Most likely – since schizophrenia is diagnosed on the basis of behaviors, not by testing for substances in the blood or patterns on the EEG – “schizophrenia” is not a brain disease but rather a mental condition that any mind (including yours) is capable of experiencing under the right circumstances.
(People may have an underlying physiological condition of the brain or of the biochemistry that predisposes them to be in that mental state, of course).
**schizophrenia is diagnosed on the basis of behaviors, not by testing for substances in the blood or patterns on the EEG
** True, in a way. Psychiatry has defined a diagnosis of schizophrenia by behaviors.
But, in the last few years, EEG, PET, and MRI scans are showing significant differences between chronic schizophrenics and “normals”. There is quite a bit of evidence accumulating about specific problems in brain development and neurotransmitters that may cause schizophrenia. Neurology is gradually replacing psychiatry by providing more detail and insight.
"schizophrenia" is not a brain disease but rather a mental condition that any mind (including yours) is capable of experiencing under the right circumstances.
Agreed, that you can subject any normal person to stresses or drugs that create schizophrenic-like reactions.
However, “schizophrenia” itself is a label for a set of behaviors that may have many different causes. It is unlikely to be a single condition – identical in all people. There is a lot of difference between someone who has a single “schizophrenic episode” and someone who spends their entire waking life hearing voices and living on the street.
**(People may have an underlying physiological condition of the brain or of the biochemistry that predisposes them to be in that mental state, of course). **
Agreed. So is why do you say that schizophrenia is a mental condition and not a brain disease?
A third of all people will experience your “schizophrenic fugue,” a hallucination, or some other symptom associated with schizophrenia once, right? And another third of people will have a “schizophrenic” experience two or more times in their lives. That’s what you’re saying, correct? Because I know, crazy though the world may be, that there ain’t two billion folks walking around with this severe, chronic mental illness.
I am understanding you correctly, aren’t I, Phlosphr?
Thanks for any clarification in advance.
–Mephisto, who knows he is sometimes dense. 
IME, the excessive use of both nicotine and marijuana in schizophrenics is most likely due to self-medication. Both nicotine and THC are somewhat effective in blunting the more annoying symptoms of schizophrenia. As does alcohol, and a few other abusable drugs. I refuse to jump on the bandwagon yelling “pot makes you schizophrenic” when the most reasonable explanation based on evidence thus far is that “pot makes chizophrenic people less upset”.
Caveat: I am not a psychiatrist, but I do treat the medical needs of schizophrenics almost daily. If I get the chance tomorrow, I’ll chat with my colleagues the shrinks and see what their consensus is.
QtM, MD
Frantic mad and Ahunter3 - you are ,mildly correct.
schizophrenia is diagnosed on the basis of behaviors, not by testing for substances in the blood or patterns on the EEG
So does that mean it isn’t a “real” disease, just a bahvioral problem? Or just that medicine does not have the diagnostic acumen to determine what sort of test will distinguish between psychotic behavior and just a really bad mood? A hundred years ago it was called “lunacy” and was attributed to being affected by the moon.
“schizophrenia” is not a brain disease but rather a mental condition that any mind (including yours) is capable of experiencing under the right circumstances. Wrong again, you are confusing schizophrenia with delusion. Anyone can become delusional which is one of many possible symptoms of schizophrenia but you can’t “become” schizophrenic unless you are already biologically wired to be schizophrenic.
There is a lot of difference between someone who has a single “schizophrenic episode” and someone who spends their entire waking life hearing voices and living on the street.
You are on the right track but I do want to point out that not all schizophrenics are living under bridges. Many are very sucessful and largely creative bunch. (I’m sure I don’t have to bring up John Nash)
So I still stick to my original thoughts that marijuana can’t cause schizophrenia at all. It may contribute to delusional thoughts, it may activate symptoms in someone who is already and perhaps undiagnosed schizophrenia but it doesn’t cause the disease.
Let me correct something here. Schitzophrenia is not a behavioral problem. It is a neuro-biological condition. If it were merely behavioral, it would be attributed to bad parenting etc. and could be cured without drug therapy.
I did. I became incoherent (for lack of a better word). I became schizophrenic when I agreed to talk to the nice doctor and receive that diagnosis. Once you’ve received the diagnosis, there exists no procedure by which medical personnel will ever declare the diagnosis to have been incorrect. The most you can hope for is “schizophrenia in remission”.
Agreed. And if it is their “entire waking life”, they must have a disposition towards that mental condition the external manifestations of which constitute the symptoms of schizophrenia as defined by the DSM IV.
I should not have said that schizophrenia is a mental state rather than a disease. That isn’t quite it.
Schizophrenia is a diagnosis and a social status. You get it attributed to you by manifesting symptoms. Those symptoms are symptoms of a mental state. That mental state can be experienced by potentially anyone under some circumstances. Some people end up in that mental state more readily than others. Some people, in fact, seem to reside there by default.
