Colibri (and others) – there is certainly a “something” from which many people suffer, a “something” that fits enough observable patterns for us to feel comfortable speaking of it as a unified phenomenon (as opposed to, say, “Gee, lots of people have thoughts and/or feelings that make them and/or other people uncomfortable”). And, yes, research tends to indicate that the observable (and felt) portions of this phenomenon have corollaries in bodily states (including, but not limited to, neural firing patterns, neurochemistry, and genetic patterns).
Nevertheless, despite approximately a century of insistent claims for its existence as a specific condition of physiological CAUSE by the psychiatric profession, I am of the (at least modestly informed) opinion that we cannot yet say, with any assurance, that the built-in differences constitute more than a predisposition towards a reactive pattern that anyone – including you – could experience under the right (or wrong) circumstances.
Certainly the symptoms are not alien to the experience of people who have come to comprehend those experiences as meaningful (rather than meaningless “static”-like) albeit uncomfortable and chaotic mental processes that were, fundamentally, responses of the self to the environment.
A predisposition towards becoming “schizophrenic” (if I may use it as an adjective) does not mean that one’s voices and one’s activity of standing outside the Lincoln Tunnel and blessing the cars as they emerge by touching their hoods are CAUSED by pathologies of the neural tissue, genetic glitches, or that culprit so often touted by the Alliance for the Mentally Ill the “chemical imbalance”.
Now as to whether or not I was “misdiagnosed” – it would be one thing if I’d been on a locked ward in the company of people who were substantively different from me, causing me to conclude that I didn’t belong here and that a mistake had been made, but the truth of the matter is that there was no easily drawn line. Perhaps more to the point, when I’ve been to conferences of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) or NY Project Release or National Alliance of Psychiatric Survivors and had the opportunity to sit in huge auditoriums full of people who were most definitely capable of being lucid and coherent, and spoken with them, I’ve heard NOT a recurrent theme of “Gee, they locked me up by accident but eventually realized that and let me go” and NOT “I was causing a disturbance so they threw me in with the nutcases and said I was one of them”, but, rather, “They said I was sick and threw me into a ward full of people with very similar stories, and mostly they were just like us, give or take varying degrees of terror and anger, and no, the shrinks never at any point said ‘whoops, you don’t belong here’, they kept me in for 5 weeks, two months, one year, three years, they forced me to take psych drugs / electroshocked me, they send a Public Health nurse around to try to get me to take my meds, they’ve hauled my ass back in about six times for no reason in particular, saying I’m ‘sick’ and I’m ‘decompensating’, …”
Anyway, we’ve all heard the “Oh, WELL, they obviously made a mistake in YOUR case but what about the genuine blah blah” line a few times too many. No offense intended, but how convenient to say that about anyone who is, in the context of discussing the matter, capable of speaking out about it, that “oh, you don’t count, we mean the REAL schizzies”.
Personally, I think schizophrenia can happen to anyone. Happens to some easier than others, perhaps due to a range of biological predispositional factors, but, ultimately,…
schiz happens.
