>The persistence of schizophrenia is an evolutionary enigma
how much schizophrenia is actually going to manifest in peak procreating years?
I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis. She thinks she's in some kind of Truman show that she calls "the game". Since none of her friends or family are willing to admit to it, then we must be in on it.
We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.
We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.
Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.
If you have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia it's starting to seem like drugs that seem harmless like marijuana (specifically THC?) can definitely bring it out. At least, that's what seemed to happen to my mother and another friend.
In Europe this (some rec drugs bring out latent schizophrenia) is taught in med school as a “known fact” (source: psychiatrist friend) so it’s well beyond “starting to seem”
The fact that in different parts of the world the voices can be helpful instead of intrusive makes me feel like the drugs are not the problem but how external forces view the drugs or if we really wanna talk like crazy people how the drugs influence the people around you even if they do not directly know you are using the drugs.
This was treated as pretty much a fact when I took a class on psychological disorders in the US circa 2007, too.
Ah okay, good to know!
And at High School too on talks about drugs; the marijuana->schizophrenia link it's widely known.
I wonder if alcohol is one of the seemingly harmless drugs whose abuse catalyzes such conditions in susceptible people.
Because, if so, then alcohol's ubiquity in society would imply that it is probably responsible (in the sense that substances are responsible) for most such conversions.
It's kind of worse with alcohol because the psychosis associated with that as an exacerbating factor is more related to alcoholic encephalopathy, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome etc... much of which can be brought on with self medicating with alcohol. Definitely a component but more like psychosis and mania drive you to drink because these experiences are awful more than a causative factor that's been proven
Even peculiarly stressful life events can trigger onset
The aldehydes that are produced from drinking alcohol heighten the risk for schizophrenia if you carry certain genetics.
I also suspect people with schizophrenia that haven't yet started showing symptoms are more likely to take drugs.
Based on what?
The huge number of them who smoke cigarettes prior to their first episode - a different form of self medication. 90% of people with it smoke and there is research indicating a greater likelhood prior to first episode. I’ll have to look up those numbers though. (Edit, seems about 60% at a time when the average US population was at 20%)
Statistics literally show this.
You don't develop schizophrenia in your 50s. It sounds like you track her behavior and habits quite closely?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/schizophr...
> But when the protective hormone is withdrawn during menopause, some who avoided earlier psychosis get a later onset. Having a first experience after age 40 is uncommon, but it may include up to 15 percent of the women with schizophrenia—twice the percentage of men who have schizophrenia onset after age 40.
> It sounds like you track her behavior and habits quite closely?
No it doesn’t. It sounds like they’re really concerned about a loved one who went off the deep end.
As someone who is currently dating someone with history of psychosis, I have vested interest.
90% of the time she is truly the most amazing, compassionate, full of life and thoughtful person one can ever meet. Then there are times when it’s truly awful. She can barely sleep at all, leaves house without telling anyone seemingly thinking the presence of third person around. And she strongly feels others around are judging her hard, giving non verbal communication. It’s truly awful.
I didn’t know to the full extent her symptoms when we started dating. But one thing that was clear was she could barely sleep at night. Or sleep too long. There was no “normal sleep cycle”.
Over the time, some triggers are noticeable. Places with crowds, bright lighting, or sometimes stress at work. Aripaprazole so far seems to be holding up, no one knows for how long. I hear meds become resistant at some point. I don’t know what future holds. Kids are probably not an option. Although she very much wants it.
I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, and I just wanted to acknowledge and thank you for staying with your partner. I’ve never been able to get someone to stay through my illness with me through my life. But that’s probably because I am man.
I was on so many meds. I can’t even count them. Now I’m not on any, and I consider myself essentially cured after living with it for 35 years.
If she has triggers, that means she does not have a disease , it means she’s a different person that sensitive to different things. If someone who carries the celiac risk genetics, never eats wheat they never get celiac disease. If your partner was never exposed to triggers, you would never know she had a mood disorder. Do you see what I mean?
Thank you for sharing your journey! Most difficult part of this relationship has been to have her not worry about me leaving her because of her symptoms. Communication is the key. The only thing that can get tiring is when sleep schedules are so messy, and I have to go to work in the morning.
