I have heard described that it feels perfectly normal (whatever “feels” means). It is just that when you are having an episode it is incredibly obvious that (insert favorite hallucination here) is true, and you can’t understand why no one else sees it.
Isn’t that what you’d expect though? if you were constantly on acid from day one, you wouldn’t understand why nobody else sees the melting walls.
I suppose the case might be different if you didn’t always have the condition, and then because of some strange stimulus or whatever you cracked so to speak… Presumably your brain would still remember “wait a minute… since when was my boss a polka-dotted osterich with crayons for legs?”
That said, I have no training in this area and my comments should be taken as random uninformed speculation.
[sub]redrum[/sub]
I am willing to bet it feels different to each person afflicted.
A close friend of mine suffered from schizophrenia, and once described a mild episode to me in some detail. Basically, he was travelling on the London Underground one day, when he suddenly “realised” that some of his fellow passengers were demons who were out to get him. So, he started a desperate flight across London, dogged by his imaginary pursuers, looking for a place of safety… and everything that happened to him along the way got interpreted within the framework of this delusion. (And this was a mild episode - as in, no auditory or visual hallucinations.)
I might add that, although the sufferer feels perfectly normal, the onset of an episode is much more obvious to those around them… I had the dubious privilege of seeing one of my friend’s episodes start up once. I’d known this guy for nearly twenty years, and in the course of half an hour he turned into a total stranger. Very scary.
IMNA Schizophrenic, however through work (with the street homless and in the mental health system) I have dealt with literally hundreds.
I suspect there as many answers to this question as there are to any question of perception. Bear in mind that schizophrenia is a condition with a wide spectrum of affect. Many schizophrenics are fully aware that the hallucinations they are experiencing are just that (this is usually auditory). An example of a (UK) self help group that may give some insight is the Hearing Voices Network.
This group recognises that the voices are not real ie they are not from an external source, and are not contempaneously experienced by others. They also accept that they are “real” to the person hearing them. One coping method that they advocate is to make time in the day to listen to one’s voices, ie to deal with them.
Other sensory hallucinations are usually a symptom of a greater level of affect. Oflactory usually being the worst.
Whereas the rest of us travellers just assume that LU are the demons out to get us.
Mark Vonnegut, son of US novellist Kurt Vonnegut, wrote a book on his expreiences with schizofrenia, called “The Eden Express”:
http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/eden.html
I think there was some controversy among psychiatrists as to whether he really was suffering from schizofrenia, though. Many where of the opinion he was just bipolar and suffered from hallucinations.
Here’s a list of other first person accounts on the subject:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/SommerR/htmAuto/goodBib.htm#5
Also, here’s one person’s story I found on the Internet:
I can’t tell you what it feels like to genuinely, actually HAVE schizophrenia, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s just a convenient label + excuse for locking us up without a trial or charges and then poisoning our minds so we can’t think or feel. They make examples of us to instill fear in the rest of you of becoming other than normal.
Or perhaps not, but it has seemed that way to me, incontrovertibly, without room for other grey areas. To believe that is to harbor a set of beliefs not shared by most others; it is, in fact, to harbor a set of beliefs that would be dismissed by many others as “crazy”. What that means, in practice, is that, at some point, you choose to dismiss other folks’ evaluations of your beliefs, having more faith in your own ability to differentiate between crazy nonsensical belief-content and content that is simply different from what the rest of the world believes.
That can make you feel a bit “paranoid”, not so much that folks are out to get you, but that they are, en masse, harboring a shared set of values and beliefs that you have discounted as wrong. Maybe dangerously so. Heck, if they believe schizophrenia exists, they might believe they should lock you up, thinking you “have” it! In particular, when they find out you’ve been diagnosed as schizophrenic and that the doctor thinks you should be taking antipsychotic medication, they may believe they are doing you a big favor by doing whatever it takes–pressuring you, having you locked up, tricking you–to poison your brain (get you to “take your meds”).
One thing you learn is the art of diplomacy. Here’s the first paragraph, reworded just a bit:
I can’t necessarily tell you what it feels like to genuinely, actually HAVE schizophrenia, because it doesn’t necessarily exist, at least not as they’ve described it. Even if it does exist as the biomedical phenomenon they allude to, it is also true that in practice people who are disruptive may receive the diagnosis (as I did), there is no test for schizophrenia other than a psychiatrist’s subjective evaluation of a person’s behavior and affect, and
the psychiatric medications are still pretty much blunt assaults on CNS functions, i.e., they dampen out the mind’s ability to think and feel. This lessens symptoms, and may help badly distressed people cope, but it is also true that those who receive it involuntarily experience it as an assault on their ability to think and feel, and their reactions to that, such as describing attempts to treat them as attempts to poison them, are viewed as delusions, proof of how badly they need their medications.
