Schiz - what is it, do I have it?

[Black Rose]

In schizophrenia, the dorsal striatum (upper basal ganglia) has too much dopamine in it and has been damaged by stress. This brain region is used for understanding cause and effect. If it is damaged then people can get weird ideas about how the world works and how to obtain and maintain their goals. Hallucinations also play a part in that this brain region integrates perceptual stimuli.

I was diagnosed via the DSM in 2009 with Schizoaffective disorder. This is a less severe form of "schizophrenia". It has bipolar type meaning I get high and low-energy episodes. To meet the criteria you need two episodes of impairment with understanding reality within a period of 6 months apart from the bipolar symptoms. And no drug use.

Often I have had people call me autistic because of my low moods, sluggish cognitive tempo, and zombie-like mannerisms (this is called disassociation). Also, I have had this thing called a "mental block". I do not know what to say and have bad anxiety. People do not understand that autism is developmental meaning you had it your whole life and it doesn't just "show up". Repeated stress or traumatic events can trigger schizophrenia. But people think they look exactly the same.

Often I get bad sensations at the top of my head. I feel all contorted inside and need to move in odd ways.

Google:

The dorsal striatum is a part of the basal ganglia. It's made up of the caudate nucleus and the putamen. The basal ganglia controls voluntary movements and habit formation. The dorsal striatum:

• Integrates information about sensory, motivational, and motor state
  
• Facilitates the selection of actions that achieve desirable outcomes
  
• Contributes directly to decision-making
  
• Regulates movement and cognition

The dorsal striatum has two subdivisions:

• Dorsolateral striatum (DLS)
  Involved in the execution of habitual behaviors in a familiar sensory context
  
• Dorsomedial striatum (DMS)
  Involved in mediating goal-directed behaviors that require conscious effort.
  The dorsal striatum is implicated in the development of habitual drug-seeking.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Often I get bad sensations at the top of my head. I feel all contorted inside and need to move in odd ways.

This sounds uncomfortable.
Are you saying you have had it all your life or haven't had it all your life.

I thought Schizophrenia was about being Paranoid too. I don't know if you are or not.
If you have hallucinations, thats another part of it.

Autism is more just not being good at making friends I think. But you don't normally feel too lonely with Autism, just sometimes.

I'd guess its a combination of damage to neurological systems and direct effect of whatever happened to you as a child.
But if you had family members with similar diagnosis, it might also be somewhat genetic? I really don't know.
You do make a lot of logical sense in most cases though which doesn't quite match up.

 

[Black Rose]

Often I get bad sensations at the top of my head. I feel all contorted inside and need to move in odd ways.

This sounds uncomfortable.
Are you saying you have had it all your life or haven't had it all your life.

It mostly appeared after 2016.

Before then I just bit my nails. (I don't anymore)

I thought Schizophrenia was about being Paranoid too. I don't know if you are or not.
If you have hallucinations, thats another part of it.

I get that way alot but it has to do with my thoughts when I remember the bad things that happened to me and what could happen. I do not have hallucinations but I can become delusional.

My brother has delusions and hallucinations and is paranoid.

Autism is more just not being good at making friends I think. But you don't normally feel too lonely with Autism, just sometimes.

In autism, the metabolism has changed so that abnormal growth patterns occur. Too many brain cell connections and or asymmetrical white matter connections.

In sensory and disconnected patterns, noise increases in a brain where the energy has nowhere to go. Self-regulation becomes an issue and sometimes and this is common children only just have gut issues or are hard of hearing and not autism.

I'd guess its a combination of damage to neurological systems and direct effect of whatever happened to you as a child.

Yes, I remember bad things happening to me and in 7th grade being bullied and graduated high school shutting down for a period of 2 years doing nothing.

But if you had family members with similar diagnosis, it might also be somewhat genetic? I really don't know.

Jordan Peterson said that mental illness happens when you blow out / break the weakest link in the system. genetically that means in schizophrenia the basal ganglia can't understand how the world works anymore.