If you don’t mind sharing, what was your progression towards being cured? Did you do anything different lifestyle wise? I have consulted many psychiatrists but the general consensus seems to be that the management is the only option.
I am also somewhat concerned about the genetic component of it. The general feedback I received from pedestrians is most meds are not safe during pregnancy and postpartum episodes are very likely. And the risk of passing down is also about 10-20%. Her dad’s sister also seemingly had it.
Did you ever check for sleep apnea? The tests for it can be done at home now if anxiety would otherwise be a concern.
[flagged]
Did you just suggest that lactating might cure schizophrenia?
I have schizoaffective disorder, induced by a bad trip from marijuana. It was like the 3rd time I had tried weed, and I naively took too much.
For me psychosis feels like pattern matching going on extreme overdrive, while at the same time memory goes to shit. It's truly an awful illness, and what's worse is that the current medical treatments are bad. I've been fortunate enough where I can get by on a low dose olanzapine, but for many people they simply don't work at all.
Even though I'm doing well enough to function normally and hold down a good, well paying job, it's impossible to find a partner. If I were to have kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services. I am strongly in support of these screening services - the disease is truly horrible.
There has been little progress on treatments for schizophrenia, the mechanism of action of these drugs has remained the same for decades. The side effects are almost as bad as the disease, which is why so many schizophrenic stop taking them. The only novel medication recently released is Cobenfy, which I have not tried yet.
Personally I am holding out hope that schizophrenia has some basis as an autoimmune disease. There was a cancer patient who had a bone marrow transplant and ended up being cured: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/schizophre...
I have family with that.
The most striking thing, is the absolute certainty of the thinking. They feel as if their thinking is crystal-clear, and that they are the only one that "sees the patterns."
Currently, they're doing well. I know of others, that are not so fortunate.
It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use. They are better off chewing tabs of acid. I've not used it in about 45 years, and I've heard that today's pot is a heck of a lot stronger than what I remember.
>It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use. They are better off chewing tabs of acid.
from the guys I knew who chewed the tabs of acid and had evident schizophrenic problems, I don't think so.
> It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use.
This isn't entirely true, and it's a dangerous misconception. High THC, low CBD cannabis wouldn't be recommended, but that's exactly what making cannabis illegal selects for.
High CBD, low/zero THC cannabis, on the other hand, will probably be one of the paths to treatment if we ever get over our Reefer Madness and pharmaceutical obsession.
Legal competition had lead to much higher concentrations of THC than was normal in the bad old days of smoking Mexican brick weed, not to mention the pure accessibility of buying 96% THC vapes wherever you go in unlimited amounts as opposed to being happy you could get your hands on an ounce.
"High CBD will probably be one of the paths to treatment"
On what exactly are you basing that off of? Vibes?
“Dangerous misconception”? Get out of here with that. Cannabis is dangerous for schizoaffective people. Why are people that smoke pot so tiresome about this? Just accept that it’s not good for everyone!
Eh, maybe. I can certainly say that I have "skin in the game." Someone very dear to me suffers from it, and it's difficult to hear theories from folks that don't have as much of a stake.
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.
Can I ask how you are sure they haven’t had some novel insight that you just don’t currently understand? Like maybe they are bad at explaining but whatever pattern they noticed is valid?
I’m not defending them as I don’t know any details, I’m just curious how you came to be certain about your assessment.
Talk to them for 2 minutes when they are having an episode. The effects are not subtle.
It’s an extremely debilitating condition.
I can't speak for the above person, but what the OP of this comment thread said also tracks with my own experience of schizoaffective disorder: when I'm psychotic, the pattern matching part of my brain goes into overdrive and not only does my brain erroneously fill in the blanks in sensory input (causing hallucinations), it does the same thing on an abstract or logical level with ideas and people. It's easy to fall into the trap of paranoid delusion when you feel like you're seeing connections between so many otherwise benign, disconnected things and events.
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.
Do you take adhd medication by any chance?
I used to on and off in the past, but I found it made me more prone to mania, so I've since stopped. Why do you ask?
Stimulant induced psychosis is very common. One of the major side effects of those medications, just like their street cousin, is paranoia.
I don’t really believe in the dormant/latent argument because once you shift down to the underground (as in, entertain all possibilities, even the possibility that you share something in common with drug abusers) where people abuse drugs, there you can see just how common psychosis is.
