https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder

as did Eugen Bleuler. I have a friend who is schizophrenic whose speech hardly makes sense and she is always calling people on the phone and carrying on nonsensical conversations. Somehow the general public is hung up on ‘hearing voices’ but I have never once heard a voice but under stress I (schizotypal) did once spend about six months under the influence of a ‘system of delusions’ yet stayed mostly functional, kept working, and managed to avoid getting in serious trouble.

I think it is quite ordinary also for people to have a dialogue with an ‘invisible friend’ or believe that they ‘talk to God’ when they pray, the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia seem to be something like you have a thought that you don’t think is your thought but somebody else talking, notably schizophrenics often believe that somebody is putting thoughts into them or taking thoughts out of them, see

https://www.theairloom.org/mindcontrol.php

This is not unreasonable.

It could be less awful if the voices were positive and not harsh and negative. Schizophrenics outside the US were found to have a more benign relationship with their voices.

    The striking difference was that while many of the African
    and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences
    with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects
    were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and
    evidence of a sick condition. 

And as others have pointed out, it really depends what kind of programming you're carrying around. Feeling terrified of something isn't the issue...it's how you've trained to respond to terror that matters. If you lash out or avoid, yeah....don't cultivate multiple voices. If, instead, you're choosing to purge the addiction to violence & domination fairly rooted in American imperial colonial indoctrination, it's really quite something. I'm now working on bringing in 16 others as a way to better connect with different parts of the population and spread this and other blackness-embracing ways.

Hearing/seeing things that aren't there has historically for the majority of humanity's time on Earth not been an issue. We can get back to living in such ways, especially since doing so can be extremely helpful.

Whom I thank every day for repairing my retention processes, just enough that lessons become learning.

I have an Ancestry partial genome that I've imputed to expand. Would be curious whether those SNP's are present in the data.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459134/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26941382/

Schizos may take alcohol or cigarettes to calm down, a form of self medication. On the long term these may worsen, in the immediate they help. Why do you think they smoke a lot?!? To treat. If you smoke or drink, what do you do after a tough day - smoke or drink, to relax, feels great. Schizos may have a tough day , but not from external stimuli, but from internal stimuli

While that framing might change the aperture for people to support decriminalization efforts, "helping people who have addiction means social progress" is the greater good here.

Unfortunately, at least from a USian perspective, we only got so far as the decriminalizing part, and we did it while actually cutting a lot of the social services, health care access, and safety net that actually help people with addiction function in society.

I had a parent with schizophrenia. I can tell you what a privilege it is to have my cannabis use be the primary risk factor I have to worry about, and not the financial stress and eventual homelessness, untreated health issues, and lack of mental health support my father faced.

If you've ever listened to some of people pushing or debating psychedelics, or natural remedies, or even "totally safe" vaccines, then it should be readily apparent.

An example is she was having a nice conversation with her roommate, who brought up that he had gone to a bar where they have turtle races. She immediately turned defensive and thought he was making a joke about her being slow.

EDIT: Imagine being powerful and wealthy and assured in your position in the Catholic Church and someone comes along and questions geocentricity and says you're wrong. It's a pretty easy leap to huffily say well, they are "mentally ill, crazy, delusional, paranoid"

I think what really gets me is that despite my constant vigilance and skepticism toward my own thoughts, I simply cannot talk myself out of how truly real those delusions feel when they happen. I can even acknowledge how absurd they are, even in the moment, but I can never shake the feeling that they're still very, very real. It's so maddening. The best I can do is to just not act on those thoughts.

Maybe the above person's family is actually unearthing valid insights, but if they're prone to psychosis, in that state they'll be prone to finding connections, associations, patterns, and so on between things in a way that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It'll feel very real to them in the moment, but when they exit that state (if they do) they'll likely be on the same page as others in thinking those ideas were a stretch.

Also, in my days of yute, I was fairly profligate in the use of ... mind-enhancing chemicals, shall we say. They basically gave me the same exact certainty and "insight."

Once, I decided to write down the marvelous insight that I experienced, while tripping. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff in a notebook, and then read it, a couple of days later.

It was pure gibberish. Made no sense at all.

[EDITED TO ADD] I should say that I had the luxury of having two distinct states of mind, including a "control state," in which to review the ramblings in the "enhanced" state. This is not a luxury that someone suffering from schizoaffective disorder has. They have no idea that their thinking is off.

It’s an extremely debilitating condition.

That's one reason that I have compassion for parents of autistic children, that are vehemently anti-vax. I completely disagree with their stance, but I know what they are dealing with, and the very real fears and stresses that they are under.

On what exactly are you basing that off of? Vibes?

