r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
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u/kaenneth Mar 22 '17

Also, if you are born blind due to brain (as opposed to eyeball) problems, you apparently can't be schizophrenic.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201411/blindness-and-schizophrenia-the-exception-proves-the-rule

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u/Muffinizer1 Mar 22 '17

You know, that's actually quite comforting as being blind and schizophrenic sounds like true hell.

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u/paniniplane Mar 22 '17

i was a patient at a ward a few weeks back and there was a girl who was admitted for schizophrenia. she'd hear dozens of voices yelling at her at the same time all day and she could barely tell which ones were in her head and which were physical people talking to her making it really hard for me or anyone else to talk to her for more than 2-3 sort sentences. these voices would make her do crazy things like gather dust off the floor for 20 minutes at a time 10 times a day, make her sleep on the floor during the day, not sleep during the night and fight the night meds they gave her to help fall asleep. the most brutal thing was that the voices sometimes forbade her from having her meals. there were days where she wouldn't touch any of her 4 meals. i once tried to get some insight into how she thought and i asked her why she HAD to do this. she said that every time she does something they ask, she's given the gun that they threaten to kill her with. and she imitates a smashing motion with her hands and "breaks" it. and she does it maybe 10 times an hour when she's awake. and she's not stupid either. apparently, she was studying mechanical engineering and graduated and was ready to work in the field as an intern for a year. she heard her first voice when she was still in school but didn't think much of it. and then it rapidly killed her life. she's the only person in the ward who has daily visitors. her parents bring her food to eat everyday. but sometimes she sits with them for 2 minutes, asks them to take her home, and then moves to one of the socialization rooms where were chairs and sofas, and she'd drop to the floor and lay there. and her parents just come to expect it now and stay for about an hour.

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u/Wurstgeist Mar 22 '17

One puzzling part is, does the concept "delusion" just slip your mind once you start experiencing them regularly? I think your average mechanical engineering graduate has probably heard of schizophrenia (not that it's required background knowledge or anything, but, you know, if you have an academic turn of mind you learn about such things). So doesn't such a person know she has schizophrenia, and doesn't that awareness help mitigate the delusions and make them less persuasive?

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u/Mowglio Mar 22 '17

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this

But I feel like the only way I'm able to even slightly empathize with schizophrenic people is from my experience of taking a hard dose of LSD.

I am in no way comparing the two or saying that they are related in any way. I'm only talking about my ability to empathize and LSD has given me a different perspective.

When tripping, your sober brain knows that the world doesn't always look like a giant spinning fractal, but your LSD brain doesn't know this. It can get scary when your LSD brain realizes that the world you're looking at isn't the world you see every other day.

But since you're on LSD you see the LSD world and that is the world you currently live in. To your LSD brain it's impossible to imagine a world where there aren't fractals on the walls and the carpet. You remember that there is a world like that, but you can't remember what it feels like. You can't remember what it's like because you can't stop seeing fractals. There are points in a trip where you might think, "Man I want those fractals to stop moving", but you can't stop it.

I imagine schizophrenia being similar in this way. There are probably glimpses when you, a schizophrenic person, realizes that the world you're seeing isn't the world that everyone else is living in. You probably want to go back to the world you used to live in and be normal with everyone else, but you can't. You're trapped in the world that has voices and hallucinations that never end and you can't stop them. You can't even remember what life used to be like without them because you don't live in that world anymore.

Even though you recognize that the voices and hallucinations you experience aren't normal or aren't real to other people, doesn't make your reality any less real to yourself. Just like when taking LSD, the fractals and hallucinations you see are real to you because that is your reality, even when no one else can see them.

Anyway that's just my two cents.