The drugs fuck people up. Interestingly, after many years of laying off the substance, many do find their way out of the psychosis.
Many people are actually caught in this trap and don’t tell anyone because they are struggling between reality and their delusions and trying to present a calm face to the world. It’s often directly the result of the substance, but it’s allowed to fester in the person due to all kinds of reasons (”hey, I’m really going to confess this is the crazy shit that feels believable to me?”). By the time they are done wrestling with reality and unreality, often they are left extremely damaged from the ordeal psychologically.
I can't say I've experienced psychosis due to stimulant use personally, but I see what you mean. For me it's maybe brought on instances of hypomania a few times, but I get how it could trigger issues in others, especially in high doses.
My instances of psychosis outside of depression/mania tend to be triggered by stress. I don't use drugs or take any stimulant medications, but they still just happen sometimes. It sucks. I'm thankfully not in an active episode at the moment, but I do suffer on a daily basis from the "negative" symptoms of schizoaffective disorder (i.e., the symptoms that take away function, like anhedonia, avolition, alogia, etc).
I'm not certain, but, in the case of my family member, their "certainty" is that everyone is conspiring to kill them. As I am one of the "conspirators," I can assure you that they are dead wrong.
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.
Schizophrenics do sometimes have novel insights. I've noticed that schizophrenics tend to be extremely talented at coming up with deeply cutting insults. Like, insults that will change how you see yourself forever. Something about high pattern recognition. Plus an ability to mentally "go there", to countenance dark things that other people willfully ignore.
I wonder about this as well...like maybe there's some comfort in automatically "diagnosing" someone when they might see patterns or think in ways that challenge your priors..
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 am holding out hope that schizophrenia has some basis as an autoimmune disease
From article:
Increasingly, researchers consider schizophrenia to be a “meta-syndrome,” encompassing multiple symptom dimensions/clusters and arising from intersections of diverse underlying mechanisms
As humans we look for a simple A therefore B story. Even then most people in my experience are either (a) poor at spotting cause and effect or (b) go into denial e.g. many political arguments
> kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services
Have to? Do you mean you would want to? Or is there some compulsory force where you are?
It also makes you near unemployable as stress triggers the paranoia/psychosis.
Not for everyone. Many schizophrenics find their work calming and grounding.
Why do you need to do embryo pre-screening for something that’s not genetic? Or do you think it still is genetic despite also thinking you know the specific trigger in your case?
Edit: are you thinking it’s genetic, but exacerbated by weed?
Everything is at least partially genetic.
We have a friend whose sister has it and she went to genetics counselors before having kids.
They told her that because her sister has it that her kids had a 20% likelihood of developing it. Obviously 20% is way higher than normal.
Be sure you understand what this means. 20% higher chance (of a 1% baseline) is vastly different from a 20% chance.
From my understanding of the science, weed can trigger schizophrenia in the genetically predisposed. Schizophrenia can be triggered by other environmental factors, so the embryo screening makes sense to lower the risk of the child getting it as well.
I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type as well. And man when I have anything with THC in it I’m a basket case. Worst psychosis in my life.
He might be interested in looking up THC, glutamate and schizoaffective disorder. Here’s a good start.
Is it possible that the pro-schizophrenia genes persist because they offer other (non-neurological) benefits, e.g., lower risk of cancer? Siblings of patients with schizophrenia are less likely to develop cancer, and in several studies these patients had lower risk of developing cancer despite higher prevalence of smoking.
There’s no such thing as a “pro schizophrenia genes”. There are only genes that increase the risk of schizophrenia, and this is probably due to environmental variables.
Exchanging a risk for cancer for a risk of schizophrenia is not a win-win situation. You’re just switching one set of risk genes for another.
Very worth it to read the follow up research paper that moves away from this cliff-edge hypothesis, highlights other ambiguities, and attempts some self-correction.
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-evolutionary-genetic...
In any case, a fascinating read and well-worth it to explore the linked citations, especially by Crow and Nesse.
