B19 wrote:
Is stress what sets episodes off?
I've only had one episode and there were stressors then, but not immediately before it. It seems from that one case, the stressor (being put in a regular school nearly a year before the episode) started a sort of breakdown process which took months to work itself out and produce psychosis. Immediately prior to the onset of psychosis, and even during the time I was psychotic--when I was "double bookkeeping"*, knowing not to talk about my delusions (because I believed that everyone else was too stupid to understand that I had special insight into the universe and would mistake me for a "schizo") and trying to go to a normal school--I seemed to be doing better. When the real world and my delusional world collided, however, which was probably inevitable, I engaged in seriously dangerous behavior that led to a 6-month hospitalization. Because of my silence about my delusions--was still thinking that these people were too stupid to understand my special insight--, they weren't sure if I was psychotic. When I tell them what I was thinking now, however, the full story, they're like, "Yeah, you were psychotic."
* This article goes into the subject. I was amazed by how similar this description is to my experience:
Quote:
As described above, self-disorders entail a weakening of the natural attitude associated with the emergence of a solipsistic perspective, which usually culminates in psychosis as a profound and rigid alteration of the sense of reality and existence: “[the] patients cannot take things to be the case in the usual way, as the [very] sense of ′is′ and ′is not′ has changed.”28 In our view, many psychotic patients adopt, what might be called, a double ontological orientation, designated by Bleuler29 as “double bookkeeping,” which refers to the predicament (and ability) of simultaneously living in two different worlds, namely the shared-social world (ie, the natural ontological attitude) and a private, psychotic world (ie, a solipsistic ontological attitude). The patients experience both worlds as relevant and in that sense real. They also generally seem to experience them as two different, incommensurable, and thus not conflicting realities, thereby typically allowing them to coexist in an idiosyncratic-personal amalgam and, in the advanced/consolidated stages of the illness, only occasionally to collide (the beginning or exacerbation of psychosis may be, however, associated with a sense of perplexity). Daniel Paul Schreber30 describes in his memoirs a remarkable world of “nerves,” “rays,” and deities, providing us with an unusually lucid, first-person account of double bookkeeping. He claims that God has “entered into exclusive nerve-contact” with him by which he has “gained deeper insight than all other humans beings.” Schreber explains that this “nerve-contact” has made him the centre and constitutor of the world, whose existence now seems to depend entirely on him. Rather than confusing his psychotic experiences with those of real objects, Schreber seems for the most part to have been able to differentiate the two “worlds”: “I could even say with Jesus Christ: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’; my so-called delusions are concerned solely with God and the beyond… The certainty of my knowledge of God and divine matters is so great and unshakeable that it is completely immaterial to me what other people think of the truth or probability of my ideas.”30 More recently, Professor Elyn Saks, the author of the book, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, sketched the rationale behind her long-lasting denial of suffering from schizophrenia: “I completely recognized that the things I was saying and doing and feeling would be thought to amount to a diagnosis of schizophrenia; but I thought that it was not true—I didn’t really have the illness… I looked like I had schizophrenia… but if we knew enough, we would see that I really did not… All of my so-called symptoms were things I simply chose to think or do. I was choosing, eg, to hold certain beliefs even though the evidence was not what would classically constitute ‘good’ evidence—I had a special premium on the truth [italics added].”31 Saks seems here to say that she too experienced having a special access to or insight into the real nature of things, a deeper level of reality, which is not readily accessible to others. As Schneider concluded on the issue of delusional conviction: “the significance [of experience] is of a special kind; it always carries a great import, is urgent and personal, a sign or message from another world.”32
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjour ... bt087.fullThere's also the self-disorders, which I heavily identify with (from the same article):
Quote:
This basic self-world structure is disturbed in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, ie, it is constantly challenged, unstable, and oscillating, resulting in alarming and alienating anomalous self-experiences (also termed “self-disorders”), typically occurring already in childhood or early adolescence.24 The patients feel ephemeral, lacking core identity, profoundly, yet often ineffably different from others (Anderssein) and alienated from the social world. There is a diminished sense of existing as a bodily subject, distortions of the first-person perspective with a failing sense of “mineness” of the field of awareness (eg, “it feels as if the thoughts aren’t really mine”), and a deficient sense of privacy of the inner world. There is a significant lack of attunement and immersion in the world, inadequate prereflective grasp of self-evident meanings (perplexity), and hyper-reflectivity (eg, “I only live in my head” and “I always observe myself”). Although patients often suffer from self-disorders, the latter are usually lived in an ego-syntonic way, as modes rather than as objects, of the patients’ experience, ie, often affecting more the “how” than the “what” of experience. What is important to emphasize at this point is that the self-disorders, reflecting the unstable basic self-world structure, destabilize the natural ontological attitude and may throw the patient into a new ontological-existential perspective, an often solipsistic framework, no longer ruled by the “natural” certitudes concerning space, time, causality, and noncontradiction. Unconstrained by these certitudes, the world may appear as only apparent or staged, ontologically mind-dependent, prone to noncausal relations, and the patient may experience a unique access to deeper layers of reality, which are inaccessible to others. Often, these experiences evoke a specific sense of grandiosity, leaving others to be seen as oblivious to the true nature of reality and only concerned with everyday trivialities.
Immediately prior to the onset of psychosis, things seemed different, changed, strange in some way. It felt like I was in a video game where the plot was just about to start. Everyone else was just NPCs (non-player characters) while I was the main character. I then saw a sign and my delusions came into being and solidified, and were unchanging. As I said before, I was silent on the delusions because I thought everyone else was too stupid to understand the truth like I had.
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"You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
03 Mar 2015, 2:36 pm
; and the perceptual distortions (noted in the same report) all suggested MCDD.
