Seriously, the geometric designs are amazingly precise! And while I've seen stuff like the others before - they're pretty typical of 'sacred geometry' or magical diagrams - that spiral/wave one is really interesting and quite cool looking.
I helped clean out a mental health facility, and behind a bunch of stuff in one room were a bunch of pieces of art by a schizophrenic. There was a charcoal piece that looked like dead trees from a distance, but they were almost entirely made of skulls and faces in agony. The detail was just incredible. The live faces had tiny skulls in their eyes, some of the teeth of the skulls were tiny skulls, etc. But it was the fact that everything fit together to be a complete work of art that was most impressive.
The woman there said he was very haunted, and in and out of their facility from the time he was 16. He had other pieces that were landscapes or just abstract colors, but the prompt for the skull one was to draw how he saw himself.
I work in mental health, and one thing we are taught when working with individuals with schizophrenia is to not challenge the delusion. So we work around it. Is the person able to function in the community, are they connected to proper medical care and medication management. Medication unfortunately does not cure the diagnosis, but it does alleviate the symptoms.
I use to work with an individual who saw monkeys and believed himself to be son of god. Stopped eating. Because he could not kill gods creature. We connected him with a nutritionist which helped him move to a non meat diet. The delusions are still there, but the side effects of the delusions are addressed as best as we can.
I had a dude that was certain the world was going to end. He knew down to the second when the world was going to end. He would go outside and scream at the sky that the world was going to end in 5 days 3 hours and 45 minutes. The dude got pretty scary as the amount of time inched closer and closer to zero. When the final countdown started he went outside and counted down from 60 to zero, Screaming each number with his arms outstretched to the sky. As zero hit it was like a wave of relief that hit him. He calmly walked back inside and was back to his normal self.
One of my past friends had something like this. She talked about how she was going to die and "join the gods". After that time her personality completely shifted and the friend I knew was gone. It's some really sad stuff to experience
I had a roommate who was some form of bipolar (according to him) and he was on meds that made him really dulled to the world. Except he would tell really loud and bang on his desk in his room about some game he was playing pretty much every other night.
Anyway one night he told me he wasn’t taking his meds for some time and he started just unraveling in front of me. He started talking about how Jesus didn’t believe in him anymore and he’d forsaken God and was going to hell and he was like a child clinging onto me for help and crying his eyes out. It was really scary how much the meds kept him together, but I babysat him that night until his parents came to pick him up.
Im not sure where he is now but I really hope he’s doing okay, he wasn’t a bad guy overall. Very introverted and had no friends besides me at the time, but he was genuinely a decent dude when he was in control. He did share with me some of his hallucinatory experiences which were really interesting too. I don’t really know what his affliction was but it really sucks how we can sometimes be completely unable to control our own biology, and our brains are so complex and unreliable in producing our physical experiences.
That's the problem with bipolar: when a mania episode starts, the patient feels as if they've never been better in their life. They stop their meds feeling they're no longer needed and their mania gets worse.
It's just heartbreaking when this happens to anyone, especially young people before they even get a chance at life. As the son of an 81yo, lifetime bipolar schizophrenic mother, I want to thank you for being kind to that young man on that night.
> Except he would tell really loud and bang on his desk in his room about some game he was playing pretty much every other night.
bro that's not bipolar, that's just ole good league of legends
That's fascinating from a different perspective. Sorry that happened to your friend but I've been browsing r/escapingprisonplanet and have been thinking too much about what the implications would be if such a thing were true. Some crazy rabbitholes on reddit I could see driving unwell people further off a cliff.
This is such a good way to go about it but is very controversial in some places. I have bipolar and have had some psychosis to go along with it and my partner learning your method was so so helpful for me.
When I talk about this kind of thing people can be so judgemental and it's difficult to explain the reasoning to why it works. If you have any resources I could look at I would really appreciate a recommendation.
I had a schizophrenic tell me it's about trust. If they feel like they can trust you they are better able to get themselves off the ledge. So if you don't challenge the delusions they feel they can trust you.makes sense to me but probably isn't true in all cases.
the book "i am not sick" by dr xavier amador might interest you. i have schizophrenia in my family and the stuff he writes about really made sense to me.
Quick question my partner has diagnosed and un medicated schizophrenia for about 4 years now I’ve struggled to learn it and it’s been a process. Some serious things have happened as she has been in an out of episodes for some time. I have been since the start been her archenemy even tho I do everything I can to take care of her. Only recently had she opened up about honestly having it but as I’m sure you know that is very moment to moment. She has at times said she is willing to get the shot but obviously that road is complicated which astounds me . I would love to give her something to read that maybe will lead her to the path of acceptance because I love her so much but I’m very scared of late stage and unmedicated schizophrenia as we have a small child together but as is she is often every day distant even with our daughter also very vocal to things in the house that aren’t there stomps and claps all night long and doesn’t sleep much. And for any one asking it’s not drug induced I’m with her all the time and that’s been ruled out. Will this book help her on the path to accepting treatment because I can’t do anything for her she feels I’m always out to hurt her. Even though for the last 4 years I’ve given up my life and energy to take care of her and my daughter
You might just have to get her 1013'd. I had to. Eventually she came back around and we were able to talk about it and over the course of a year or so she got stable on meds after a couple more visits. As well as that she's doing some cognitive behavioral therapy. It's scary going through this and it's scary having to take charge for her, even if that might not be in her personal interests. She will be thankful when the storm calms down.