One Youtuber Jreg used a breadth-first search (schizophrenia) vs depth-first search (autism) analogy when comparing the the two, but I think your temperature analogy is more apt. Higher temperature results in more disorganized thoughts like schizophrenia. And if you buy into the idea that the root of most schizophrenia is thought disorders, then this analogy implies that dialing up temperature corresponds to more signs of psychosis through speech

My experience with many friends on the autism spectrum is that their speech tends to be more scripted, but I certainly don't think autism and psychosis are mutually exclusive.

There are many psychiatrist that have different viewpoints, for example I’ve talked to many who see purines as a problem and then you have the whole keto/mitochondrial doctors. There are many psychiatrist that will never change their minds about mood disorders because why do they have to?

I should add as well that there are so many things out of my control that are triggers that I still carry Klonopin with me just in case. It’s the one thing that can stop my psychosis in a heartbeat. I think the glutamate GABA balance is extremely important and unlooked with a lot of mental illnesses. Glutamate are a big trigger for my psychosis.

To me, and I think this can be true for anyone, it’s all about connecting the dots between the triggers and not only mood symptoms, but physical symptoms as well. But obtaining my genetics and also learning about genetics over a 10 year period helped me tremendously. I knew it was in my family because my mother, my brother and my nephew, including myself all had extremely similar experiences and also suicide attempts.

The first thing is, I could not have done this if I did not stop my medication. I’m not recommending anyone stop their medication‘s but it’s going to be really hard to find things that affect glutamate, dopamine and serotonin if you’re taking these drugs at the same time. But being on the same drugs my mother was o 50 years ago did not seem logical to me. And then I started hearing stories about people recovering from mental illness, real stories. Then my nephew hung himself at 13 and that changed everything. I knew it was genetic so I knew that’s the direction I had to go to investigate what was going on with my family.

So I got to know my mother side of the family a bit better both genetically and from stories. It definitely came from my great great grandmother side and it turns out while we all thought that side of the family was Polish, they were actually from Finland.

For myself, my gut was a big indicator and clue. I’ve had IBS-D really bad since I was a child. I managed on my own to find foods that were triggers, but it was not until I discovered I was a FUT-2 non-secretor that thing is really changed. Only 20% of Europeans carry this gene so I knew it was important

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9301175/

Eating a diet heavy in Fucose (not fructose!) fixed my gut. Seaweed, mushrooms, etc.

This was not a cause of my schizoaffective disorder, but it definitely was a trigger. When my gut was bad, I was bad. But there were a lot of times when my gut was good and I was bad as well. So I kept looking for triggers.

Then there was the early heart attacks in my family and my hyperlipidemia. In my genetics, I saw that I had genes that were more like people who were the Inuit when it comes to poly unsaturated fatty acids. At this time, I was a vegetarian. With all the research about how omega-3 helps with heart disease I decided to eat more like an Inuit and what do you know, my cholesterol totally reversed. LDL down and HDL from 30 up to 54. Plus, I was feeling much more stable. Don’t underestimate how omega-3 can control receptor function.

Both my mother and I also had what is called multiple chemical sensitivity. I don’t really like that name but that’s what I’m left with. It’s essentially a sensitivity to a lot of aldehydes. The story here is kind of long and complicated so I’m not gonna go too much into the genetic details but I’m just showing you another of several triggers that helped me find out what was going on. A lot of foods have aldehydes, aldehydes impact flavor of foods and food manufacturers add aldehydes to foods as well as add glutamate and purines to increase our taste but sensitivity to flavors.

And then we could talk about air pollution. Another big trigger. My grandparents lived in Manhattan and every time we went back there I would feel worse. I even tried to work in Manhattan for a year and that did not end well.

Alcohol is complicated. At the front end, it brings me really really big relief. But I could never drink too much because it gave me a really bad fatigue in the end. It turns out that the calcium ion channel blocking effects of alcohol are great, but the aldehydes alcohol creates just make me feel worse in the end.

So I just started avoiding those foods and eating Whole Foods that are people in a cold climate would eat, and they went away a bunch of more of my triggers.

And then there was heat. Heat is the number one trigger for me. And for some stupid reason, I moved to North Carolina. Since I ended up homeless because of this and living in a van, I was able to move to different climates to different places and also found not only the cold weather, but high altitude were triggers.

see the problem with all this is my mother married an Italian man. So instead of eating a more Polish/Finnish diet we were eating in Italian diet having a carbohydrates and red meats and little fish. This was the worst diet for me.

I do take some supplements and two supplements. I’ve been tested deficient in, and that helped me are zinc and B6. When I say these supplements help me, I mean they dramatically make me feel different when I’m am low I them and when I supplement with them. And magnesium is another one.

So now I try to live like a Sami. I ate a lot of seafood, salmon, mackerel, oysters, mussels and wild game meets. I say low latitudes in cold climates. And I also avoid polluted cities.