The problem is that when you start to define our mental state as an artifact of a (pathological) neurobiological condition, you are making the rather politicized statement (whether you realize it at the time or not) that no situations or events precipitated our ending up in that mental condition. This isn’t necessarily so. Furthermore, there are both real and potential victim blaming side effects of that perspective.
The other problem is that once you’ve defined the problem as one of brain chemistry, you’ve set the stage for authorizing some spectaculary invasive treatments that are based on the idea that the brain ain’t working properly and needs some tinkering, while at the same time setting the stage for characterizing our mental output as ignorably different from healthy thinking processes, which implies that no one need bother consulting us about what we think of “treatments” that are proposed and/or imposed upon us.
I’ll tell you about the overwhelming vast majority of those treatments: they “work” by shutting down what neurons do for a living to the point that we cease to have enough mental activity taking place to constitute a disruption (on or off the locked wards). Kind of like fixing distortion in your home theatre system’s sound modules by turning the volume down until you can’t hear the distortion any more. Oh, and permanent side effects.
What is schizophrenia? It’s what they say we are, the explanation for why it is okay to detain us for no violation of law or criminal statute, depriving us of our freedom. It is the name they give to our mental processes, which explains why it is okay to deprive us of them, modifying them without our consent on the supposition that we are too crazy to know that we are too crazy to know anything coherently. Schizophrenia is where they say that who you are is a disease, and then set out to eradicate it without killing the corporeal container that you arrived in.
Or at least that’s how it feels when you’re on the receiving end of the diagnosis.
I agree but disagree. I know all about the stigma but it totally pisses me off when someone tries to say " schizophrenia is a mental state rather than a disease."
Schizophrenia is a diagnosis and a social status - this I agree with. I have several close (very close) family members with both Bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. This is how I know so much about the functioning and the predjudice of mental illness. Being a caretaker of those will this illness is quite frankly a bitch. Sometimes I am not sure who got the worst end of the deal.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that there should be no consequence and no ability to control this mental state. It is truly neurobiological but not completely uncontollable either.
It’s a catch 22, if you say it is behvioral then people think you can cure a mental ill child with a good spanking, if you say it is biological then all the murderers on death row could not have controlled there behavior. It is somewhere in between.
I too have had varied opinions of the helpfulness of the diagnosis and attending physicians. Further complicating the matter are the varied degrees and symptoms diffrerent people experience. There is a diagnosis of an “isolated schizophrenic experience” sort of equated to post tramatic stress. Theory being once you’ve had one, you never know when it will happen again but you don’t need medication to maintain.
So it’s good you were only incoherent for a while (apparently you are no longer) I am assuming though that it wasn’t caused by marijuana which was the original question.
I don’t think this is quite right - Of those patients diagnosed with schizophrenia 1/3 will have a single, non-recurring episode, 1/3 will have recurring episodes broken up with periods of lucidity and 1/3 will enter a state of psychosis out of which they will never emerge - that is, 1/3 of schizophrenia patients do not respond to any type of therapy - drug or otherwise.
However, the prevalance of schizophrenia in the general population is around 1-3% if I remember correctly. Those with a close relative with schizophrenia or schizoid personality disorder have a higher chance of developing the disease. Those with an identical twin with schizophrenia I believe have a 50% chance of developing the disease.
Interesting thing.
Most schizophrenics smoke tobacco.
There is a good reason many do.
Studies have shown that people with schizophrenia show less of an auditory accommodation reflex, that is, a sudden loud noise causes us to start, but another noise a few seconds after doesn’t have such an effect. This isn’t true in schizophrenics, who will respond to the second noise as highly as the first.
Smoking tobacco causes the reflex to become more normalised.
This fact is courtesy of my psych lecturer, sorry no cite.
The riff within the movement is that nicotine alleviates the side effects of neuroleptic drugs, particularly the “restless motor neurons” syndrome.
Interesting thread, but are ALL people who hear voices necessarily schizophrenic? IMHO a lot of people suffer poor mental health as a reaction to the condition of hearing voices and being unable to deal with it - command hallucinations etc. But thats not to say that the hearing of voices is part of a mental illness process in itself.
In actual fact the term “hearing voices” is inaccurate because in many cases the person perceives a thought pattern that is delineated by lingual tokens (ie thinking in words). The word “hearing” is used to distinguish the sufferer’s perceptions from a so-called healthy person’s perceptions of the same nature.
While you or I may think “I’ll go and get the shopping in now”, the unhealthy person may think “Stick a sharp pointy thing up your ass!” or “You’re worthless”. The main distinction being that of discoursing with oneself in the third person. Even then, I will often reprimand myself in the third person after “doing a Homer” etc. So the hearing of voices can only reasonably be described as contributing toward mental ill health in that they degrade or debase the hearer in some way or otherwise contribute to erratic or anti-social behaviour.
Assuming that the source of the derisive commentary is the hearer (and I would not be too swift to assert this), the only problem is one of attitude - to oneself or others. It is this bad attitude which brings a person to think bad thoughts linguistically and in the third person.
Schizophrenia = blanket term for different people who are given as much trouble by social perceptions as their actual illness.