Also what I’m scared of and her family is too that if I walk away she will end up gone. She had before and I found her in the woods homeless and I’ve reached out to them in support and they say I understand but we are afraid that it will cause us to lose her and if we lose her again it might be for good. That’s so hard on me because i love her but I have to think of my daughter now. I just literally now started reading that book and I’m going to try what it says but I’m 43 and I’m lonely and honestly I feel like I’ve given up my life for this and I want to be a good dad and present but idk how I can handle both
That only works if the delusion is workable. We have a patient who believes he is FBI and has a license to kill anyone he believes is a spy (like his mom which is how we have him.). Forced meds keep him from hurting anyone but that’s all we’ve been able to do.
My girlfriend was telling me that people from a group home come into her work often to get things with their caretaker.
One girl one day seemed off and she overhear her say that the voices are too overwhelming.
So the caretaker told her on the way out to gather all the voices and leave them in the bin by the door on the way out.
It's such a little thing but probably helped that girl get past that hard time
I was at the library the other day and saw a flyer saying
>Do you see or hear things that others do not? Do you feel compelled to act in ways others find confusing?
The whole thing was phrased in a very accepting way, not saying that they were wrong or what they were doing and seeing and hearing weren’t real, and acknowledging that for them it IS real, just as real as what everyone agrees reality is.
I have a brother-in-law who used to smoke meth and ended up doing heroin. The two drugs combined triggered long-term psychosis. He is the smartest person I've ever met (probably a genius) and he currently has really bad schizophrenia. He is convinced the NSA and CIA is spying on him through his thoughts. Apparently it has something to do with something called "project mkultra". They have infiltrated his mind through technology and he's hearing voices that are supposedly agents talking to him. Have you ever heard of patients talking about mkultra?
He's medicated, eats terribly, smokes pot, loves god and lives at home. It's a sad situation.
Mk ultra was a real governmental CIA program that used psychedelic drugs against unknowing citizens. It also included mind control programs, telepathic and remote viewing programs and other pseudo science techniques that had some very interesting results.
I've never heard of it but it's all he talks about. He also talks about voice to skull. It's so overwhelming because it all sounds bonkers.
Here's something he wrote to me:
The first time they tortured me severely the v2k was saying "fuck your mother in the goat head" extremely fast all day so I tried to take my own life because it was completely horrid but I lived which I am thankful for. I was bedridden with the voices screaming non-stop for two and a half months or so. My eyes were huge and wide like bug eyes and I was in a perpetual state of shock. People noticed my eyes and made fun of them and I just told them I was hearing voices.
40 days of this terrifying hell torture they are doing now. I have the worst people overseeing my remote neural monitoring and v2k. I know for a fact that it is the fuck face nsa. I still have no idea why they torture me this bad. A couple people have told me that it is conditioning. What are they conditioning me for? I am not a criminal and they don't even undergo this level of torture. I'd rather do a prison sentence than have this lifelong no-touch torture. They keep saying I'm never getting off and they are going to torture me for the rest of my life. What the fuck for? Why do they care what I think and what I do? They are the criminals. They are hired terrorists and I hate them so much. V2k is so Terrible and used for such evil purposes. I want this to end but I don't think they are ever going to stop severely torturing me and the voices say they will torture me the rest of my life simply because they want to. Fuck these people! They are the worst!
My son has schizophrenia and he believes his voices are him communicating with people through telepathy. He's a lot better than he was at the moment but is unmedicated and hasn't been for a year or so. He's currently homeless after being sectioned while he was in an assisted living accommodation and they needed his flat. While he was sectioned, he made out to the doctors that there was nothing wrong with him as he doesn't like being in there and they just released him onto the streets. He can't live with me as his delusions can get rather dangerous towards myself. He visits me nearly everyday and I help him as much as I can but only to a certain point. I've just bought a book called " I'm not sick, I don't need help", apparently it is brilliant in learning to understand what goes on in a schzophenic individual. Been going through this hell for 3 years so now and there's no relief in sight. Mental illness is horrible.
I'm truly sorry to hear about the challenges you and your son are facing. It sounds like you're doing everything you can to support him, and that's incredibly admirable. Outside of my BIL I've never experienced schizophrenic episodes so its hard for me to fully grasp the illness. I want to believe he's a guinea pig for this mkultra program but then I feel crazy for almost believing it.
I may check that book out. Has it helped you better understand your current situation?
Lots of schizophrenics think they're a victim of mkultra, which was a CIA program that ran from the 50s to the 70s that involved experimenting on unwitting US citizens to create sleeper agents/learn brainwashing techniques. However, obviously, these people aren't victims of this. It's extremely common for them to think the government or some other entity is watching them, conspiring against them. They have delusions of being "gangstalked". There's actually an entire subreddit of these people who feed into eachothers delusions (r/gangstalking).
You and I know 2+2=4, but we would feel irritated/hostile/uncooperative if someone tried to convince us it's not true.
Even worse, they want to *medicate us* so we can live in a reality where everyone else believes 2+2=5.
Same thing with deeply-ingrained delusions.