What a miserable disease. The typical age of onset is in the late teens or early twenties so people who get it know the difference between being schizophrenic and being normal. However, the hallucinations feel quite real. As a matter of fact, this is one of the differences between hallucinations of schizophrenia and those on LSD. People with drug induced hallucinations usually realize that they are a drug effect and will pass.
Many schizophrenics are quite intelligent and will make great efforts to cover up their disease. They will not tell anyone that they are hearing voices, but mental health workers will note “the patient appears to be attending to inner stimuli”. At times, though, they become overwhelmed and unable to do this.
They often suffer from despair and suicide is common. As is alcoholism. They know their disease will never relent and the drugs that control their symptoms are no picnic either. What a nightmare.
AHunter3, There is a huge difference between having schizophrenia and being misdiagnosed with it. Occasionally, people with bipolar psychotic episodes are wrongly diagnosed. Also, borderline personality patients have been known to be labelled schizophrenic by stupid or sadistic practitioners.
However, the defence of denial is often utilized by schizophrenics. My husband used to moonlight as a psychiatrist at a prison in NYC and many “patients” there would complain of hearing voices in order to get sedatives and such. He could usually tell the real schizophrenics by the fact that they would be referred to him by staff for seeming oddly distressed and deny to him that they were hearing voices. Their affect (demeanor) usually gave them away. He would often feel great sympathy for these patients (imagine being schizophrenic in prison).
The disease is real, despite the occasional misdiagnosis, and to deny that is just crazy. There are actual, physical changes in the brain structure that can be seen on CT scans as the disease progresses.
Yes, the treatment is awful too, but it keeps people out of the hospital if they can tolerate it enough to comply.
Even with meds, they tend to live marginal lives. Without them, they often wind up living on the street. Get a grip and have a heart.
Websters has a most nice fitting discription:
1 : a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought (as in hallucinations and delusions), and conduct ? called also dementia praecox
What I think is being “said,” but not in so many words, is that the schizophrenic does not engage in the sort of reality-testing most of us do by habit.
Let’s say you park your car and go into a convenience store not ten steps away. A minute later you exit and your car is nowhere to be found. Most of us will go through a series of mental steps (“Did I exit into a different parking lot?” “Did I forget that I’m driving the other car today?”) and achieve some satisfaction with regard to them, before considering drastic (“It’s been stolen!”) and more drastic (“It’s been stolen and the store clerk is in on it!”) and increasingly bizarre (“Aliens programmed me to believe I owned a nonexisten car!”) alternatives. Craziness is when you jump all-too-readily to the latter steps, as if driven by a sort of inner emotional pressure: literally, a panic.
I once drove around and around in mid-evening because it seemed imperative that I find an ATM not located to my left. Why? Beats me.
ejrn:
WOOOOOSH!!!
I learned in Abnormal Psychology that schizophrenia is the inability to distinguish between internal and external stimuli. However, I took this course 20 years ago, so they’ve probably come up with new things since then.
Given that though, consider this. All of our connection to the external world actually happens inside our brain. For instance, light of certain wavelengths reflect off an object and excite different light sensors in our eye in varying ways. This information is sent on to the brain, and it is up to the brain to take this stimuli, form it into a cohesive pattern and give it meaning, significance and place in our internal conception of the universe.
However, at the same time we have internal events that play quite similarly to internal events. For instance, I’m “hearing voices” right now… as I compose this post, I hear the words I want to write in my head. I try out different tacks, and then I type what I’ve composed, and hear the words again as I type them. I’ve also heard my mom say “Zyada!” whenever I’ve done something stupid. But I know that these “voices” are in my head, and not real sound coming from an external source.
The question is how do I know the difference? I can point to some obvious things, such as an external feedback loop for real events, e.g. I see a person talking while I hear the words; or that internal “voices” are almost always much quieter than external sound. But since these really require a conscious evaluation of what’s going on, I believe that there is another mechanism going on. It is this intriguing question that will probably be answered by the study of schizophrenia.
Obviously, since I am not schizophrenic I can’t tell you what it is truly like to be such, but you may be able to get some idea from what I’ve said here.
Well having worked in an inpatient psychiatry unit at a local Hospital for two years after grad school I can tell you that most of you are on track. owlstretchingtime has hit it on the head quite nicely.