If genes that increase schizophrenic risk increases cognitive abilities you should find people who have high polygenic scores for schizophrenia without having schizophrenia test well on these cognitive abilities. I'm not aware of any of data that shows this in a convincing matter. I think I've seen a few small studies but nothing that replicated this on a large scale. And most of the studies show they score worse on cognitive abilities.
The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.
1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring. 2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.
For your consideration: the theory of "Positive Disintegration" developed by Kasimir Dabrowski does help to explain the capacity and reality of schizotypal disorders. The easiest way to explain it, is that human brain potential for "over-excitation" leads to personality development; this is natural and human. The stages of personality development are not guaranteed to succeed and proceed correctly. Most cases of schizophrenia may be a result of failed re-organization, or a failure to develop the final, executive, function. In cases of "arrested development," this process may be delayed till later in life. This is the so-called mid-life-crisis, which also can fail, and then you get adult onset schizophrenia. This is all emerging research thats usually locked up in foreign language journals. Almost no medicine to be sold here, AMA and APA are not interested...
The article suggests a possible model where the schizophrenia is an extreme linear progression. But the inability to find a culprit genes suggests something more complex. It is possible that there are is a group of genes that all have variations that confers benefit, but when those variations are all together negative effects occur. That makes the positive variants overall beneficial, and keeps them in the gene pool. This is why it is dangerous to presume that when we correlate genetic variants with disease and then presume they should go away. In fact, nearly any inherited disease that has survived may be conferring value to other individual when in proper partnership with other genetic profiles.
Though it doesn’t mention it by name exactly, I think a related idea for systems that are optimized close to a point of phase change is “the edge of chaos”
Trading stability for agility, basically?
After reading this article, I’m really curious how you would model all kinds of other reproduction reducing behaviors that have become popular in recent years and how they many generations it will take them to be squeezed out of our culture. Like say taking care of a pet instead of having a kid in Korea.
One plausible explanation is that birth and childhood have become much less dangerous. Before 1900, children with poor genes died; since 1900, children with poor genes survive and have children of their own.
I think people should study the RCCX gene cluster and link to giftedness more, I have TNXB SNPs which results in hEDS, but C4 SNPs have a similar effect and is likely to result in Schizophrenia. There are some cross over symptoms such as dopamine dysregulation and flat affect. I think dysautonomia and auto-immune plays a big part. Our lifestyles are very different than they used to be and this could be exacerbating auto-immune issues and as we get better at treating auto-immune conditions I expect we'll get better at treating Schizophrenia.
Is there some puzzling chronic condition that isn’t on this list?
Of course there are. I'm guessing you're insinuating two things, it's highly improbable that individuals can have this many simultaneous issues, and it's impossible for medical researchers to miss such an anomaly. The Ehlers Danlos subset is shorter but still covers a huge amount of issues (https://ohtwist.com/about-eds/comorbidities).
Well there is a reason why doctors kept telling me I am a hypochondriac, but I do have a whole zoo of conditions simultaneously, and this is a pretty common state for people with hEDS and I'm on the extreme end of it. So while milder versions of it are ~2% of the population the extreme versions of it are < 1/20K.
And yeah, medical researchers are in fact in the aggregate really bad at their jobs. Look how long it took to convince surgeons to wash their hands. But a lot of the genetic stuff relies on Linear Regression for GWAS which assumes independents of SNPs, otherwise you get multicollinearity problems, this is not a safe assumption and they've confused their results as confirming their assumptions. Instead of listing everything they get wrong a much shorter list is what they get right, Dr Jessica Eccles (https://x.com/BendyBrain) does great research into Long Covid and Generalized Joint Hypermobility which should put to bed the theory that GJH is benign - still good luck trying to talk a doctor out of that train of thought.
If you find someone who has hEDS the odds are they have a very large number of those things and most of them don't even know the names of most of the conditions, just one or two that bother them the most. The RCCX / hEDS list is a distinct subset of all possible things, the list of all medical maladies is far longer. It becomes highly improbable that a set of people have the same set of maladies - doctors tend to chalk this up to social contagion but that doesn't bear out. Genetic and behavioral causes have distinct diffusion patterns.
It's confirmable with WGS which I've done and I've encouraged many others to do and it turns out that you can indeed predict with a great deal of reliability if someone has TNXB / CYP21A2 SNPs. Unfortunately it's harder to find people who have C4 since they're likely to have schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia can coexist with extreme levels of intelligence and lucidity.