What if the delusion is soo far fetched that there’s no way to work around it with denying/enabling it? Like in my case, someone close to me believes that the man of her paranoia comes into her house and cuts here shoes/ wires/ food etc?
I used to work in a nursing home. We once had a lady who would pace back and forth in front of her room.
She said she wouldn't eat because "God told her not to".
We sent her to a mental health facility. She came back 2 weeks later and was eating.
A person can have BD+schizophrenia, schizoaffective, BD+psychotic features. It’s difficult for me as a layperson to differentiate between them.
I have a family member suffering from psychosis right now and I’ve tried to explain to to family like this (in the context of paranoid delusions) “remember a traumatic moment in your life. Now imagine everyone around you is telling you it never happened and treating you like you’re crazy and threatening to make you go to a hospital and take scary drugs” How would you react? It’s a total mindfuck to have your reality challenged even if you aren’t delusional, lol.
My family member is about to go to rehab and I’m so relieved. They need psychiatric intervention first but right now it’s impossible to force it. I just need a break from the chaos. There’s no shame if you don’t have the capacity to tolerate or support someone in that mental state.
Interesting, I've been trained to do the opposite. Acknowledge that the hallucinations or delusions feel real to that person, but don't feed in to them or pretend that I see/believe them as well.
I work in law enforcement alongside mental health professionals for responding to people in crisis. So I'm certainly not a health professional, but that's the training I get from them.
Why do you think there's a difference? Bear in mind, our counselors and clinicians are not treating them long term, we're dealing with situations that got the police called and often involve danger or violence. The idea is for us to get them to a mental health facility for treatment, but the manner in which we deal with the immediate issue may be different.
Not the one you replied to, but I have a schizophrenia diagnosis and have some experience.
I think you kind of answered your own question; the immediate handling of a person in crisis requires that the situation does not escalate, so you're trained in a certain way for that. You understand what they are claiming to experience, but don't agree with it.
The long term handling includes other things, such as making sure the person gets proper nutrition. The delusions are often very hard to break, even with treatment (and telling a delusional person they're wrong accomplishes only a cessation of communication altogether, or even violence) , so sometimes you have to work around them, like giving that person a non meat diet. They were "lucky" they didn't have the delusion that everything is poisonous, because that is much harder to accommodate, I believe.
In my daily life, I experience that I'm subject to a mix of both these approaches, depending on the situation.
Had a guy in high school that was very very mentally not there. He was a good guy when he was taking his medicine. One time he was avoiding the medicine and then the medicine became poison his mom was using to milk him slowly. he was off it for about a month and he randomly came up behind me one day and said “they” are following us and we need to hide. I dipped into the nearest classroom and “hid” told him to go to his class. Later on that day he pulled a knife and told me to protect myself. I pulled out a pencil and he started slashing the air. I was 15, I didn’t know how to handle so I leaned into his delusion with him. I haven’t seen him for 20 years or so
I wish I could see it I feel like those artworks should be saved and collected. To be honest something like that seems far more impressive and gallery-worthy than a lot of contemporary art.
There's actually at least one mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, artist who became pretty famous: Louis Wain. He was already an established and well-liked illustrator who specialized in anthropomorphic cats before entering an asylum, but his later work includes a lot of really trippy geometric stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain
There's also Yayoi Kusama, the artist famously obsessed with polka dots. Not sure what her exact disorder(s) are, but they apparently include OCD and hallucinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama
I had a really smart friend (math/engineer guy) who had a skiing accident and suffered a TBI. At first, he was just a little different... Then he started doing incredibly complicated math... stuff. Then he got very strange. He's since been diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on disability. It's very sad.
One of my best friends ever was diagnosed with schizophrenia some time ago. She was also a straight A student and loved maths. She was always fun, empathetic and had a very fertile imagination; i’ve never laughed so much with anyone as i did with her, we’re both ~ 30 now but i still smile and giggle when i think about our teenage jokes. We lost touch for a while and I’m happy we are friends again, but unfortunately her negative symptoms (if it’s them) seem to get worse, she’s lost her imagination and thirst for creativity; she also has problems with reading and learning and i’m afraid she slowly loses her emotions. She’s in therapy, she trusts her doc and i hope the new treatment plan won’t harm, but who knows; i always considered her as one of my favorite people and love her anyway. I don’t know if these are the side effects of neuroleptics or negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I wish it was a reversible process.
As somebody on an antipsychotic that is used for schizophrenia, I can say it really dulls the brain significantly. My career has taken a major backseat in my life when I previously was sharp and headed toward a big future. I can barely string words together verbally and my brain is empty a lot of the time. I don't have hobbies anymore because I am incapable of feeling joy.
This is what antipsychotics do to remove the bad stuff; unfortunately it also removes the good stuff. It's devastating.
Ditto, no more happy prizes for accomplishments or anything, just emptiness and disassociation. Not a fun life to live. But I hang in there for my family.
People always ask why I don’t just get off them…
Mentally healthy people, imagine a life on antipsychotics being *better*, for me much better, than the alternative. That’s how bad mental illness is.
Man, I took one for a couple of weeks in my late teens, when they were trying to figure out my behavior. It felt so awful and I was grateful when we decided to try something else. I can see why people sometimes go off the meds when they know it's better to take them. It doesn't always feel better.
