What does science think schizophrenia is?

MNBrant, this reminds me of The Quiet Room, written by a woman with schizophrenia, who shared a story about how, during a very disorganized part of her illness, she had tried to go to nursing school. She experienced loud and constant voices and was in a state where she couldn't follow the classes well. She said the voices assured her that they had access to all of the information she needed to pass the tests. Like you, she suspected the voices might be supernatural or have ESP abilities. She trusted them completely and took a test in which the voices gave her the answers. And she failed.

It sounds like you no longer have the voices, which is good, but unfortunately you also can't test them out like this.
 
MNBrant said:
The folks at NIMPH said that they couldn't yet detect schizophrenia with a MRI. There might be severely damaged folks where this deterioration is true though.
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Yes, this is true. What they have found are certain changes that seem common in the brains of people with SZ, but as far as I know they are not diagnostic.

Here is a summary of some of the findings:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812015/
 
ExMinister said:
MNBrant, this reminds me of The Quiet Room, written by a woman with schizophrenia, who shared a story about how, during a very disorganized part of her illness, she had tried to go to nursing school. She experienced loud and constant voices and was in a state where she couldn't follow the classes well. She said the voices assured her that they had access to all of the information she needed to pass the tests. Like you, she suspected the voices might be supernatural or have ESP abilities. She trusted them completely and took a test in which the voices gave her the answers. And she failed.

It sounds like you no longer have the voices, which is good, but unfortunately you also can't test them out like this.
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Well no the voices would say something like you passed your street, your on Irving, go straight etc. Other times they would say stuff of a religious or political nature that I would see discussed some months or years later. I do not rely on voices to help me get through the day. Usually I avoid them.
 
MNBrant said:
Well no the voices would say something like you passed your street, your on Irving, go straight etc.
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So MNBryant, what do you think they are? I didn't get this impression from your opening post, but your later posts seem like you think they're not coming from inside your own head. Is that what you're thinking? That they're coming from someone, not you, who guides you?

The human brain is a complex thing. What we've learned is that different areas of the brain are constantly working in parallel, even coming up with conflicting ideas, and some central organizing function in your brain takes all these inputs and comes up with ideas.

We don't know a lot about schizophrenia, but we DO know that these perceived voices are just your own mind, and for some reason the part of your mind that feels like "you" is perceiving the inputs as coming from an external source. But that source is part of your own brain, it's just that yours, for whatever reason, perceives them differently than the rest of us.

To say really what is going on, would require that we know a whole lot more about how your brain works than we currently do. Something's going wrong inside the brains of schizophrenics, but we just don't know enough about normal-personality brains to identify exactly what.

Whatever it is, though, its only possible source is inside your own head. Congratulations on being a high-functioning schizophrenic. That disorder is devastating to most people that have it.
 
CurtC said:
So MNBryant, what do you think they are? I didn't get this impression from your opening post, but your later posts seem like you think they're not coming from inside your own head. Is that what you're thinking? That they're coming from someone, not you, who guides you?

The human brain is a complex thing. What we've learned is that different areas of the brain are constantly working in parallel, even coming up with conflicting ideas, and some central organizing function in your brain takes all these inputs and comes up with ideas.

We don't know a lot about schizophrenia, but we DO know that these perceived voices are just your own mind, and for some reason the part of your mind that feels like "you" is perceiving the inputs as coming from an external source. But that source is part of your own brain, it's just that yours, for whatever reason, perceives them differently than the rest of us.

To say really what is going on, would require that we know a whole lot more about how your brain works than we currently do. Something's going wrong inside the brains of schizophrenics, but we just don't know enough about normal-personality brains to identify exactly what.

Whatever it is, though, its only possible source is inside your own hea d. Congratulations on being a high-functioning schizophrenic. That disorder is devastating to most people that have it.
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I have my theories, it could be fallen angels, angels, dieties, priests of various cults, symbiotes, psion cells, esp, etc. you know it might be a coincidence but when I was in the hospital my sister showed up in a ghetto type tee shirt with a black angel on it. Now she is dieing of liver disease. I am reading the gurps psychotronic gamebook it discusses animal and human brains in boxes. I have had hallucinations in the past where they were preparing to do just that.
 
It sounds like you DO currently experience the voices. If they are external to you, they should know things you don't know. I don't mean street names (those are things your brain was probably able to perceive, as Cavemonster described above). Have them guess a friend's middle name, or get somebody to open a magazine to any page and have the voices identify what they are looking at. Test them and see.

Do you always have the voices like this, or are they coming back just recently?
 
If I hear voices or have disordered thoughts I up my meds. I don't need voices to do my job and they are too hard to control.
 
MNBrant said:
I have my theories, it could be fallen angels, angels, dieties, priests of various cults, symbiotes, psion cells, esp, etc.
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It sounds like you think it is just about anything but coming from your own brain. Can you explain more about why?
 
Hmm, Could be anything. I tend to be secretive about what I see and hear. I dont know if thats helpful or not. Some voices say yes some voices say no. Heh.
 
