I got to live with a schizophrenic person who subleased after a roommate left. I gained a better understanding for people who suffer this horrible disorder. It validated my theory that many homeless people are schizophrenic--yea, go figure, homeless people who aren't lazy. It's very difficult--stupidly so--to get these people help. They have to threaten your life (or theirs) to get them any kind of help, which undeniably is not good enough yet, so they wind up abandoned by their families, in prison with a horrible mix of drugs, etc.
My case was no different, I had to kick him out because he wasn't paying rent and was causing distress to my other roommates. I would have done the same with a sane person, but I must admit I felt bad because the guy was kind, he just couldn't keep a job, so he couldn't pay me. He still owes me like $600, but I've never contacted him about it. I figure he has a hard enough time as is.
Does anyone here have friends or relatives who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with it. Someone I know was diagnosed, but later the diagnosis was changed by another doctor to manic depressive with bipolar (we were told that it was too early to say affirmatively what the prob was). Every 9 months or so (for the past 3 years), he has episodes where he or someone else has to check him into the hospital because he's delusional (usually paranoid, having delusions of grandeur, sometimes threatening).
Read my other post, but I'll elaborate here. People with schizophrenia definitely "hear voices." I've read a bit about this and forget the exact scientific theory for why this happens, but my high-level understanding is that the "self" part of their brain is disconnected from their consciousness so--i'm sure this has happened to everyone when they're very sleepy--when they hear "recordings" of voices, they aren't aware of the fact that their mind is producing them.
The person I roomed with heard angels and demons. He was very religious, so it's logical to see how he arrived at such conclusions. They usuallly slip into such "episodes" when under stress. I remember one day, he came in very angry, jumped into the shower, punching the wall yelling at "Satan." It was surreal, but I kept my cool because I had read a lot about this. The most insane part was trying to talk to him about the voices. In his mind they were real. And when I implied they weren't, he would become stressed because I didn't understand him/believe him. At this point you relize, reality is so insanely relative to your experiences and how your mind processes stimuli. Any "bad" wiring in the brain and you're either too religious, or too rational, or too "insane" to hear voices that aren't there.
My half brother had his first episode around his 20th birthday. I was 8. His behavior still haunts me, we were very close. On a trip to hong kong I met and was subsequently stalked by a schizophrenic girl for 3 years and I also worked briefly in a psych ward.
People with the disorder can drift in and out of health. On some level their symptoms are related to stress (and meds), so you can have a normal conversation one day and the next they can become obsessed with ghosts living in the shower. I guess the hardest part is that when they seem somewhat cognizant at first in a conversation. They initially try very hard to concentrate and can make a fair bit of sense, but after a few minutes they start getting a little fuzzy around the edges, drifting off, mumbling to themselves talking about things that didn't happen etc. Eventually they start confusing you with jesus or a dead relative. I could go on with incidents...
It can be incredibly disturbing. I have nightmares about the behavior, its just too much. I once talked to a psychiatrist who told me its better off separating yourself. Its really hard to do (and this comic doesn't help, its misleading) but spending any amount of time trying to cope with it and rationalize ends in frustration and sadness.
"Sufferers are no more dangerous than anyone else. Don't believe me? Then look in the paper and you'll see most crimes are committed by the sane."
This is a fallacious argument. Non-schizophrenics outnumber schizophrenics by a huge margin. Schizophrenics could, hypothetically, be ten times as dangerous and most crimes would still be committed by sane people.
This study is somewhat outdated (1990), but: "The crime rate among male schizophrenics was almost the same as that in the general male population, whereas among females it was twice that of the general female population. The rate of violent offences was, however, four times higher among the schizophrenics." http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/3/345
In other words, making friends with a schizophrenic should make you about as afraid of violent crime as making friends with four non-schizophrenics would make you, assuming your friends are representative of the general population.
"Even with these side-effects, people who suffer schizophrenia are still far better off than if they'd been left untreated."
Except for that this directly contradicts the research, which shows that A) In the U.S. patients are doing far worse than they did in the 50s before drug therapy was introduced and B) patients in developing countries where they use less or no drugs at all do dramatically better than patients in the US.
Link to research? I'd like to see how it was done, being that in so many developing countries mental illness carries a huge stigma. Patients may do better according to their family members, for whom the inconvenience of hiding the patient is less bad than the shame of others' finding out.
Some chick in some ramachandran youtube video, if I remember, said a giant black widow told her to cut her shirt with scissors or it'd bite her. And there was a conspiracy against people people who's name started with 'j'.
The movie naked lunch is kinda schizophrenic.
My case was no different, I had to kick him out because he wasn't paying rent and was causing distress to my other roommates. I would have done the same with a sane person, but I must admit I felt bad because the guy was kind, he just couldn't keep a job, so he couldn't pay me. He still owes me like $600, but I've never contacted him about it. I figure he has a hard enough time as is.