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Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

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Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this makes sense. Venous delivered adrenaline is used to close down peripheral circulation during cardiac arrest to encourage the poor flow to perfuse the heart, lungs and brain. Maintaining tissue viability until recovery. Intramuscular adrenaline is used in anaphylaxis. Either makes sense in the context you describe. I must be missing something. Are you misremembering stuff?

I have been certain for 17 years that they said it was adrenaline. If it wasn’t adrenaline, what else could it be? I went in and out of waves of in outside this world to inside the room to outside this world and inside the room. Until I was firmly inside the room and out if the trip. It was fast. And it was into my vein, they tied a rubber hose around my arm. I watched the needle go in. And I had to hide my arm for w…

Adenosine? Used to revert a supraventricular tachycardia.

Name sounds enough like adrenaline to mix them up, and would have felt like death. Adenosine is rapidly metabolised so it needs to be delivered into a reasonably large vein and pushed with a bolus so I can't imagine it wrecking your arm where the cannula was placed.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#112
post #48

This seems consistent with Chris Palmer's hypothesis, that mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain, discussed in his new book Brain Energy[0]. He's done lots of podcast interviews[1], if you don't want to read the book. [0] https://www.chrispalmermd.com/ [1] https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=chris%20palmer%20md&so...

I recommend the book The Schizophrenias - Ours to conquer by Carl C. Pfeiffer. It divides schizophrenia into several phenotypes that have metabolic causations.

I used to have manic episodes for my whole life, but managed without medication. After I fixed my histamine oversupply in the body around march(by cutting folic acid and histamine-rich foods from my diet and taking L-methylfolate supplements), I haven't had another episode.

I used to have allergies and crazy food cravings for sugar and other unhealthy stuff because of the histamine issues which are gone now. This phenotype is called histadelia.

Then there is histapenia, where you have too much copper accumulated in your body and it can’t get rid of them unless you take higher doses of zinc and mangan(and a chelator to avoid complications). Folate and histamine levels are too low.

Overall B-Vitamins are pretty important. If you need them its way higher doses than RDA(b3, b6, b2)

Thyroid problems can be involved in schizophrenia, aswell as gluten intolerance.

Also recommend the books by Dr. Abram Hoffer.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been certain for 17 years that they said it was adrenaline. If it wasn’t adrenaline, what else could it be? I went in and out of waves of in outside this world to inside the room to outside this world and inside the room. Until I was firmly inside the room and out if the trip. It was fast. And it was into my vein, they tied a rubber hose around my arm. I watched the needle go in. And I had to hide my arm for w…

Adenosine? Used to revert a supraventricular tachycardia. Name sounds enough like adrenaline to mix them up, and would have felt like death. Adenosine is rapidly metabolised so it needs to be delivered into a reasonably large vein and pushed with a bolus so I can't imagine it wrecking your arm where the cannula was placed.

I think you might be onto something with the name mixup. I reckon you might be right - thank you!

And I looked up cannula and bolus, but I only remember a syringe with a needle attached to it. My memory might be wrong though.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#114
post #10

"Living in an urban environment during childhood or as an adult has consistently been found to increase the risk of schizophrenia by a factor of two."[0] While city life is as complex of a confounding factor as anything, the fact that they found hunter-gatherers have practically no incidence of SZR is interesting. Is the modern megalopolis simply too intense of a stimulus for the minds of the sensitive to handle with…

The effect is stronger than that as it scales with population densities. Geoffrey West's works explore this in some detail.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the only one, how many of us out there?

Seems like we were the only ones! I wouldn't have been surprised if there was more though. I think the kind of people on here probably think too much/overanalyze stuff to begin with and my impression is that trait doesn't mix super well with psychedelics. At least I feel like the fundamental cause of my PTSD inducing trips is wanting to explain the inexplicable. Hope everything's going well for you though. I think it…

Mine was a long time ago now (~7 years), I was pretty horribly messed up and dysfunctional for the first 2-3 years but I'm mostly okay now. I have HPPD too but that's also mostly subsided, and things only flare up for me if I go without sleep or am under a lot of stress.

Hope you're doing alright too!

I also take Buspirone, which I've found helps a ton with general anxiety.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#116
I'm reminded of the story I've head (I believe via a podcast, though I cannot presently find the source) on syphilis as a mental-health issue.

The upshot is that cases of syphilitic psychopathy were treated as psychiatric illnesses, that is, strictly disorders of the brain, and there was a substantial network of mental health asylums for housing and treatment of patients.

Successful treatment of the infectious disease syphilis all but eliminated this class of mental health disease, and is among the very few instances of successful management at a public-health level of a category of mental illness. The fact that the psychological disease was entirely based on physical (and specifically infectious) medicine is highly notable.

The mental health sector continues to perform poorly at looking beyond strictly psychological aspects of mental health, and in particular has placed a probably unjustified emphasis on psychotropic medication as opposed to other interventions --- not just of potential infectious-disease causes as with syphilis and posited here for schizophrenia, but of environmental and social factors.