A schizophrenic member of my family argued in divorce court that her husband, a leading physician at one of the most famous medical institutions in the world, was secretly involved in outrageous nefarious activities.
The stories were all fiction but she was so convincing that the judge awarded her a ruling in the divorce that ruined her husband financially and took an emotional toll.
I wouldn't exactly call it intelligent to lie to a court ;) Perhaps another descriptor would be more precise? For that matter, can one be "truly lucid" if one lies in such a manner?
I wonder if Autism would be even simpler to explain with a cliff-edged fitness function. Because there seems to be a high correlation between extremely intelligent people and people on the spectrum. Maybe the group of genes rewarded for high intelligence/creativity/quantitative ability also, by accidental design, inhibits social capacity.
Is it possible that every non-typical presentation simply tells others in society to give them space enough to develop the intellect?
Maybe it does when you are an adult but it can make childhood a disaster.
> Maybe the group of genes rewarded for high intelligence/creativity/quantitative ability also, by accidental design, inhibits social capacity.
Maybe living in a world with neurotypical people who immediately dislike you [0] 'inhibits social capacity' after years of traumatic experiences piling up.
Why does no-one dare say "schizotypy?"
many people hear voices and experience symptoms of schizophrenia while managing to keep their cool and thrive amongst the nerts. hearing-voices.org is a support network for such people
It's dangerous to existing systems for people to become aware they're capable of creating/conjuring/channeling useful new voices in the mind to help learn different things. People get burned at the stake for that.
I've never ever had any symptoms of schizophrenia but the idea of trying to consciously encourage myself hearing voices is terrifying, Im sure I could send myself truly insane with probably not much effort.
> the idea of trying to consciously encourage myself hearing voices is terrifying,
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.
I once accidentally came up with another conscious voice in my head & we decided to govern through the 12 traditions of Codependents Anonymous. She also had specific qualities I'd chosen 3 weeks prior as qualities I chose to believe I could come to embody, so that was an interesting pointer to what's possible.
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.
My belief about is that the core of schizotypy and schizophrenia is
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
It's like gang-stalking--its not that there's something being introduced, but rather that the subject sees relations that are not objective relations (like, for instance, the relation between temperature, pressure, and state change). Typically, however (and I can't imagine a case where this didn't happen), the relations are social in character--and since social relations are subjective to the extent that all the social world is not expressly a fact, it can be difficult to differentiate between an illusion and a reality: people imagine their partners are cheating on them, whether or not its true. And there are many things we do not know about the social world around us; but, statistically speaking, nobody has ever actually been gang-stalked.
That is very interesting. Excuse me if this question is too personal, but what do you mean by "system of delusions" exactly?
A constant state of needing to do continuous reality testing. The GP almost lost a grip basically.
Dangerous to the autism-industrial complex and as well as the addictive stimulant industry.
> addictive stimulant industry.
Whom I thank every day for repairing my retention processes, just enough that lessons become learning.
Is this supposed to be some kind of diss for adhd stimulant therapy?
Gotta a friend who’s 52 and has all his teeth rot out 10 years ago. He goes to Wegmans every month and comes back with a pill bottle the size of a small trashcan. He says he could get nothing done without out but I don’t see him getting anything done. Wouldn’t be surprised if will fall and break his hip 20 years early.
I’ve seen plenty of those pills get diverted with outcomes like somebody stays up for 4 days and gets hospitalized so, yeah, I want to diss ADHD medication. It is clear it helps in the short term, not so clear if it helps in the long term.
> Gotta a friend who’s 52 and has all his teeth rot out 10 years ago.
FTR, meth mouth has no overlap with ADHD meds. I specifically looked into this, way back when.
> He goes to Wegmans every month and comes back with a pill bottle the size of a small trashcan.
If he took that many ADHD meds he'd be dead on day one. Three tabs/day is a heavy dose.
How scientific.
Even that very limited study didn't link stim use to poor teeth - at all. As far as study went, this was it.
• Stimulant ADHD medication use in adults is associated with decreased bone
mineral in the skull and thoracic spine.
• No other areas of axial or appendicular skeleton showed significant
differences.
