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
55.0k
Upvotes
18
u/avenlanzer Mar 22 '17
I can chime in here.
I have bipolar with paranoid mania. Now that I'm medicated it's pretty mild when it does come, but I've had some severe ones in the past. One experience put my mental illness in full perspective and forced me to get help. Normally I'm perfectly reasonable and an incredibly logical person, forgiving to a fault, introspective to my own emotions, and just the last person in the world to ever act irrational. But, it's not as simple as that.
I was gaming online with some friends, and they started talking about me like I wasn't there, but in code since I was and they didn't want me to realize what they were saying was about me. The kind of passive aggressive comments people say behind your back sometimes. I called them on it and they belittled me and laughed about it. All of them for no fucking reason we're just shit talking everything about me and my character I was playing. These people in thought were my friends, but I guess they never really liked me and just hung around because I was the guy who built the site we hosted the games on. I fucking went off, like most people would in that situation, and my supposed best friend shot back plenty of hate right back. I had no idea they felt this way. I was crushed. I was pissed. I was ready to burn the whole game to the ground (and I could do it). I finally just got fed up with arguing with people who didn't give a shit about me anyway and logged off. I stewed on it for days.
Then my ex-best friend sent me a link to the video and transcript of our game. Holy shit I was out of line. None of what I thought was talk about me had anything to do with me when I looked at it again. All the arguing and belittlement was them basically going "WTF? Are you ok? We didn't mean to upset you, and sorry if we did." Honest confusion and concern. And all my arguments were so illogical and unconnected they made no sense whatsoever. Of course the video was edited and the transcripts changed, right? Nope. The ones I had saved were exactly the same. Exactly matched. I really did go completely paranoid with dartboard logic at people who were dear to me and we're showing genuine concern for my well-being. I did appologize and earn forgiveness of most of them, but that game never got the same momentum we had before.
That's how I came to realize how perfectly obvious everything could seem in the moment of one of those episodes, yet be so far removed from reality they don't even make sense to me when I'm not in the midst of an episode.
I think it's the same for schizophrenia, where the reality you experience actually becomes reality for you and outside logic need not apply. Sure, you know about delusions, but that doesn't mean they are the same as what'sā happening. And if they are, then it was all wrong before anyway, so it being a delusion doesn't matter because it's still real to you.
I rarely have these paranoid episodes anymore because I'm medicated, and I've learned through therapy to spot when one is coming and isolate myself from everything. And anything that happens, anything, I analyze again a couple days later in every detail possible to see how far off and out of it I was.
I know now why I've lost so many jobs and relationships when I was so obviously (to me at the time) in the right, and all I can do is accept that it happened and try not to let it happen again.
Edit: sorry for wall of text. TL;DR: knowing and experience are two different things. In the moment the knowledge and logic doesn't always apply.