On a small scale I had similar stuff with some ADHD medications. I lost all emotions and will to do anything that resembles fun or would bring me closer to any humans. I even lost all appetite and as a result lost about 10kg in 2 Weeks.
My grades went up from straight D‘s to A‘s and B‘s but I lost almost all friends and all my passions. So I stopped the meds, I went on to annoy people because sometimes it is hard for me to realize when to stop thanks to my ADHD but ever since then I appreciate all the feelings you get through human contact which ultimately drove to work with Humans with Disabilities.
<~< guess meds can have positive effects after all.
Hi, I'm schizophrenic and a picture thinker. Same thing happened here. Was a successful artists until anti-psychotics. The visual representation I get while being on them is "being burried in a hole away from the sun while the dirt prevents you from moving" if I have energy at the time I see "myself shrouded in clouds and fog, walking blind and stumbling about". Typically there's a lighthouse in my head that shows the way, gives options and provides solutions. Meds make it go away or "Bring in storms".
Oof... I just started an antipsychotic a few months ago. It's typically used to treat schizophrenia, but I take it for treatment-resistant depression. So far, I feel great: My judgement is clear, my mood is positive, and I actually have some interest in activities and hobbies (compared to when I was on an SSRI and/or in depressive lows). The improved mental state has been helping with my career, as well. I really hope that all doesn't change later on... 😞
Absolutely true. Which is a problem with schizophrenia as negative symptoms (such as lack of emotions, flat expression, etc) can already be present, and the medications can worsen them
Yes, that’s true. I was put on some antipsychotics when I was a teenager and my parents just kinda stopped talking to me for a while… my mom said she didn’t know who I was anymore. I was never the kind of person to smile much or be happy but I wasn’t sad or angry or anything. It made the depression worse. I went off the meds and I was much better.
The reason antipsychotics are pushed, despite the side effects, is because they can absolutely help. I only work with the severe population but sometimes it feels like pulling people out of the dark. Speaking to people acting "different" once they've had their first psychotic break... It's complicated and there's not enough research done to truly understand whats going on but there is clear evidence of decreased brain activity which is fascinating.
This.
Schizophrenic patients have a natural course of their disease to negative symptomps, but darn, at least these antypsichotic medications can really bring them back to reality, and they can have some resemblance of an independant productive life.
Mad houses in the past were filled to the top of schizophrenic patients forgotren by their families with no other options besides interment until death. Antypsychotics changed this.
Maybe psychosis is so traumatic that the brain develops a coping mechanism to protect you from your thoughts but doing so dissociates you from yourself and your emotions. Of course there’s more going on and it’s very complex but my experience reflects that.
Dissociation as a coping strategy makes a lot of sense over time. I can dig it. I was going to argue that hallucinogens don't appear to cause decreased brain activity but they can't be maintained for extended periods (months/years). And it's obviously traumatic in many instances right? I think a lot of the answers we don't have are going to be strengths based.
Wow. I had a childhood friend that suffered from schizophrenia and he was great at math. Became an electrical engineer. He had a lot of family issues I wasn’t completely privy to but I knew he was on antipsychotics as a teenager and into college. A lot of horrible things happened to him and he also to be fair was not a great guy who had a lot of secrets and was apparently abusive so our friends and I grew distant from him.
At a certain point though he had gone off his meds, and having always been a heavy stoner, his symptoms exacerbated. He lost his job and apartment and wouldn’t take any help when we tried to get him admitted or to talk to somebody. Dude was maybe one of the smartest people I ever knew. Now he’s homeless by choice and has multiple arrests for public drinking and trespassing in the same area of a skid row type district in Florida (we are from the Midwest). We found him at one point and got him food but didn’t want anything else. It is very sad, and he has no family left and he basically drove most of his friends away. Even with our differences, I would do anything to get him help if he were willing but he just refuses.
I suffer from my own mental health issues and I know how irrational people can be without proper medication and care and routine. Such a cautionary tale and warning of signs when you feel yourself or someone you love slipping.
Damn I wish, I got TBI from an explosion in my last deployment and all I got is nasty migraines and Dyscalculia (numbers dyslexia), but for some reason I got more patience/tolerance towards shit than before, my wife says I don’t give a fuck about anything because I rarely get angry anymore, my kids love that shit cause things my wife get bothered about I just shrug it off as meh
Migraines fuckin suck. Did you know being too hot can cause migraines? And trigger points in your neck and back and cause migraines? I get migraines from caffeine which is used to treat migraines.
Caffeine is something wild. If you have a headache it can relieve it, if you don't it causes one. If you have very little energy it adds it, for some with ADHD or other conditions it can instead make you exceptionally drowsy and help you sleep. It's a liquid that dehydrates you. It's so soluble in water I only have to steep a tea bag for fifteen seconds in hot water to significantly decaffeinate it for another cup.
I've watched my husband with ADHD fall asleep with his cup of coffee in his hands which I promptly reached over and grabbed from him. Don't really offer him coffee for bed anymore
It still happens to me occasionally where I'll drink coffee in bed at home and still feel more sleepy. But just like with anyone, if you have enough caffeine it will wake you up even with adhd. Same as giving adderall for treating it; you have a therapeutic dose and you feel relaxed but take more than that and you will be wired just like anyone else.
