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

psychiatrymargins.com

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

#351

Post by suzzer99 »

roarcher wrote: post #312
suzzer99 wrote: post #9

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 w…

> whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known…

Yeah the main great insight I got out of doing that stuff was to see reality from a different perspective for a while. Kind of like travelling and realizing that things you take for granted aren't the same in every culture.

But I never felt like I was getting at some deeper meaning, and it wasn't something I wanted to keep doing throughout my life.

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

#352

Post by ksenzee »

skissane wrote: post #348
ryanjshaw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of intelligent people entertain this possibility, as well as many other possibilities, around how our world works. If they then become obsessed with the idea being a fact and refuse to even consider updating their mental model when presented with evidence contradicting it then they have developed a fixed belief . When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief . When…

> When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief. > When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem. But why does the issue of whether it is “common among their culture” matter? A person unable to function due to a non-bizarre fixed bel…

“Common among their culture” is a quick way of determining whether lots of other people are able to hold this belief and function fine. It also suggests an origin for the belief that isn’t unique to the person. You can’t go around saying “ah this person’s problem is they believe in angels” if the person’s belief in angels is simply part of their religion or culture. “But they believe in imaginary beings” is not a helpful observation in that context.

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

#353

Post by skissane »

ksenzee wrote: post #352
skissane wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief. > When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem. But why does the issue of whether it is “common among their culture” matter? A person unable to function due to a non-bizarre fixed bel…

“Common among their culture” is a quick way of determining whether lots of other people are able to hold this belief and function fine. It also suggests an origin for the belief that isn’t unique to the person. You can’t go around saying “ah this person’s problem is they believe in angels” if the person’s belief in angels is simply part of their religion or culture. “But they believe in imaginary beings” is not a hel…

> “Common among their culture” is a quick way of determining whether lots of other people are able to hold this belief and function fine.

But some people’s functioning is impaired by beliefs common to their culture, whereas other people have very unusual beliefs but aren’t impaired by them to anywhere near the same degree

One person obsesses so much over “culture war” topics they lose their job… another person spends all their free time contemplating elaborate idiosyncratic theories of parallel universes, yet still manages to put a lid on it at work to a sufficient degree to keep their job. The first person has a non-bizarre obsession with serious functional impairment (they lose their job due to it), the second a bizarre obsession but the degree of functional impairment is significantly less. So the fact that we label one obsession “bizarre” and the other “non-bizarre” seems of little relevance

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

#354

Post by heavyset_go »

johnisgood wrote: post #344
heavyset_go wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also known as "delirium". They cause delirium. Benadryl (DPH) for example does that. It is very dysphoric.

Lower doses can induce hallucinations before it becomes full on delirium that you see in higher doses. You'll regularly hear about people seeing "spiders" after taking 25-50mg of Benedryl, the recommended dose.

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

#355

Post by zahlman »

> For instance, if schizophrenia risk genes were not under positive selection, we would expect them to be purged from the gene pool over thousands of years.... Let’s say schizophrenia is associated with a 50% loss of reproductive fitness in 1% of the population (and there is no offsetting benefit in the rest of the population), then it would take roughly 180 generations to cut the rate in half and about 560 generations to reduce it to one-tenth of its original value (Mitteroecker & Merola, 2024). We’ve had a comparable number of generations since the Neolithic era, but as far as we know, the prevalence of schizophrenia has not decreased in the manner anticipated.

... Okay, but you already acknowledged that

> The process will be slow, but it will happen (this is not the same as saying schizophrenia itself can be eliminated, since it is highly polygenic and the pool of risk genes is not static).

So how do we know that modern-day schizophrenia isn't caused by a different set of genes? Maybe the Neolithic ones have been dying out from the gene pool, but new ones have consistently managed to keep replacing them. New genes can start contributing to the incidence of schizophrenia right away; even if they're otherwise neutral, they but won't die out due to the marginal effect on schizophrenia incidence for a very long time (much longer than the calculation above - since each one is, as we already established, causing only part of the loss in reproductive fitness). They don't need to be under positive selection, unless I've misunderstood something.

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

#356

Post by heavyset_go »

suzzer99 wrote: post #284
heavyset_go wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can identify with the guilt. In my case with my friend, their behavior lead to me distancing myself from them, not knowing what was going on, and I was his main source of socializing. Same thing happened with several of his other friends. The isolation definitely was something that amplified the progression of his illness to detachment with reality. Didn't help that the people he sought friendship from in lieu of us were scammers who fed into his delusions to take what little he had even when he became homeless.

If I could go back in time, I would do things differently, but at the same time I can't blame myself for not understanding what was happening and doing what was, at the time, the healthiest thing for myself.

Sorry to hear about your friend.

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

#357

Post by lazyasciiart »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #340
lazyasciiart wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disease or disorder is always present, the symptoms can come and go. Someone allergic to peanuts is allergic to peanuts whether or not they have eaten some this week.

But you see I only care about the symptoms. And the symptoms are used to classify disorders. No symptoms, no disorder. You can carry all these jeans and not be exposed to any trigger and would never know you had the disorder so can you call it disorder if you have zero symptoms?

Yes, actually, you can. Feel free to call yourself allergy free and stop carrying an epipen though.

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

#359

Post by roughly »

skissane wrote: post #346
heavyset_go wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, not just drugs-children are more likely to experience hallucinations even without drugs. I still have vivid memories of experiencing what (in hindsight) I realise were hypnopompic hallucinations, around the age of 6 or 7. I wasn’t taking any regular medications, that I can remember. But, I grew out of it, as kids usually do.

A fun aside here: experiments in which people who’ve taken hallucinogens are placed in brain scanners reveal activation patterns which look an awful lot like what we see when we put small children in brain scanners, and this somewhat accords with the neurogenesis vs pathway pruning see-saw model of brain development.

I’ll say personally my experiences with psychedelics brought back memories of childhood - how I engaged with the world, how my mind would go off down different paths, the intensity of focus - so, you’re probably not far off here.

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

#360

Post by fennecbutt »

suzzer99 wrote: post #9

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 w…

That sounds so terrible. But damn it, "I just lost the game". Sigh.
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