You do make a lot of logical sense in most cases though which doesn't quite match up.

I have times when I do not understand how the world works anymore and it becomes very scary. But it did not damage me completely. Some people have greater damage in the limbic system but it is all based on the intensity of the experience and the areas of the limbic system that are connected together. So it matters how connected an area is with the proteins (genetics) involved and nutrition.

 

[dr froyd]

I used to know a woman with schizophrenia (incidentally the only woman I ever truly liked and had a deep connection with). She was insanely smart, probably the smartest person I've ever met, but struggled badly with this disease. Hallucinations, paranoia, severe phobias, stories about things that never happened, etc. She almost invariably ended up turning against everyone she knew because at some point she always got the idea that they were trying to harm or exploit her.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

I have like three diagnoses, but I'm pretty functional.

For the most part I'm good, but when I'm bad it's like I'm a different person. I've only really had 2 incidents in the past 6 years which led to my diagnosis, and while I was in that state it was basically the perfect horror show for me where my thinking is incapable of happening in straight lines. Anything I am thinking about in that moment becomes real and thus my imagination becomes a weapon against myself.

Regularly, I don't believe in the supernatural, I'm non conspiratorial, and more pragmatic than most people around me. I am precise in speech and actions. I don't like to follow up on assumptions just because I see something with my own eyes, if multiple witnesses say something, I will take it more seriously.

It's pretty scary to think I am statistically in a group of people that constantly hear people saying things outside of their houses or rooms with nothing to pin down the source to. Not really a problem for me outside of these episodes. The hardest part is picking up the pieces afterwards and just processing these things so that I can go back to my normal life.

The creepiest thing that's happened to me is that before my very eyes, people would go from having normal faces to looking like uncanny valley surgically done faces. Like their skin would suddenly shift to a leathery texture, and it would look like they were wearing someone else's face on top of their own. This other time, while I was at an intersection I look at the sidewalk, and there was an Asian woman almost mannequin like woman with shades, and a bus drove by and she disappeared just like the movies.

I guess on the disturbing side, people have told me things I've done while I have no recollection. I don't remember being admitted to the psych hospital, and my roommate who had just met me said that I was laughing hysterically without stopping, like that I was trying to talk to him but I was just unable to stop laughing. He requested to sleep elsewhere that night. I wish I knew what was so funny.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I had sever intrusive thoughts. Violent and unspecified thoughts.
I have had phobias my whole life. I overcame them over time. Some I still have.
I have sever trust issues.
I had sever paranoid thoughts. Overcame them.
Not sure how.
I have perceptual problems, I get overwhelmed.
I have a diagnosis of PD.
I officially take meds for schizophrenia.

I believe schizophrenia is multi facet sickness. Not everyone experiences it same way.
I don't have symptoms of schizophrenia, but my mind is overactive, and sometimes I fall into anhedonia, depression, de-personalization, and various trippy states of being.
I also have alexithymia.

I believe my sickness was brought on by sever prolonged stress, and inability to cope with issue in life.
Generally speaking I feel very good now days.
I am discovering emotions, and learning about my mind to deal with life.
I manage my stress mostly.

I don't have diagnosis of autism, but I think I have it, though I believe I am at the high functioning end. Even if I don't have it I do have autistic like thinking.
I struggle with understanding other people motives, I have to adjust and socialize for prolonged time.
Hyper sensitive hearing especially to specifically high pitched sounds.

Most people who meet me think I am normal.
I kind of think in many ways I function well.


I believe the current model for schizophrenia and PDs is essentially lacking in describing mental illness and personality disorder.
I think also the actual understanding if disorders and how to deal with them and fix them is pretty much reduced to taking meds.
I think its a crime that this is considered good thing and sufficient solution.

 

[Black Rose]

If I suppress the need for motion and focus on music I can feel vibration in the center.

Both the vestibular system and the autonomic nervous system start to cooperate.

Normally I cannot feel my heartbeat or breathing.

I think that my brain stem and limbic system need to be paid more attention to.

Body motion and sensory stimuli are what activate these two systems.