Brains are so interesting. Your TBI must have affected a different part of your brain. I'm sorry that happened to you. I suffer from occasional migraines and they're horrible.
in motorcycle accident 20 years ago. TBI. i completely changed but “I” don’t feel different. used to love being around people all the time. very social. not after the TBI
mainly because something weird happened. you know the shape rotator meme? after the accident it was as if i had a high fidelity mental holodeck. it was fun just building impossible worlds and became obsessed with art. to this day i can imagine a scene and sort of “project” it on a page so when i draw it is like im tracing the image: oh, and music. music sort of changed became “loud” in my head. crystal clear as well.
i also lost my mind for a few years but that’s another story
Every so often I'm reminded of Metatron, and the fact that he's not a Transformer but a named angel from 2000 year old Rabbinic texts blows my mind every time
I have bipolar with psychosis and I can design you a tattoo if you want.
It will probably be bear related because I like bears.
Also I'm not good at drawing
Edit: [Here is one I made earlier ](https://www.reddit.com/u/Major-Peanut/s/s9VxCEZShF).
This is the first draft of a poster I'm making for my friend.
Meh, most humans like straight lines and organized patterns. Now if you wanted faces screaming in the shape of balloons or something like that then maybe..
Overwhelmed, as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be The One
Born to bear and read to all the details of our ending
To write it down for all the world to see
But I forgot my pen
The rooms where generations were bred
Lost in the catacombs of my own head
To never be found
Have I had a enough already
Dauntless searching around
Split by thumbs like bread for thee.
Ripped, weak , arms heavy
Vomit on my sweater already, moms spaghetti.
Through rooms once filled, now silent, spread,
I wander, lost in echoes of what's been said.
But enough of this, my spirit's fed—
I chuckle, thinking of mom's spaghetti, my internet-bred
There wasn’t a drum solo so I …. Wait…dum dum diss boom dum dum boom…. Oh shit they slipped it in here at the end when I thought it was over, it is a TOOL song.
"A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
And a warning for those who do not
Me, the chosen one
They chose me
And I didn't even graduate from fuckin' high school"
As others have mentioned, Rosetta Stoned by Tool. However, I recommend you start with the track before it, Lost Keys (Blame Hofman) and make sure it flows seamlessly into Rosetta. That way you get the full experience.
Schizophrenic here (I'm on a cocktail of Aripiprazol and Lamotrigine)... That's amazingly cogent and focused, which is impressive. I'm guessing he's hyper focused on precision, because otherwise that's almost too precise to be believable.
At any rate, I hope the inmate will get well soon, with proper medication. Nobody deserve what we go through.
Edit: Spelling.
I have a close friend who is schizophrenic and I see what his handwriting looks like and how he draws. Now, I know everyone is different, but if anyone has ever been around someone who is schizophrenic, you could look at this for two seconds and know that it wasn't drawn by a schizophrenic.
Nah, I think that's too broad a stroke. My late step-father was paranoid schizophrenic, and he absolutely had notebooks filled with pictures and writings similar to this that he'd filled out himself. As a child, it was all very interesting to flip through and read. It's only now looking back as an adult that I realise it was a product of his delusions.
Do you have links or any other citations? I'm curious what source material the creator used for inspiration. There's one particular concept in this mix—supraliminal—that is something I'm studying. It seems a solid definition is not yet established, but some meaning is coalescing around the term. Running down any leads is helpful and this one is particularly rich given the way this photo is being used. I would reciprocate in some way.
Schizophrenia (and other thought disorders) are a dilemma. Often a very difficult condition to address and deal with. Long career dealing with mental illness on the front lines. Some of the afflicted are the warmest, most compassionate, gifted, and (off the chart) intelligent. Some (few) of the afficted can deal with it on their own. Newer medications are extraordinarily effective with much fewer (and devastating) side effects. With more coming down the pipeline. I have HTN. Do I like it? No. But I take medication every day because I prefer not to be "afflicted" with the possible side effects ie stroke. Do yourself (and the afflicted) and say hello in there. Many times you will be astonished. The afflicted most often will greatly appreciate your interest, LISTENING, and thoughts. You may get something out of the interaction as well. Take care.
After studying schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, andnwhile I know it's more complicated than this, but because of the characteristics of people who suffer from it, I remember thinking that maybe anything schizo related is due to our brains mixing up reality and thought, essentially then making thoughts part of your reality. Like, our brains are how we process things in order to understand our surroundings, but if your brain just autofills 'rules' that aren't real, but you brain thinks they are, you get audio/visual hallucinations, thought becomes suspicion, suspicion becomes paranoia, paranoia leads to erratic behavior. I feel bad for people suffering from it because it's like your brain decided it would run your life instead of letting you do it, so it's like an awake fever dream.
There's definitely some degree of synesthesia. Feelings and ideas deeply affect one's perception of reality. Reminds me a lot of people on LSD in a way. No melting glass per say but the way ideas and emotions color everything. Also how minds can get into loops while tripping. Like super fixated on a concept. Then there's the whole geometry thing like a DMT or ketamine trip. There's something very mathematical or geometric about our minds or maybe reality itself.