Now that’s gonna sound depressing because I know that not everyone can do what I did, live in an van and move somewhere that fits them genetically. But that’s the truth of the matter. In my humble opinion, they have the idea of mental illness all wrong. It is a disease more like an allergy than a mental illness. There is an environmental trigger that causes a reaction. And make no mistake I think for the majority of us, including myself, it is an immune disorder and not a nervous system disorder in a fundamental way. For example, I’ve had very low white blood cell counts, but also showed signs of lupus that they were always testing me for. They also kept testing me for HIV because of my symptoms in white blood cell counts.

And then the doozy was when I had COVID-19. Both times I caught it I had the worst psychosis in my life. For some reason, no one finds this interesting not even my doctors.

Edited to add

I want to add this in a shorter post cause I can’t believe I didn’t bring it up.

The first thing I would do was get all of her nutrition levels, tested, and ruled out as causes. There are several tests you can get without a prescription.

The first important one is a hair mineral test. But getting a full iron panel, zinc, B6, homocysteine, B12, methyl malonic acid, serum amino acid test, and of course, a complete CBC with differential and metabolic panel. Keeping track of the last two were really important for me. I noticed my white blood cell count changed when I was in different locations. For example, my white blood cell count was consistently higher in North Carolina than it was when I was in Washington state.

As an example, I had a friend who was on Prozac since she was 18 and she was now 48. I looked at her blood test and it was clear she had anemia. They did an iron panel and her serum ferritin was only three. It turned out they were treating her lifelong anemia with SNRI’s and antipsychotics.

Every comment you're making in this thread confirms her fears and delusions. Whether or not she was right initially doesn't matter anymore since the situation has now been bootstrapped. If she can't quite tell in which way you're being dishonest, she has the certainty that she eventually will. And here you are, committing a violation of intimacy, taking strong advice from blind strangers to whom you are confiding the destiny of your relationship. You have just put on your shoulders as much, if not more, weight than you wanted to get rid of when you started commenting, and you will leak it through non-verbal communication, 100%. Looking at it a second time, it seems there is as much self-fulfilling prophecy in your behavior as in hers. As you complain about her paranoia behind her back, you are judging her hard and stockpiling the very weapons of silence she's complaining about.

You're nonetheless as captive to the situation as she is: the idea of psychosis, even though it may well be correct, is what allows you to deflect her delusions before they are funneled back to her in the very terms she anticipated – it is also what binds you to her, her delusions, and your reaction which confirms them. You're not just commenting on your situation; you're calling for help.

Your dilemma is that her psychosis allows you to define the problem and helps you enact your decision, but at the cost of painting you as an asshole when you look in the mirror. This is why you're getting so many replies; this is what makes these situations so interesting. Intuitively, every poster has understood this and given you justifications for dumping her or for accepting that you're an asshole. I hope to have given you the tools to see yourself as part of the problem and to consider breaking up as the ethical thing to do.

I believe she can be fixed, though. This requires acknowledging and letting her know that no matter what you do, you're under the spell of her pre-traumatic stress disorder, and you're bound to confirm it. So why not stuff her mouth shut with your passion to prevent her witch's tongue from twisting disharmony into reality, and own her as a slave in retribution?

We also have a lot of mental health issues in my family since the switch to "civilization", not sure that any one of us is totally sane.

If you are switching one low survival gene for another there is no net benefit.

I dont think they are. Most are diagnosed in their teens or early twenties. Women slightly later than men.

Women diagnosed in their menopause are not a majority of diagnosed schizophrenics; far from.

I understood that part as merely a curiosity.

There’s absolutely a correlation, enough to be causation. But it doesn’t make mental illness a primary factor in creativity in modern society.

Typical is putting in a lot of work in that sentence. I could rephrase it with the same truth content and make it much more ambiguous.

"Many phenotypical sexual differences in humans are obviously genetic. Some very common differences in sex-specific sexual attraction are likely genetic as well. For large swaths of sexual attraction, we have absolutely no evidence of a genetic link."

What's funny is that the one example you facetiously picked (a curve detector) is extremely culturally dependent. Trying to tie elements of human sexuality to evolutionary just so stories is usually pseudoscience. When we start isolating genes for the things that we think of as natural, if we ever do, I bet you $100 the mapping from our social experience of these traits to some kind genetic reality is muddled to the point of total detachment.

What I'm saying is that evolution matters across large timescales. By contrast, I believe the topics I was commenting on concern timescales where effects of biological evolution are negligible compared to the effects of memetic evolution.

Thus, biological evolution doesn't matter at all for predicting what will happen (or is happening right now) to humanity, unless predicting so far into the future as to be completely futile speculation (imagine someone 200 years ago wondering how biological evolution might affect humanity during the next couple thousand years).