like its served as a drip cloth for not a few oil changes. The mattress is reached if one can make it past the pile of garbage, beer cans (in my reality, his attempt at self-medicating, and possible evidence for maybe not enjoying his reality all that much), and the Bible stacked on top. The smell is unthinkable, I really cannot say I’ve experienced one worse. It must make some kind of sense in his reality, but I’m willing to bet if I went back and showed this to the 17 year old Stephen I knew, he would probably wish it didn’t. He probably wouldn’t care much about being able to predict what I or anyone else thought.

I realize the two examples are quite different in a lot of respects, and this is not an attempt to one-up you, rather to show what in my reality, is some pretty dire circumstances. Regardless of whose reality it is, they don’t appear to be conditions under what anyone would want to live, if one can call it living.

What I hear you saying, is that his reality is his, and he should be able to choose how he wants to live. Since I’m not attempting to strongarm him into the psyche ward, emotionally blackmail him into taking medications, or otherwise trying to control him, I feel I’m doing just that. In the meantime, it still appears something needs to be done. While I try to offer what support I can, and listen to the problems he has with his reality, neither of us appear to be particularly happy about the situation.

[AHunter3]

That’s a rough row to hoe.

For some, there are enough bursts of brilliant insight and novel glimpses of meaning to make up (or more than make up) for our tendency to think a lot of nonsense thoughts and experience knotted-up emotions attached to them – mental static, mental chaff.

For others, no.

Some of us very emphatically want no psychiatric treatment and prefer who we are in our untreated manifestation. Others are grateful to get it because it helps them, and in its absence they find they are mainly victims to the static and chaff.

Still others don’t appear to benefit appreciably from available treatments yet aren’t doing well without it either. They sleep on filthy sheets or walk naked down Lexington Avenue trying to bless the downtown traffic instead of painting like Van Gogh or writing symphonies like Sibelius, yet psychiatric treatment doesn’t turn them into creative gainfully employed people with full enriched lives, etc.

It is often said, as was implied by DSeid above, that the ones who do the brilliant creative stuff and have (at least some portion of the time) method and purpose in (or interwoven with) the incomprehensible madness don’t have the “schizophrenia”, that we were misdiagnosed, whereas the ones who don’t bathe and lose arguments with people who aren’t there and meow like a kitten on all fours are the real schizophrenics, suffering from a grave mental disease that does not equate in any fashion to simply being “differently minded”, mental nonconformity, owners of a different but possibly somehow equal countersanity or anything of the sort.

Well, maybe, possibly.

Problem with that is, the track record for knowing the difference when confronted with people who seemed awfully messed up, incomprehensible, intensely focused on ideas that make no sense, and behaving in unpredictable confusing ways is pretty damn dismal. They can’t test your blood for levels of serum schizophrenase or anything, in large part because no one really has a good handle on what schizophrenia is, aside from the presenting symptoms. We don’t have for comparison a sense of how many eccentric oddly-behaving weird-thinking emotionally volatile nuts are out there who have never faced a serious inquiry into their mental health, but we have no shortage of people who have received psychiatric diagnosis who end up being told, years later, while trying to advocate for our rights and so forth, that the diagnosis in their case must have been an error.

I am sorry about your brother, cichlidiot, and I hurt to imagine what you and your family go through on a regular basis. The best that the movement would have to offer your brother (aside from freedom from forced treatment, not an issue in his case) would be user-run self-help centers, but while they can be marvelously helpful to many people, they don’t magically fix problems for everyone either. I wish that we could; for that matter I wish that if we couldn’t, the pharmaceutical industry could.

[DSeid]

cichlidiot,

Please do not take my comments as having been meant in anyway dismissive of the pain that your brother or you and others who love him must deal with. Such is not my intent. It is very difficult to see people you love suffer and to be unable to help other than by letting them know of your love. I know that.

When I said “in some way to better survive (or to survive better)” I was precisely trying to address those issues. To better survive is to just to continue to exist with a higher degree of probability. To survive better is to have a better quality of existence. For the vast majority, I believe, the brain difference of schizophrenia does neither. That is why I would classify it as a disease.* Your brother is in pain because of the different ways that his brain experiences the world. He is suffering from a disease. And because you love him, you suffer as well.