This is very true. There is a wide array of different levels and different degrees of the disorder. As a matter of fact if you want to know a startling fact, which I think I learned in Abnormal Psych 101 is that schizophrenia runs in thirds. This means a third of the population will never have an episode, a third of the population will have one episode and a third of the population will have more than one episode, or reoccuring bouts with the disorder.
Today there are many medications that can be had that have a very positive affect for the schizophrenic. As a matter of fact there are people who live their day to day lives dealing with the disorder and who live quite nicely. I dealth with a gentleman who came onto the ward on a monday night complaining of vocies and seeing movement out of his periphery. Come to find out the attending nurse knew this gentleman and told me that ‘George’ was a reoccuring patient of the ward and that I should get to know him. He comes in 4-5 times a year checks himself in and gets free meds. He is not a very well off man and he can not afford the medication that would benefit him. So he comes into the ward receives some IM meds and is on his jolly way. The the meds wear off or he runs out and is back on the ward in a few weeks.
There are others who completely go into a fugue state and forget who they are, who their reletives are, and just simply forget themselves. [these patients are usually the ones with severe schizophrenia and require massive doses of medication to keep them even in a semi-normal state]
Although I have seen perfectly normal people enter the ward and say to us that they are about to have an episode. This is especially perplexing because science has not really found out the reason why or how these people can feel an episode coming on. But they seemingly can.
All in all schizophrenia is a terrible disorder but thoroughly treatable with the right physician and the correct medication. The drooly mumbly types are still out there but in drastically fewer numbers.
Here’s a simple, informative site on schizophrenia.
And a broader site: www.schizophrenia.com
And an alternative site: Alternative Mental Health.
Net, nobody really knows exactly what causes schizophrenia and different people react differently to different treatments. One take is that it’s a group of disorders with similar symptoms, and each will have to be solved separately.
UH OH!!! I must appologize for the rude remark at the end of my last post. I did not mean to say drooly mumbly types whilst refering to someone with schizophrenia. That was quite unprofessional and uncalled for, and the wife just threw a boot at me for doing so, so sorry just the same…
My father was schizophrenic, as was my aunt, and as is my first cousin. A good friend of mine is also schizophrenic. From many hours of listening to them talk about their experiences, I have no doubt whatsoever that when they are actually in a schizophrenic state they believe implicitly in the “voices” and other hallucinations, and there is no way to convince them that these are not “real.” As my father got older, and as drug treatment improved, he had extended periods of lucidity. During these he “knew” that the hallucinations he had had were not real; however, he still remembered having heard/seen them.
AHunter3, it’s obvious you were misdiagnosed - your posts are far too coherent to come from an actual schizophrenic (even a “recovered” or treated one), at least any that I ever had experience with. And I understand your point that there is at present no objective anatomical/physiological way to identify schizophrenia, and I sympathize with the trauma you went through in undergoing involuntary treatment/incarceration. However, to say that “schizophrenia” doesn’t exist - well, I’m on the verge of taking offense at that (even though I realize you are saying it for the sake of your own self-image). This is a real and horrible disease, one that has blighted my family, and one I know all too well. (And I think it has an obvious genetic component in our case.) To have someone state that it doesn’t exist, even to make a point about their own misdiagnosis, is deeply objectionable to me.
Phlosphr, thank you for the apology. I was about to throw a boot at you also. I would also, however, take issue with the statement about it being “thoroughly treatable.” While new drugs have made it much more treatable than it used to be, neither my cousin nor my friend are able to live lives fully integrated into society.
If you are really interested in what schizophrenia feels like I suggest reading The Quite Room by Lori Schiller.
It is written by a women who had her first “attack” of schizophrenia in 1976 at summercamp before her senior year of highschool. She was in and out of hospitals and halfway houses (and tried to take her life a couple of times) until 1989 when she finally started taking a dangerous and experimental drug which helped her live a more normal life.
It was a really eye opening book.
There is a short note from Lori Schiller at the http://www.schizophrenia.com site. Here is direct link to the note.
The Quiet Room : A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
by Lori Schiller , Amanda Bennett
Published by Warner Books
Publication date: January 1, 1996
Dimensions (in inches): 8.03 x 5.30 x .82
ISBN: 0446671339
Cassettes Edition
Audio Cassette
List: $17.00
Published by Time Warner Audio Books
Publication date: June 1, 1994
Dimensions (in inches): 7.10 x 4.57 x .78
ISBN: 1570420386