• There was no dose-response effect between stimulant medication use and
bone mineral density.
• The overall effect of stimulant medications on adult
bone health is unclear.
Completely anectodal:
Right after the time I was diagnosed (~36), I started to become weirdly good at some stuff.
Music, for example. I've been playing for almost two decades and couldn't progress after a certain level. This changed almost overnight, and I started to learn new instruments very quickly (now I play guitar, bass, drums and piano). I'm not a genius at them, it's not what I'm trying to say. It's just that the pace at which I learn is very different from when I was younger, I can do things I never imagined being able to do.
Somehow, I also acquired some ambidextry. This might be due to learning the instruments. I now can write with both hands (not at the same time, dominant hand is still faster and more acurate). I also developed a second, completely different handwriting (now I have two "fonts" I can use naturally).
I got worse at dealing with people. Everyone seems to be in a haze from my point of view, and it discourages any kind of meaningful relationship. I can pretend though.
I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component is involved in all of this (my father was ambidextrous though, but he acquired it in childhood), it seems purely psychological. I am also skeptical about the stereotypical triggers people often associate schizophrenia to.
Last year I was reading about Havana Syndrome. That was the thing that most resonated with the kinds of psychotic events I had. Weird sounds and voices that seem to come from nowhere, dizziness, balance problems, insomnia, headaches. By the time I got to a doctor, these effects were not there anymore (they last a very short time, at least for me). I was diagnosed by describing them to the psychiatrist. Since the first episode, it has happened again a handful of times. I have learned since that Havana syndrome is not a thing anymore, but there are no official explanations other than "it's likely to be psychogenic". I also wouldn't qualify for it (apparently, only diplomats and spies had it).
> I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component
Something can still be (weakly or strongly) genetic, but not inherited in any direct way. I.e. due to a particular mix of genes.
The kinds of genetic claims people usually make about schizophrenia are of the hereditary kind (including the post article), not random mutations.
I attribute this to how the illness is researched: finding a genetic factor would be a major breakthrough, so lots of people do studies on that, and eventually force their way into a discovery that represents a narrow subset of the illness but ultimately fails to explain it. It's all over the place.
This makes me extra skeptic regarding the validity of some of these studies.
If you scan Wikipedia's "Famous people with schizophrenia" article, as in people whose talent was so exceptional that they could succeed despite their disadvantages, most of the people on the list are musicians.
Could be age related. I could never play a musical instrument until my mid thirties. Nobody in my family could. My wife found a Ukulele which was left on the side of the road and which was in good condition and took it home. I started playing just randomly tugging strings to understand the sounds and I kept doing that maybe 10 to 30 mins a day for about 2 months and the tunes became less and less random and now I can improvise full 1 to 2 minute melodies on the spot with multiple strings.
I don't need to plan the melody ahead of time I just pick a few notes that go well together then I pick some starting notes and I just intuitively know how to join them together into a full piece. It's like when I play some notes, my fingers themselves resist certain bad notes and whatever note I end up choosing (high pitch or low pitch) seems to work out every time.
I had a guitar since I was 16, and never gave up trying to learn. I reached a plateau very quickly (knew some chords, simple songs), and could never go past it. I then spent almost 20 years in that plateau.
Then, suddenly, it all started to click. I was reharmonizing, writing my own lines, improvising, soloing. It was uncanny. I moved to other instruments at similar speed, stuff I never played before. It became so easy.
I heard many times that once you age, you lose some ability to learn music. What made this experience so jarring was that I experienced the exact opposite.
Maybe this thing that you have to start young is all bullshit (probably what's going on here), and before I had some kind of block. I can't explain what that block was though.
Did the diagnosis perhaps relax some defensive structure in your mind which freed up an ability to tolerate the discomfort of actually identifying what you need to improve?
Julian Jaynes' theory is always interesting to think about. I self-diagnosed myself as schizophrenic in my late teens and I still stand by my diagnosis 20 years later. I do believe it is a spectrum though and the degree to which one is schizophrenic is not static, and I don't think it's even necessarily a bad thing.
I assume you mean the bicameral mind / consciousness?
The cliff theory is an interesting one. I don't have any kind of schizo propensity, to my knowledge, but I did, for a brief period of my life, have what I call a "firemind" experience.