My trivial point is merely that “sanity” is a functional thing. Yes, to some extent it is conformity, because the majority have brains that work well for the world in which we exist, and because massive nonconformity itself interfers with function in a social world … and would require significant pluses to offset that cost.

*I do have to take a counterpoint to my ownstatement: if I am surviving a horrific situation - a concentration camp, systematic abuse, whatever - and in that process become internally convinced that these things are not happening, that I am actually a King living a life of luxury, say - and am happier because of that belief - is my belief not a delusional state and a disease? Or is it a healthy response to a diseased situation?

[cichlidiot]

@AHunter3

For some, there are enough bursts of brilliant insight and novel glimpses of meaning to make up (or more than make up) for our tendency to think a lot of nonsense thoughts and experience knotted-up emotions attached to them – mental static, mental chaff.

For others, no.

Some of us very emphatically want no psychiatric treatment and prefer who we are in our untreated manifestation. Others are grateful to get it because it helps them, and in its absence they find they are mainly victims to the static and chaff.

You’re preaching to the choir here. I agree that some people seem to do fine without treatment, or at least as well as, or maybe better than. I also can appreciate the trade off involving brilliance. I am glad you acknowledged for some people this is not the case, though I wish it weren’t.

It is often said, as was implied by DSeid above, that the ones who do the brilliant creative stuff and have (at least some portion of the time) method and purpose in (or interwoven with) the incomprehensible madness don’t have the “schizophrenia”, that we were misdiagnosed, whereas the ones who don’t bathe and lose arguments with people who aren’t there and meow like a kitten on all fours are the real schizophrenics, suffering from a grave mental disease that does not equate in any fashion to simply being “differently minded”, mental nonconformity, owners of a different but possibly somehow equal countersanity or anything of the sort.

Well, maybe, possibly.

I’m with you. I realize the knowns are pretty darn limited, and my understanding is probably much less. It was my understanding that schizophrenia is progressive, so while my brother still exhibited brilliance in the beginning, the inability to separate the chaff, has since overwhelmed him, cutting him off from that brilliance in a sense.

We don’t have for comparison a sense of how many eccentric oddly-behaving weird-thinking emotionally volatile nuts are out there who have never faced a serious inquiry into their mental health, but we have no shortage of people who have received psychiatric diagnosis who end up being told, years later, while trying to advocate for our rights and so forth, that the diagnosis in their case must have been an error.

Still with you. It’s not just the misdiagnosis I am worried about. It’s the treatment in the first place. A quick example, the last time my brother asked to be taken to the hospital, it was for problems with his jaw and swallowing, stemming from his lack of dental hygiene. When I called the local Mental Health to find out about his status, I was informed that he had been evaluated and released (from hospital). I asked to speak to the person who handled his case at the Mental Health end, and then asked her a few questions about his mental state at the time. She seemed completely in the dark, though she had his file right in front of her, and when in the course of the short conversation, she had to ask me what “levitate” meant, I thought she misheard me. When I repeated the word and still received silence, I felt so incredulous as I fumbled for an example of a magician and his assistant and the hoop trick, that I had strong doubts about her ability to help my brother at all, whether he was willing to follow their regimen of medication and counseling or no. To be clear, she still didn’t appear to know what I was talking about, I felt I was speaking to a Doctor Tarr or Professor Fether.

I am sorry about your brother, cichlidiot, and I hurt to imagine what you and your family go through on a regular basis. The best that the movement would have to offer your brother (aside from freedom from forced treatment, not an issue in his case) would be user-run self-help centers, but while they can be marvelously helpful to many people, they don’t magically fix problems for everyone either. I wish that we could; for that matter I wish that if we couldn’t, the pharmaceutical industry could.

I feel a bit silly for posting what I did, and thought pretty hard about it before posting it. It wasn’t my intention to fish for sympathy, though I appreciate your thoughts all the same. I realize there is no magic bullet, in the same way I don’t believe my brother’s problems stem from not conforming. I have researched some of the tools available to my brother, should he decide he wants a change, but so far, he hasn’t taken any of the offers.

