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Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

psychiatrymargins.com

301–310 of 422 posts

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#301

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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.

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, d…

all kinds of authoritarian regimes and movements certainly do this.

that said... you just have to have a conversation with someone experiencing psychosis. it's a totally altered state of consciousness, they are sensing and understanding the world in a radically different way. it's never just an otherwise normal person with a nonconformist belief.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#302

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Male vs female differences, including differences in typical sex-specific sexual attraction, are obviously genetic, even if we've yet to figure out all the specifics (where are the male's "curve detector" genes, etc). Do men and women both have the coding for male/female attraction, with one typically disabled ? This perhaps seems most likely, in same way both sexes have nipples, etc. Without knowing exactly how this…

> Male vs female differences, including differences in typical sex-specific sexual attraction, are obviously genetic Typical is putting in a lot of work in that sentence. I could rephrase it with the same truth content and make it much more ambiguous. "Many phenotypical sexual differences in humans are obviously genetic. Some very common differences in sex-specific sexual attraction are likely genetic as well. For la…

> Some very common differences in sex-specific sexual attraction are likely genetic as well. For large swaths of sexual attraction, we have absolutely no evidence of a genetic link

Sure - it seems there may be a large degree of imprinting as well, but homosexuality does seem to be an important special case given that it typically means lack of descendants. Of course evolution is really about sub-populations and gene-pools, not individuals, and it seems there has to be some benefit at that level otherwise this trait would have been out-competed in the population.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#303

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Unfortunately, this is just statistics. There are cases that lie outside of that age range. I know of two cases, personally. Things like stress, drugs, childbirth, significant life changes, etc can trigger psychosis and latent schizophrenia at any age, it's just statistically more likely to happen during adolescence and the period right after. Another way to look at this is that adolescence is when someone experience…

Yeah, in this case it seems to be menopause + losing her job and having all the free time and nothing to focus on plus who knows what other stressors. I think something bad happened with her Phish friends. The really tough part for me is she was out of work, so I paid her to be a beta reader for my book. She's a brilliant person and very detail-oriented. She went way over and beyond what I asked for. She spent months…

Sounds like it was bound to happen. If she hadn’t hyper focused on your book, she’d likely have found something else.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#304

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[flagged]

Did you just suggest that lactating might cure schizophrenia?

Did you just suggest that hormones don’t play a roll in mental health?

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like Matthew 6:28, "And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin", and something about how they're as glorious as King Solomon despite not having clothes or jobs. The religion in question did OK, despite this bad advice.

Sure, because most Christians don't take Jesus' teachings too seriously. You shouldn't slap a Christian (or anyone) on the cheek for no reason, but if you were to, the odds of him responding by inviting you to slap the other cheek are pretty slim.

What about arresting and sending to the mental hospital multiple times to deal with psychopathic caregivers whose purpose is ultimately to make you homeless?

A good Christian or any good person would viewing that scene would actively fight to make the person sufferings life better instead of feeding into the false "caregivers" or more aptly put abusers who are more interested in robbing people than improving their lives.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#306

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I started hearing the voices well after 30. First it began with gang stalking, and by coincidence I am from the “home town” of Americas thought control elite. I was “recruited” (press ganged) and it is only a determination not to accept a word these say that keeps me unconcerned with the collapse of the lie that is modernity in my life.

I keep hoping my friend gets to the point where you are someday. Another thing not working in our favor is she's the most stubborn person I know. She thinks she can beat this thing with her mind and no help from anyone.

I have a friend like this, it's unfortunately one of the prominent symptoms of schizophrenia.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#308

Genetics is messy - as I understand it most genes don't code for a single thing, so assuming evolution is "selecting for schizophrenia" that only implies that there is an evolutionary benefit to some of the things controlled by the same gene(s) that control schizophrenia, that outweighs the disadvantage of schizophrenia. Homosexuality is interesting from this perspective too - common enough that evolution has to be s…

I always wondered if it was natures check on overpopulation. I know that is controversial to say, but it seems most fitting on its face

Do rural populations have lower rates of homosexuals as a % of offspring? How would nature "know" we are overpopulated and bias towards homosexuals?

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#309
> They computed a polygenic risk score for schizophrenia for each participant, calculated by summing the weighted effects of thousands of risk alleles.

I am not an expert by any means, but this analysis only makes sense if we assume there is a strictly linear relationship between alleles. It will not capture nonlinear relationships.

Re: Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are a man and make it past age of 29 without starting to hear voices, you can breathe a sigh of relief (I did)

I kinda heard lots of whispers when I was very young (like 6-7) and now I'm 40 and haven't had any such problems. I blamed it on the drugs I got prescripted for sleeping (I had bad allergy and was scratching myself to the point of bleeding during sleep so I got some "pacifying" drugs).

Older antihistamines were anticholinergics, the latter of which are famous for causing vivid auditory, visual and somatic hallucinations.
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