MNBrant said:
The folks at NIMPH said that they couldn't yet detect schizophrenia with a MRI. There might be severely damaged folks where this deterioration is true though.
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My understanding that in the degenerative form of schizophrenia there are noticeable changes. And there are some changes in locus during fMNRI
 
Can you interact with the voices or is it all one way, like listening to the radio?
 
Articles from just the first page
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=schizophrenia neural development

Dendritic Spine Pathology in Schizophrenia.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22546337

Comparing the neural bases of self-referential processing in typically developing and 22q11.2 adolescents.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22483077

BACE1 Dependent Neuregulin Processing: Review.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22455478

Sex, glia, and development: Interactions in health and disease.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22387107

Interplay between DISC1 and GABA signaling regulates neurogenesis in mice and risk for schizophrenia.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22385968

The importance of the NRG-1/ErbB4 pathway for synaptic plasticity and behaviors associated with psychiatric disorders.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22378872

This stuff gets deep real fast and always points to the multifaceted nature of teh brain, never a single factor
 
marplots said:
Can you interact with the voices or is it all one way, like listening to the radio?
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As a case manager we always encouraged our clients to not interact , but some do. It really depends how florid their symptoms are.

Muttering and eye darting/staring, extremely slow response to questions, things to watch for in an assessment. One individual I met took 90 seconds to respond to questions.
 
MNBrant said:
If I hear voices or have disordered thoughts I up my meds. I don't need voices to do my job and they are too hard to control.
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I am sorry for what you have to go through, but it's great that you're high-functioning.

Mind if I ask what medications you are taking? I've been reading a lot about schizophrenia and mental illness recently. I don't have schizophrenia, and I probably don't have any serious mental illness; however, I've always been a very quiet, socially withdrawn, morose kind of person who is almost incapable of making friends. I am very socially inept, and find socializing in groups impossible. For some reason I find it easier to communicate through typing than talking.

I also have various obsessions. My parents were very worried about me for a long time. They nearly took me to a psychiatrist, but they changed their mind. Plus, compared to my "disturbed" brother I was the "normal" one, so they always thought I would snap out of it unlike my brother who had to go to special schools and needed frequent psychotherapy.

Although I haven't been formally diagnosed(since I avoid doctors), I have just about all the traits of a high-functioning autistic. Anyway, one of the reasons I have been reading a lot about schizophrenia recently is because it appears to be linked with autism.

Schizophrenia, Autism Linked to Several of the Same Genes

It appears they may be caused in part by the same genes. However, the brain abnormalities, as revealed by MRIs and other methods are quite different in schizophrenia and autism. This doesn't stop me from exploring the similarities between autism and schizophrenia, although I fortunately have none of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

It is of course possible to be both schizophrenic and autistic. In fact, it appears that if you have one, you're more likely to have the other. Science unfortunately doesn't understand enough about either condition. Best of luck to you.
 
The voice in my head says that this thread is a woo scam. I'm not saying that. The voice in my head is saying that. I'm just letting you know.

In my experience, the voice in my head is smarter than me. I'm not saying that this thread is a woo scam trap. I'm just telling you what I heard.
 
ExMinister said:
If you're interested in schizophrenia and the experience of voices, this is one person's account that it is very interesting:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183830&highlight=case46
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Very interesting. What struck me was how the voices differ from what I might hear, for example, on the subway from strangers. They may be distracting, as someone shouting at you might be, but the key feature is that they seem to have access to emotions that outside voices do not.

So, for example, they are often described as "disturbing" or "causing fear" or come with some other emotional tag that isn't based solely on the content of the speech. It is the difference between someone yelling "Fire!" at me and me realizing there is a fire. That's fascinating, that part.
 
William Parcher said:
The voice in my head says that this thread is a woo scam. I'm not saying that. The voice in my head is saying that. I'm just letting you know.

In my experience, the voice in my head is smarter than me. I'm not saying that this thread is a woo scam trap. I'm just telling you what I heard.
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MNBrant has posted in other threads, and this thread is in line with his previous posts. I am not in any serious doubt that he is genuinely schizophrenic, on treatment, and trying to understand what goes on in his brain.

Rolfe.
 
There's more evidence appearing day by day that what you think as your thoughts are not really generated consciously -- that they're generated unconsciously and then passed through your consciousness for review, just like any other sensation.

Given that, I could easily see this mechanism getting amped up on steroids, so to speak, so it seemed like someone else was shoving these ideas into your consciousness. You didn't "think" them, so why are they there? Someone else thought them, obviously.
 
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I can. I used to be not able to but now I can. Sometimes we can be sitting next to one another and have a chat. I get messages in chat forums, in person, in the media, and in my head. In an earlier post I, I posted that my sister was seen wearing an image of a black angel on her tee shirt and sometime later was disagnosed with advanced liver disease and is dying. Soon thereafter someone said in a chat room I was in that she will have wings. When I asked the person directly why he said that, he said I feel a little confused. I take 2, 4 mg doses of pherphenizine with 2, .5 mg doses of klonopin. I have another 8 mgs pherphenizine prn and a 10mg olanzapine prn that I can take if I hear voices. I manage my own meds, telling my doctor what I want to take and at what dose.
 
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