Thinking too much deactivates the ability to observe these systems.

 

[dr froyd]

btw a noteworthy symptom:

Smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM)
People with schizophrenia and their relatives may experience atypical eye movements when following a moving object. Research suggests that unusual SPEM can occur in 50 to 85 percent of people with schizophrenia.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Thats interesting. Its only if both eyes have jerky movements though, if its just one, it can be something else.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I have a firm belief that once psychiatry world wide makes a move away from drugs approach to medicine we will have a new revolution in medicine.
Personally I endorse herbs, and natural products, psychedelics and shit.
I am afraid that lots of plants today are being destroyed due to deforestation that could cure disease.
I am anti pharma. I hate the meds I take, but they are the best on market.

I recently suffered major burn out.

To my understanding schizophrenia is something that inhibits communication of various parts of the brain.
Inhibition creates a rewiring, but as the brain rewires the connectivity is too weak from its natural connectivity.
I believe schizophrenia will never be cured with neurological approach or medical approach.
If it were possible it would have already happened.
Medication does not cure schizophrenia, it only hides symptoms.
Some, about one third of schizophrenics with age get better and cure themselves.
Not because of medication though. The meds only facilitate stability of mind which probably allows the brain to fix it self.

If you look at medicine and how meds work. You will realize one thing.
Most of healing be it mind or body or both, is done by the body, not by medicine.
Medicine only helps, but the actual healing is always 100 percent body repairing it self.

You can heal with sleep, food, rest, sunlight, exercise, and herbs. Thats it.
Most meds are herbal origin anyway.

When modern doctors shit on alternative medicine, most of them cannot cure any sickness anyway.
We kind of have this worship of modern medicine, because of bypasses and biochemistry, but actually beyond that alternative medicine is just legacy of past knowledge.
As far as I know there is not even a theory as to how the body works or how the mind works.

I believe medicine has still long way to go.
I can clearly see the short comings of medicine when my parents have issues, they are old, and doctors cannot help them even with minor problems.
I also see issues in psychology and psychiatry. I went through the whole system and all they do is shot pills at you.

 

[Black Rose]

As far as I know there is not even a theory as to how the body works or how the mind works.

Most of healing be it mind or body or both, is done by the body, not by medicine.

It is a self-regulation process.

When you are hungry the body lacks something and signals the brain to find food.

When you eat food new signals tell your brain to stop eating.

It is not more than this yet concerning many system dependencies.

Each cell plays a function of inputs and outputs to keep us from falling apart.

The mind is like this with layers, you develop from psychological beginnings as an infant to a child to an adult. You learn to perceive other humans and interact with them. All to survive.

We have highly detailed maps of the human brain from the 1960s when experimentations were not made illegal yet. They tell us how a brain maintains itself as it learns. Memory formation language sight hearing and natal care, the foundation is the brain stem. it tells us when it is safe and who to trust. At the top is the cortex that understands causal relationships and corrects the errors in itself when allowed.

When damage happens or development is stunted we cannot adjust to the way the world is changing. We cannot form new ways of understanding to help us live in the world. We cannot learn how the world operates by taking information in, modeling it, and using the model to predict the best course of action. Signals promoting growth and complexity have been interrupted.

The mind needs to have a grasp on how reality is to function properly. Learning has been well studied but then mental illness is the result of breaking that learning function mechanism. Not that there is only one way to learn but there are many ways to break learning.

Yes, the brain can heal itself but that depends on the conditions of restarting the learning process from the most important areas under consideration. What needs to be fixed first may be many things at once to help it all work together again.