[cichlidiot]

@DSeid

,
Please do not take my comments as having been meant in anyway dismissive of the pain that your brother or you and others who love him must deal with. Such is not my intent. It is very difficult to see people you love suffer and to be unable to help other than by letting them know of your love. I know that.

I didn’t feel you were dismissive at all. One of the reasons I thought for quite awhile before posting what I did in response to AHunter3, is a fear of people thinking I wanted sympathy, or for it to come out sounding like some sob story. It was just the best way I knew to make a point about the conformity issue. In that, it sometimes goes beyond making others upset.

My trivial point is merely that “sanity” is a functional thing. Yes, to some extent it is conformity, because the majority have brains that work well for the world in which we exist, and because massive nonconformity itself interfers with function in a social world … and would require significant pluses to offset that cost.

Rather than quote everything, I will say I agree with what you’ve written, and was glad to see in the above quote the “to some extent” portion. I agree with you about conformity coming into play, my point was more that it’s not all conformity or the lack thereof. I think we understand each other.

[mswas]

I’ve been called insane and a genius throughout my life. Arrogant is generally the epithet I hate the most. My arrogance comes from an unwillingness to view my perception as invalid. I understand logic and how to deduce things logically, and I tend to be a very logical person, though for some reason people view what I say as illogical much of the time. I see people claiming to be empiricists and skeptics spouting just as much babble as I hear when I am at a rave full of people on Ecstacy.

On this board I see statistics used based upon legitimacy of consensus as opposed to any sort of real legitimacy. For instance, how can we possibly know how many black people there actually are in America? Most people don’t care about the census and don’t take it that seriously, so how can Census information be taken seriously? Gallup polls tend to influence the outcome of an election more than they reflect the opinions of the populace.

Yet this is what is considered “Sane” by the powers that be. We have policy being created by people based upon statistics that are never truly verified in the bureaucratic nightmare that is our government. These policies then go into affect health care policies, and I am sure they have statistics on schizophrenia that are less based in reality than what they are diagnosing as delusion.

AHunter3’s statements give me hope. I am not very good at putting things into a linear order, so I can be out High School debated much of the time. I simply do not think in a linear fashion. On top of this, I’m not really trying to convince anyone of anything, I am simply expressing what I feel of the world around me.

When I discuss anything like psychic phenomena, I get laughed at, but I’ve verified it’s existance to myself, and I definitely don’t believe my friend’s who claim to see Spirits are crazy. I don’t see spirits myself, but I feel spiritual presences.

I oftentimes go into diatribes about Angels and Demons but the misunderstanding is oftentimes about that to which I am referring. My view of what an Angel or a Demon is, has more to do with archetypes that we share among a larger conciousness. I view the brain as a sensory organ with computational capacity, as opposed to just being a computational center. It is sensing a whole level of the world, THAT IS NOT seperate from this one. Thus I don’t like the term “Supernatural”. Intellectual thinking exists in this same spirit realm where the Angels and Demons exist. It’s kind of like the setting in the “Never Ending Story”. It’s a fantasy world that DOES have dictate over this one due to our cross interaction between our dream world and the physical world. I do not believe our fantasy worlds are self-contained, but more that they are shared and interpreted differently.

I tend to accept what people tell me as true, because they view it a certain way, that’s fine by me. I am very good at sniffing out a lie, so I am rarely hurt by them. Subjects such as Quantum Physics or Qabbalah where it is supposed to be very difficult subject matter come quite easily to me and I can just as easily have everyone rolling their eyes at what I am saying one day, and the next have an audience in awe of my ‘enlightenment’.

Generally, if someone wants to have a conversation with me, and they can suspend their disbelief for a second, I’ll be able to explain quite a bit to them. I have never been diagnosed with anything but depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, because I can very eloquently explain to my therapist why I am angry, or sad at any given moment and I can sit around with a group of people like me who have been called “insane” and actively exclude people from the conversation, though everything we are saying makes perfect sense to us. So in that scenario, I suppose it is the average person who is insane if we go by the consensus rationale.

Maybe we’d just all start understanding quite a bit more if we’d stop judging what someone is saying and just accept it. I have a homeless guy near my house that talks to me all the time. People talk about him babbling nonsense, but he has never not made sense to me, but I can see why it would be nonsensical to others.

