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Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

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Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#21

Post by bossrat »

ziles88 wrote: post #4

I also want to point out that the feeling of being sick/tired after your 'episode' is also very common. As I've been told by a doctor, this is due to your brain going in overdrive for a few days, and then crashing. Typically it results in a a deep depression. It always starts out small like this though, and it's extremely common for a person after their first few episodes to still not believe they have Schizophrenia,…

OP, I would advise you to get help in person from professionals, not from friends, family, and the internet.

Ziles88, while you are sincerely trying to be helpful, the DSM-5 criteria for Schizoaffective Disorder requires 2 continuous weeks of psychotic symptoms without mood symptoms, not 2 days accompanied by mood. The criteria were changed precisely because it was being diagnosed incorrectly.

but even better is to stick with actual symptoms and stay away from labels; the labels cover broad ranges of symptoms in a way that is useful to trained professionals who understand the nuances and limitations, but individuals don't show such ranges.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#23

Post by vbezhenar »

May be you are really was hacked? :) If it's possible, I would suggest to find someone who got skills to explore your devices, analyze your emails and find out, whether that was harassment from some strange person or real hack.

I would be definitely very nervous if someone hacked my devices.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#24

Post by ap22213 »

It's probably very difficult to evaluate oneself 'objectively' but that said, if it's affecting your life negatively, you may want to get a medical diagnosis. Your sudden paranoid-like behavior could be caused by any one of many different physiological, neurological, or psychological things.

Also 40mg of adderall seems like a lot, if you're on adderall xr.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#26

Post by teraflop »

rojost wrote: post #16

Your story reminds me of a similar one that appeared on reddit a little while ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/34novp/user_thinks_... https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_posti... Do you have a carbon monoxide detector? Dizziness can be one of the symptoms. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Carbon-monoxide-poisoning/Pages...

There is a much more similar case from a few weeks back: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/3iycro/fl_i_am...

The poster thought they were being spied on by law enforcement, and that a drone was entering their house and moving around the iPad they had set up to monitor the premises (!). They posted some of the clips to YouTube but none of the commenters saw anything suspicious.

It turned out to be a paranoid delusion caused by a combination of stress, sleep deprivation and Adderall, which is the exact situation in this thread. I would highly encourage the OP to read both the original post and the followup.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#27

Post by qwertyFish »

nefitty wrote: post #9
qwertyFish wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for that answer. My "hopeful" theory is that I did get hacked and maybe overreacted too much. However, if I am being honest, regardless I think it is likely amphetamine psychosis. I have been taking it for 3months but as month 4 started I began to take a bit more at times, possibly leading to these symptoms. I think being somewhat paranoid is positive, but I need to have a better way to assess the underlyin…

A simple question is, "What value would someone get from intruding on my life?" If you're not a corporate CEO, a politician, a billionaire, etc chances are that the risk someone would target you to upend your life are extremely low. Either way, it's good you are documenting your experience. This could help when describing what you're going through to a physician. Please seek medical help, you sound like you are a bri…

Thanks. I tried to keep my post somewhat objective but biased towards the more outlandish aspects of my claim.

> what value would someone get

People do it for the lulz. I posted a snarkey advert saying I couldn't find anything outside of Wordpress tweaks on Craigslist and included a bit about security and people asking to hack Facebook. Said it would be cool if someone in security was interested, but doubted it due to their market value, was looking for a wed developer (like me) or a designer to collaborate with.

> got a message with a ridiculously long troll response about being a ms in CS who casually designs machine learning algorithms but does know the basics of building a computer from scratch. Take my word for it, total troll.

> got a message asking to hack Facebook fake arcade slots for points. Really needed "fake coins for this game". Was pushy.

> got a response asking what country I was in because "what they wanted might be better served by someone not in the us for a couple reasons..." Was pushy.

> was told I was a "script kiddie" even though I never claimed I was a hacker and said I was a simple web dev. Link to Metasploit video and other black hat resources

> several other messages

> had upgraded to El Capitan. That day I had 50gb of traffic on my network. Typically 2.5-5 or less.

> couldn't reach cloud flare network.

> during boot to recovery halfway through load my screen would blink and reset the load bar.

> phone was getting killed battery wise drained while off

> tcpdump outgoing requests to random servers. Not sure if I read results correctly but some did not seem like requests that made sense. I have icefloor on and ALF set up. Maybe legit, just seemed weird to go to random servers.

> console showed 4000 errors. Many are related to El Capitan and don't know how to interpret them. Several seemed sketchy but maybe this was me misinterpreting them. I saved some of the logs.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#28

Post by Supraperplex »

How is your "nature usage" going? What I mean is how often are you outside? I mean in the woods, not the city. At the beach, you know, nature.

The stimulation our brains get by beeing in nature is very important for us.

When you are outside and all the little, tiny millions of natural information tidbits that are coming from everywhere, they are important for our mental health in general. Outside, look at the waves, at the leafs of trees in the wind, bugs humming around and everything. Those pattern are important.

In the confines of our cities, which give us solace on other levels, and the simplistic abstractions of our GUIs, which we love, these natural stimulations are lacking.

May I suggest to you to go outside, hiking, kayaking, paragliding, stuff like that, regularly and often?

Take a walk to the nearest park every day, look at the trees for a while.

Do something physical - start a martial arts or so.

On a personal note: I hate it too. Working out is so dump, your brain is empty while doing so and that sucks. I know. I am not a "jock" by any means. I am bored by it, I understand.

But. From my point of view tere is a clear spiral down that beins with not having enough natural stimulation going on. For decades now, I suppose?

I also want to second the other poster: it is good that you reached out.

Re: Ask HN: How can you tell if you are insane?

#30

Post by caffeinewriter »

Actually, Adderall could very, very easily be causing this. In the same vein of the guy who had CO poisoning, there was a man who was paranoid about drones doing surveillance on him.

https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/3iycro/fl_i_am_...

It seems like it could be in parallel to your situation. I highly recommend having someone evaluating your dosage, as well as whether it's an adverse effect of the Adderall itself.

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