I also suspect that psychiatric / psychological conditions are best considered, similarly to cancer, as a set of symptom clusters, which may have markedly distinct etiologies. Traditional psych focuses more on the symptoms than the etiologies.

It's as if we had an infectious medicine based on, say, runny noses or laboured breathing, without considering cause. (There are areas of physical medicine which do resemble this, and others, such as trauma treatments, in which root cause is relatively insignificant concerning treatment, in at least many cases.)

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#117
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing sounds like a protracted psychotic break. Schizophrenia doesn’t just come one day and disappear 6 months later.

Not usually, but schizophrenia is a waxing and waning disease like MS - patients tend to get episodes of worsening symptoms then remission (partial) where symptoms get better. Then they’ll get another relapse and often it’s worse, eventually resulting in a state of chronic symptoms. Treatment with antipsychotic medication can actually “pause” the cycles and prevent the disease from getting worse if started early. It’…

What do you make of the thus-far success of the Soteria Houses/paradigm?

I think the proponents of this method of treatment and practitioners involved would argue that schizophrenia is not a lifelong disease, and true improvement is possible without the standard treatment methodology commonly seen in psychiatric hospitals.

Here are some links of interest that I pulled up in a quick Google search - unfortunately research is lacking and widespread implementation is yet to happen in any meaningful amount outside of Europe -

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychiatry-through-t...

https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/10/original-soteria-member...

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Soteria_(psychiatric_treatment)#...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632384/

Draw whatever conclusions you would like from those links and further research if you're interested, but here are my 2¢:

A for-profit psychiatric hospital, that is basically a prison (with locked doors, restrictions to personal freedom, restraints, forced medication - a place that strips its patients of rights, with almost no recourse for patients if they are unhappy with their standard of care), is incredibly harmful.

Imagine being released from a psychiatric hospital in the USA and having been told that you will be ill (suffer from schizophrenia) for the rest of your life.

You will have to take (sometimes expensive) medication(s) for the rest of your life (and to never skip a dose or it might cause relapse).

You get hit with an exorbitant bill that you likely can't pay. No concrete changes to your life (besides massive debt) were made by the psychiatrist/therapist/support staff. Your family is still the same, your living situation may be the same or it might have been turned upside down. You probably lost your job if you had one, depending on onset/etc.

I'd feel pretty helpless. I'd also be traumatized by the experience, especially if I were involuntarily hospitalized.

I think our current standard of "care" worsens mental illness - especially delusions and persecution complexes. It makes patients believe that they will never truly be better, unless they constantly "seek help" - taking away any shred of confidence, provides no real-life solutions (operates inside a vacuum), bills an extremely vulnerable person exorbitant amounts of money, and is designed to keep the patient coming back.

Medication can have paradoxical side effects which, depending on severity, can only be rectified under controlled circumstances (hospitalization), and as the OP's link points out, schizophrenia is probably a bit more complicated than simply being caused by genes and so-called chemical imbalances.

I believe trauma, lifestyle, diet/nutrition, environment, physical activity levels, isolation/lack of a support system, and medical problems (like heavy metal poisoning), vitamin deficiencies, bad gut biome/digestive issues/food allergies, and chronic, systemic inflammation are more likely the causative agents to point to (that psychiatrists tend to ignore/downplay in favor of medication above all else for whatever reason).

I think that capitalism and for-profit should never go near the word hospital, especially a hospital that focuses on helping people in crisis.

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#118
Interesting stuff. I often wonder if all humans are just a little schizophrenic, and only when the condition develops do things like auditory hallucinations occur.

One model might be several different people running around in a maze, only able to communicate with each other by shouting over the walls. The brain is the maze, but the fractioning of the individual's identity (internal schizms) is what creates the internal illusion of disassociated individuals. This might even develop into neural schizms, different parts of the brain not actually being able to communicate well with other parts of the brain.

I don't know if that model is even vaguely correct, but it would explain auditory hallucinations, as one part of the brain might only be able to communicate with another by utilizing the auditory channel.

Here's an interesting 1993 paper on the subject, lays out the background:

Diagnosis and Classification of Schizophrenia

available via title search at:

https://scholar.archive.org/

Re: Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were given a shot of adrenaline for a panic attack?

Not exactly. More like a solo first time trip on 5 acid tabs going horribly wrong. It wasn’t meant to be a solo trip, but my ‘friends’ abandoned me. I tried to go outside because I was absolutely freaking out walking around a busy town, thinking I could distract myself. Then shit hit the fan even worse. It was a terrible trip, put it that way. So more like an extreme long lasting panic attack on top of visual halluci…

That scene (the matrix mirror) sounds more entertaining than my pulp fiction reenactment (the OD scene - I died and then sat up just as they were gonna stick me with the atropine).
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