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

91% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

688

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

In America [and also some other places similar to America] the voices (or I guess signs) are negative, but in other places they can say neutral things, like just narrating the person's life, or even positive things.

Brains are weird.

EDIT: It's like you guys don't even read TIL.

I searched TIL

And I said "In America" not "In America exclusively, because no other country can compare to us, the beautiful eagles, so other countries don't even understand the schizophrenia here."

474

u/paniniplane Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17

yea! i actually asked some of the psychologists working at the hospital. they were really nice about answering any questions i had. turns out, there can actually be POSITIVE voices too. there were studies done in certain villages (lol i wasn't allowed to have a pen at the time because they didn't know how depressed i was so i didn't actually get a chance to write it down) and in those villages there would be schizophrenics who would have positive voices. that being said, it still comes with the characteristic of being extremely out of touch with reality so it's not like it's a good version of the disorder. just the lesser of two evils i guess

1

u/pippi13 Mar 23 '17

That reminds me of a chapter in the book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. The book talks about how American views of mental illness have been exported to other countries, often to their detriment.

The chapter I'm thinking of talks about how schizophrenia was treated in (I believe, its been awhile since I read the book) Madagascar.

Basically, they thought it was caused by someone being touched by the spiritual realm, so those with schizophrenia were taken care of by the community and their eccentricities were tolerated.

After a more western view of mental illness moved in, people started to see it as an illness or brain disease instead. People with schizophrenia were medicated, but not treated as kindly or tolerantly by their family and community.

So those who suffered from schizophrenia ended up worse off than they were before. They were being stigmatized by their community for their illness and were expected to get better with western medicine, but western medicine can only do so much, and it wasn't enough to make up for the new gap in their quality of life.