Brain Types​

Balanced
overall activity is even and symmetrical
Spontaneous
low activity in the prefrontal cortex but high cerebellum activity
need lots of stimulation
Persistent
too much activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus
has a hard time shifting attention and only can focus on one thing at a time
Sensitive
the brain stem is in fear mode
needs attachment and care
Cautious
active basal ganglia, insular cortex, and/or amygdala
lots of anxiety yet highly motivated

 

[Old Things]

I deal with some pretty severe trust issues. My emotions say I should not trust people, but my head says I should.
I also have an overactive thought process. I can't get my brain to shut up.
I have a lot of grandiose thoughts, but I do not believe them.
I used to have a lot of paranoid delusions, but those have mostly subsided.
One thing I have developed, which I don't like much is tactile hallucinations. They are undeniably creepy since it feels like someone is touching me and when I go to look no one is there.
I could probably live 95%+ of my life with no one to talk to and be just fine.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I deal with some pretty severe trust issues. My emotions say I should not trust people, but my head says I should.
I also have an overactive thought process. I can't get my brain to shut up.

Similar deal with. I use meditation. Took me a lot of time to get to a point where I can stop thinking. When I think or do something compulsive like overthinking I call it feeding the monster. Including learning.
You just gotta feed da bitch if you know what I mean.
Big brain problems.
When it comes to trust issues, they are deeply unconscious.
Trying to connect emotionally feels like hacking my brain.

 

[Old Things]

Big brain problems.

Not me. I'm kinda dumb. But I have a unique thought process sorta.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Not me. I'm kinda dumb. But I have a unique thought process sorta.

I never felt like you are dumb. I think unique though process definitely applies.
I also think a good thing about feeling dumb is that usually we feel this way when we are learning. A lot of people hate this feeling so much they avoid it, thus never learn.
Personally I have lot of things where I feel stupid, and I avoid those things like the plague.

 

[ZenRaiden]

It is a self-regulation process.

I think people always knew this. Its just words saying something very obvious.
Whether someone calls it self regulation or autonomy of body etc......

When you are hungry the body lacks something and signals the brain to find food.

When you eat food new signals tell your brain to stop eating.

It is not more than this yet concerning many system dependencies.

Each cell plays a function of inputs and outputs to keep us from falling apart.

Yes some basics of how signals travel through body and how we understand it has gone a long way.

Each cell plays a function of inputs and outputs to keep us from falling apart.

The mind is like this with layers, you develop from psychological beginnings as an infant to a child to an adult. You learn to perceive other humans and interact with them. All to survive.

We have highly detailed maps of the human brain from the 1960s when experimentations were not made illegal yet. They tell us how a brain maintains itself as it learns. Memory formation language sight hearing and natal care, the foundation is the brain stem. it tells us when it is safe and who to trust. At the top is the cortex that understands causal relationships and corrects the errors in itself when allowed.

When damage happens or development is stunted we cannot adjust to the way the world is changing. We cannot form new ways of understanding to help us live in the world. We cannot learn how the world operates by taking information in, modeling it, and using the model to predict the best course of action. Signals promoting growth and complexity have been interrupted.

The mind needs to have a grasp on how reality is to function properly. Learning has been well studied but then mental illness is the result of breaking that learning function mechanism. Not that there is only one way to learn but there are many ways to break learning.

Yes, the brain can heal itself but that depends on the conditions of restarting the learning process from the most important areas under consideration. What needs to be fixed first may be many things at once to help it all work together again.

I think this is all correct type of knowledge, but I think none of the current knowledge no matter how far we may think we have gone really explains anything.

For example we have road map to the metabolic process. Very detailed road map.
But we kind of don't know how it works anyway.
We have very detailed anatomy of the brain and the way it works, but actually its all surface level in many ways.

For instance autism was described in Russia, before that autistics were considered retarded or village idiots or weird eccentrics or even locked up in asylums for insanity. We have gone long way, but even today most autistic basically get very simple advice. There is literally nothing advanced in treating autism. And there is still people denying it exists. So we are pretty stupid when it comes to medicine.
Same way everything psychiatry.

Just because I can throw latin words and tell you there is this part of brain that does this thing, and there this chemical, that does the other thing, and there is this nerve that calms me and there is this response, does not mean I actually mean much.

To put it in analogy if a car mechanic talked about cars the way doctors talk about bodies you would tell him he is incompetent.

Not that medicine is wrong. Its just not on par with our necessary needs.