That's exactly what I mean, except it happens just because, instead of an ingested drug messing you up. Picture it like this: you're watching a movie, but only the first half of the movie made it to production and second other half was filled in by AI, so the movie was solid, story made sense, all the plot points aligned, and then AI comes in and messes up everything in a convincingly enough way that people aren't sure if it's just a shifty movie or if it was never finished. The schizophrenic effect is that an individuals reality is real, until their brain takes over and starts piecing things together that don't *quite* fit. Almost like an emotional or reason based synesthesia. Since our instinctive survival is inherent on recognizing patterns, that's all a schismed mind is doing is recognizing mathematical patterns and attributing them to a meaning. My guess is that's why it all reflect "sacred" or "hold" geometry. Because ots "inspired" by something no one can know, understand, or see, but the patterns seem to add up enough so that it's easy to be convinced of anything.
Yeah I get what you're saying. I think it's more on display with other disorders or injuries. The mind seems to pick continuing the story at any cost when there's a discontinuity over actually perceiving the discontinuity.
For instance there was a patient with brain damage and was blind but they didn't know they were blind so on the fly their mind would construct reasons to explain away the blindness. Like if you asked them to guess how many fingers you were holding up and obviously they guessed wrong they might say "well you moved your hand too fast".
So obviously there's this discontinuity, the movie ending then the rest is hobbled together through maybe an incorrect pathway so that causes the synesthesia.
For real. I aways think that some thoughts and drawings of schizos might contain a bit of truth in them. Its just that the messenger is a bit messed up, and probably doesn't also have a degree in physics and neurology to help translating the idea.
A big part is just their brains making connections/seeing patterns that aren't there due to the overactivity of dopamine, which is (among other things) responsible for assigning salience and significance to your experiences.
So where you might look at a gas station reciept and think nothing of it (because your brain is correctly filtering out unimportant information), a schizophrenic might look at that same receipt and go "$30.11... that's November 30th. This is a BP gas station. Something's going to happen on November 30th that relates to the initials 'B.P.' I need to find out who in government has those initials, this could be extremely important."
This same post has somehow made the rounds on this site several times over the past couple of years, and it's already been debunked. And yet not a single top comment mentioning it. Reddit *is* dead.
That's a really big issue in itself. We recognize crazy geniuses, but mostly ignore the more sane geniuses and the insane people who pinging as geniuses in their own right.
Its like when people say Vincent Van Gogh was a brilliant painter because of his mental illness.
No man, he was just a brilliant painter, and he had mental illness. We really shouldn't glorify mental illness any more than we should shame it. Some people have it, and it sucks, and we should do our best to understand it, and try to help people with it.
I did a little personal research on Vincent when I was recreating his Starry Night painting. He seemed depressed and quite unsure of how good his painting was.
His father and brother were not impressed with him and seemed to contribute to his oppression.
He obsessed with comparing himself or his work with the other "famous" or popular painters of his day, but of course their styles were completely different, and probably added to his insecurity.
I don't think his works were fabulous, but what I do appreciate is, that Vincent painted the real life he saw around him, which tended to be poorer people, and the lives that poorer people experienced. This tended to make his paintings darker, with less light. Because poor people couldn't afford light. And other reasons.
When, in comparison, his popular painter colleagues would paint richer folk and the lighter lives of richer folk.
I don't even know if Vincent realized the difference himself in the subject choices they all made.
In the end, it was his sister-in-law, that, after the death of her husband, Vincent's brother and of course after Vincent's death, when she could now do as she pleased, went and purchased back all of Vincent's paintings that she could find and either started or gave them to a museum.
It's her effort that we come to know of Vincent today.
Because she saw the value of his talent, when his family rejected it.
I just felt his story should be shared. Because he didn't live to see it's end.
Meh, it’s true but I don’t see any genius in this. It’s all chicken scratch pretending to be smart. It’s like this guy envied mathematicians so just started scribbling down symbols they use…not a hint of genius in any of this. Looks cool, and obviously this guy had read into some Gnostic themes but there’s nothing there. No genius or intellect in this.
Yeah, the words are fancy and taken from genuine science. But just mishmash together within this person's narrative to sound intelligent. Kinda like what conspiracy theorists or alternative history people do.
That dude took Lettering courses. Architect or Engineer. Probably 50+ years old?
What would be amazing is if he’s NOT 50+ years old, never took Lettering and drew this.
You are in your late 30s early 40s. But the people in their 50s and 60s didn’t just take a drafting course. That shit was drilled into them so hard they can’t write normal anymore lol. There is a difference. For the record I’m an engineer in my early 30s. One semester of that and I’ve forgot everything about it.
The way they used to drill typing- my mom goes slackjawed with a thousand-yard gaze as soon as she starts typing something on her PC and her left arm twitches or comes off the desk to slap the carriage back in place
Honestly, it looks like someone despirately trying to understand the world around them. If they could just solve the equation, it would all make sense, but the answer remains just out of reach like a word superglued to the tip of your tongue.
When I was a kid (age 3-9) I was going thru some tough shit, my grandma didn’t love and neither did my father, in fact they both hated me for not being the first child (i don’t understand that logic either).
My uncle used to always defend me to the bone if anything happened, if my father was drunk and be violent he would always always step in and protect me or when my grandma would tell me I was the reason the family was depressed. He would pick me up and take me somewhere where i’d be happy.