Erek

[II_Gyan_II]

@mswas

Maybe we’d just all start understanding quite a bit more if we’d stop judging what someone is saying and just accept it.

You’re asking people to give up reasoning, which is a form of judgement.

[mswas]

Gyan: I think what people refer to as reason most often isn’t. They say people are most attracted to the things which they are the least capable of.

I don’t think everything has to do with reason. Rejecting something immediately isn’t reason. Interjecting with an argument before all variables have been presented is not reason. Assuming that someone is stupid or crazy just because they took a windier route to get to the conclusion than you might have done, is not reason.

Why is it that I’ve found that the people most likely to speak up about reason are often the least reasonable? ;p You’re brain won’t explode when you listen to a schizophrenic ramble, and you might actually realize that they know what they are talking about.

Erek

[II_Gyan_II]

@mswas

I think what people refer to as reason most often isn’t.

You misunderstood (BTW, you didn’t accept what I said, but reasoned about it :D).

Your original comment was:

Maybe we’d just all start understanding quite a bit more if we’d stop judging what someone is saying and just accept it.

The process of understanding itself means fitting the just-heard or just-learnt data into your current framework. I’m not remarking on the validity or accuracy of the cognitive tools you deploy. For example, if you told me, that in your view, there’s no gravity but pink angels pulling down objects, the listener will automatically think something about what you said. If you’re asking that person to just accept what you’re saying, then that road leads to all the outdated thinking methods of the part. Critical thinking is a vital part of human cognition. Discarding that would seem to only lead to a more chaotic and unmanageable and unorganized existence. People will automatically judge and they should. The emphasis should be on cultivating rigorous and self-correcting rules of judgement, not avoiding it.

[mswas]

Well I actually believe that there is a sense to everything everyone says, and that just because we can’t make sense of it doesn’t mean it exists there. Sometimes it’s obvious why they came to their conclusion, just that it has gaps in it that one could fill, but sometimes it seems like it’s completely out of left field when in reality it’s just the lack of linearity to match your own that causes the conflict, and not a lack in logic on their part.

Erek

[Dogface]

@mswas

I’ve been called insane and a genius throughout my life. Arrogant is generally the epithet I hate the most. My arrogance comes from an unwillingness to view my perception as invalid.

I believe that what I believe is true. However, I also realize that I am a finite and small being in a universe that is, if not infinite, at least very much larger than am I. Thus, there is always the possiblity that I am wrong–there is always the possibility that my “self-evident” or “logical” conclusions are actually neither. Refusal to admit to that possibility–that is arrogance. Appearing to refuse to admit to that possibility–that engenders accusations of arrogance.

[mswas]

@Dogface

I believe that what I believe is true. However, I also realize that I am a finite and small being in a universe that is, if not infinite, at least very much larger than am I. Thus, there is always the possiblity that I am wrong–there is always the possibility that my “self-evident” or “logical” conclusions are actually neither. Refusal to admit to that possibility–that is arrogance. Appearing to refuse to admit to that possibility–that engenders accusations of arrogance.

It’s just a recognition of the fact that I have nothing else to go on and therefore must assume that they are accurate until more data is presented…by the same sources, my perceptions.

Erek

[Zagadka]

Sometimes it bothers me how casually some people treat mental health issues. The OP quote speaks as if “sanity” is a matter of choice, or a stylish trend. It is difficult to truly comprehend insanity - but it is a much more serious affliction than most people make out. Yes, I am a paranoid schizophrenic, among other things. When I’m not on my medications, I am totally unable to function outside of my bedroom, and even with them, it is a struggle. I’d give anything to regain my sanity, and it is insulting how some people take it for granted, in much the same way many parapalegics (sp) would be insulted if you started talking about “walking around is for suckers, I’m going to take the easy way and use a wheelchair”. I won’t go into details about my disorder, for obvious reasons. But I am also no philosopher, and have no pretensions of being one. I just know that it is bunk, what most people say, and if they spent a day in a schizophrenic’s head, they would be clawing at whatever straws of sanity, conformed or not, then could reach. Anyone who enjoys it is, well, insane.