During that period I spent an unhealthy amount of time alone. I also spent tons of time reading. During that time the ability of my brain to free-associate seemed to absolutely explode. I felt like I could see a pattern or form a connection between almost anything whatsoever. I read symbolism in everything. The few times I did see friends during that time, I remember them being kind of shocked at the callbacks, linkages, etc. that I was able to fire off instantaneously at the board game table.
My brian no longer works like this. I underwent several lifestyle changes and it seemed to really rewire me. I'm much more logical in my thinking now, but it's taken practice, and the shift was gradual. Every now and then I kind of miss the "semiotic aptitude" I had in those days, but I wonder if I was really just teetering on the edge of a cliff. Maybe a few more months of isolation would have pushed me over the edge.
Random layperson musing:
I wonder if schizophrenia (or perhaps psychosis) could be in some way analogous to the LLM temperature function becoming disregulated?
I mean, what is the extreme opposite of psychosis? If it is matter of degree, which it seems to be, then there is probably a tuning mechanism. Perhaps too little and you fail to account for factors that might not be apparent but might be guessed or inferred, too much, and too much seems plausible.
If so it would be possible to have a great deal of different “causes” given the tight and complex coupling of biological mechanisms.
There was a theory that autism and schizophrenia were opposite ends of a spectrum, but it's fallen into disfavor. The theory went that autism produces mechanical, rigid thought patterns while schizophrenia takes free association too far.
I think it is possible to be diagnosed with both schizophrenia and autism which is why the theory is not considered anymore.
Interesting. I wouldn’t have intuited autism as being on the opposing end of psychosis, really, at least not based on my experience of both in my family.
As expected a lot of the comments here are anecdotes. I’m assuming there exists a class of highly technical articles that get posted regularly that incite ancillary discussion, but no real contribution involving the article.
For me, I don’t like that this is about a mathematical model. I don’t want a mathematical model. I like the theory, and I think it’s interesting. I don’t need further digressions into a model. I want to see the real thing. Prove it, replicate it, codify it.
The problem with this whole line of thought is that the human environment since the neolithic period has changed.
It also does not take into account the huge amount of human relocation that’s taken place over the last 200 years. For example, we have a large number of Africans that are now living in climate that are much colder than what they evolved to live in. The same as truth for northern Europeans, who lived in cold, cloudy climate now living in sunny, warm climates. Does anyone hear really think that that wouldn’t affect the populations mental health?
We know schizophrenia genes are almost always risk genes, meaning their polygenic, or they don’t cause schizophrenia, and everyone who carries the genetics. There are a very few number of cases of people who carry genes that directly caused schizophrenia.
So it’s quite possible that schizophrenia did not exist as frequently as it does in the modern world, a world filled with pollution, stress, drugs, aldehydes, bad food, and on and on and on.
But let’s just take migration. It is a well-known risk factor for schizophrenia. See the paper below.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ajp.162.1....
So no schizophrenia is not the price we pay for mine poison near the edge of a cliff, it’s the price we pay for technology. The technology that enabled not only all the wonderful things to get, but also all the horrible things that come with it.
I had schizoaffective disorder, and I have essentially cured it. But I really can’t say it’s a cure because what was happening was there was a Mitch match between my genetics in my environment. It’s like curing yourself from celiac by not eating wheat. Celiac is only a disease if you eat wheat.
So I am one of these involuntarily relocated people because of capitalism. My great great grandparents on my mother side were Sami and I still carry those genetics. Changing my environment and changing my diet changed my life. Frankly, I’m tired of these articles saying that there’s no cure for mental illnesses and it’s just a price we pay.
Schizophrenia is genetic. So you're born with it. This makes zero sense. Maybe you mean shizo-effective which usually has to do with traumas.
The odd thing is that among identical twins when one has it the other has it roughly 50% of the time. Which suggests that having the generic basis still requires something external, and it is common but not too common.
Induced schizophrenia is well known. Your brain is not a machine. It's several independent chunks of meat that were assembled in situ. There are more failure modes than operational modes.
Nobody is born with schizophrenia.
Parent most likely meant you are born with the predisposition for it to present when it usually does.
I also happened to have a schizophrenic father. So I looked into this one a little bit :D
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