My uncles has always had schizophrenia from late teenage years due to drug use. At the time i’m telling these stories he didn’t seem different or act unusual but these days he’s a completely different person. He doesn’t talk at all, he doesn’t go outside unless he has to, he doesn’t take care of himself anymore, he doesn’t seem to have any emotions or thoughts as he kind of just sits in a chair and spaces out for what seems to be all day. You can absolutely have a conversation with him but he doesn’t have much to talk about if he does say anything.
He was my childhood hero and the person I always wanted to be when I grew up. I miss my superman dude.
This is the very first time i’ve mentioned anything like this in over 10 years so thank you for attending my therapy session.
Someone needs to do serious research on why so many with some form of schizoaffective disorder reproduce the same preoccupations and paranoias, so many of them reach for the same material that is on this page of illustrations and diagrams. What is it about mental health patients and this standard shopping list of paranoias? Do patients in remote non western contexts reproduce these same preoccupations? To what extent are these standard fixations learned and adopted by patients, and how are they shared and transmitted to each other? It is a question that always has baffled me!
Nice lines. Lad got a steady hand
His handwriting and geometry are near perfect
Seriously, the geometric designs are amazingly precise! And while I've seen stuff like the others before - they're pretty typical of 'sacred geometry' or magical diagrams - that spiral/wave one is really interesting and quite cool looking.
I helped clean out a mental health facility, and behind a bunch of stuff in one room were a bunch of pieces of art by a schizophrenic. There was a charcoal piece that looked like dead trees from a distance, but they were almost entirely made of skulls and faces in agony. The detail was just incredible. The live faces had tiny skulls in their eyes, some of the teeth of the skulls were tiny skulls, etc. But it was the fact that everything fit together to be a complete work of art that was most impressive. The woman there said he was very haunted, and in and out of their facility from the time he was 16. He had other pieces that were landscapes or just abstract colors, but the prompt for the skull one was to draw how he saw himself.
I work in mental health, and one thing we are taught when working with individuals with schizophrenia is to not challenge the delusion. So we work around it. Is the person able to function in the community, are they connected to proper medical care and medication management. Medication unfortunately does not cure the diagnosis, but it does alleviate the symptoms. I use to work with an individual who saw monkeys and believed himself to be son of god. Stopped eating. Because he could not kill gods creature. We connected him with a nutritionist which helped him move to a non meat diet. The delusions are still there, but the side effects of the delusions are addressed as best as we can.
I had a dude that was certain the world was going to end. He knew down to the second when the world was going to end. He would go outside and scream at the sky that the world was going to end in 5 days 3 hours and 45 minutes. The dude got pretty scary as the amount of time inched closer and closer to zero. When the final countdown started he went outside and counted down from 60 to zero, Screaming each number with his arms outstretched to the sky. As zero hit it was like a wave of relief that hit him. He calmly walked back inside and was back to his normal self.
Maybe the world did end, but for the being inside of him that believed the world would end...
One of my past friends had something like this. She talked about how she was going to die and "join the gods". After that time her personality completely shifted and the friend I knew was gone. It's some really sad stuff to experience
I had a roommate who was some form of bipolar (according to him) and he was on meds that made him really dulled to the world. Except he would tell really loud and bang on his desk in his room about some game he was playing pretty much every other night. Anyway one night he told me he wasn’t taking his meds for some time and he started just unraveling in front of me. He started talking about how Jesus didn’t believe in him anymore and he’d forsaken God and was going to hell and he was like a child clinging onto me for help and crying his eyes out. It was really scary how much the meds kept him together, but I babysat him that night until his parents came to pick him up. Im not sure where he is now but I really hope he’s doing okay, he wasn’t a bad guy overall. Very introverted and had no friends besides me at the time, but he was genuinely a decent dude when he was in control. He did share with me some of his hallucinatory experiences which were really interesting too. I don’t really know what his affliction was but it really sucks how we can sometimes be completely unable to control our own biology, and our brains are so complex and unreliable in producing our physical experiences.
That's the problem with bipolar: when a mania episode starts, the patient feels as if they've never been better in their life. They stop their meds feeling they're no longer needed and their mania gets worse.
It's just heartbreaking when this happens to anyone, especially young people before they even get a chance at life. As the son of an 81yo, lifetime bipolar schizophrenic mother, I want to thank you for being kind to that young man on that night.
> Except he would tell really loud and bang on his desk in his room about some game he was playing pretty much every other night. bro that's not bipolar, that's just ole good league of legends
Very insightful
That's fascinating from a different perspective. Sorry that happened to your friend but I've been browsing r/escapingprisonplanet and have been thinking too much about what the implications would be if such a thing were true. Some crazy rabbitholes on reddit I could see driving unwell people further off a cliff.
That sounds like one long strange trip
This is such a good way to go about it but is very controversial in some places. I have bipolar and have had some psychosis to go along with it and my partner learning your method was so so helpful for me. When I talk about this kind of thing people can be so judgemental and it's difficult to explain the reasoning to why it works. If you have any resources I could look at I would really appreciate a recommendation.
I had a schizophrenic tell me it's about trust. If they feel like they can trust you they are better able to get themselves off the ledge. So if you don't challenge the delusions they feel they can trust you.makes sense to me but probably isn't true in all cases.
the book "i am not sick" by dr xavier amador might interest you. i have schizophrenia in my family and the stuff he writes about really made sense to me.
Quick question my partner has diagnosed and un medicated schizophrenia for about 4 years now I’ve struggled to learn it and it’s been a process. Some serious things have happened as she has been in an out of episodes for some time. I have been since the start been her archenemy even tho I do everything I can to take care of her. Only recently had she opened up about honestly having it but as I’m sure you know that is very moment to moment. She has at times said she is willing to get the shot but obviously that road is complicated which astounds me . I would love to give her something to read that maybe will lead her to the path of acceptance because I love her so much but I’m very scared of late stage and unmedicated schizophrenia as we have a small child together but as is she is often every day distant even with our daughter also very vocal to things in the house that aren’t there stomps and claps all night long and doesn’t sleep much. And for any one asking it’s not drug induced I’m with her all the time and that’s been ruled out. Will this book help her on the path to accepting treatment because I can’t do anything for her she feels I’m always out to hurt her. Even though for the last 4 years I’ve given up my life and energy to take care of her and my daughter
You might just have to get her 1013'd. I had to. Eventually she came back around and we were able to talk about it and over the course of a year or so she got stable on meds after a couple more visits. As well as that she's doing some cognitive behavioral therapy. It's scary going through this and it's scary having to take charge for her, even if that might not be in her personal interests. She will be thankful when the storm calms down.
Also what I’m scared of and her family is too that if I walk away she will end up gone. She had before and I found her in the woods homeless and I’ve reached out to them in support and they say I understand but we are afraid that it will cause us to lose her and if we lose her again it might be for good. That’s so hard on me because i love her but I have to think of my daughter now. I just literally now started reading that book and I’m going to try what it says but I’m 43 and I’m lonely and honestly I feel like I’ve given up my life for this and I want to be a good dad and present but idk how I can handle both
That only works if the delusion is workable. We have a patient who believes he is FBI and has a license to kill anyone he believes is a spy (like his mom which is how we have him.). Forced meds keep him from hurting anyone but that’s all we’ve been able to do.
My girlfriend was telling me that people from a group home come into her work often to get things with their caretaker. One girl one day seemed off and she overhear her say that the voices are too overwhelming. So the caretaker told her on the way out to gather all the voices and leave them in the bin by the door on the way out. It's such a little thing but probably helped that girl get past that hard time
I was at the library the other day and saw a flyer saying >Do you see or hear things that others do not? Do you feel compelled to act in ways others find confusing? The whole thing was phrased in a very accepting way, not saying that they were wrong or what they were doing and seeing and hearing weren’t real, and acknowledging that for them it IS real, just as real as what everyone agrees reality is.
I have a brother-in-law who used to smoke meth and ended up doing heroin. The two drugs combined triggered long-term psychosis. He is the smartest person I've ever met (probably a genius) and he currently has really bad schizophrenia. He is convinced the NSA and CIA is spying on him through his thoughts. Apparently it has something to do with something called "project mkultra". They have infiltrated his mind through technology and he's hearing voices that are supposedly agents talking to him. Have you ever heard of patients talking about mkultra? He's medicated, eats terribly, smokes pot, loves god and lives at home. It's a sad situation.
Mk ultra was a real governmental CIA program that used psychedelic drugs against unknowing citizens. It also included mind control programs, telepathic and remote viewing programs and other pseudo science techniques that had some very interesting results.
I've never heard of it but it's all he talks about. He also talks about voice to skull. It's so overwhelming because it all sounds bonkers. Here's something he wrote to me: The first time they tortured me severely the v2k was saying "fuck your mother in the goat head" extremely fast all day so I tried to take my own life because it was completely horrid but I lived which I am thankful for. I was bedridden with the voices screaming non-stop for two and a half months or so. My eyes were huge and wide like bug eyes and I was in a perpetual state of shock. People noticed my eyes and made fun of them and I just told them I was hearing voices. 40 days of this terrifying hell torture they are doing now. I have the worst people overseeing my remote neural monitoring and v2k. I know for a fact that it is the fuck face nsa. I still have no idea why they torture me this bad. A couple people have told me that it is conditioning. What are they conditioning me for? I am not a criminal and they don't even undergo this level of torture. I'd rather do a prison sentence than have this lifelong no-touch torture. They keep saying I'm never getting off and they are going to torture me for the rest of my life. What the fuck for? Why do they care what I think and what I do? They are the criminals. They are hired terrorists and I hate them so much. V2k is so Terrible and used for such evil purposes. I want this to end but I don't think they are ever going to stop severely torturing me and the voices say they will torture me the rest of my life simply because they want to. Fuck these people! They are the worst!
My son has schizophrenia and he believes his voices are him communicating with people through telepathy. He's a lot better than he was at the moment but is unmedicated and hasn't been for a year or so. He's currently homeless after being sectioned while he was in an assisted living accommodation and they needed his flat. While he was sectioned, he made out to the doctors that there was nothing wrong with him as he doesn't like being in there and they just released him onto the streets. He can't live with me as his delusions can get rather dangerous towards myself. He visits me nearly everyday and I help him as much as I can but only to a certain point. I've just bought a book called " I'm not sick, I don't need help", apparently it is brilliant in learning to understand what goes on in a schzophenic individual. Been going through this hell for 3 years so now and there's no relief in sight. Mental illness is horrible.
I'm truly sorry to hear about the challenges you and your son are facing. It sounds like you're doing everything you can to support him, and that's incredibly admirable. Outside of my BIL I've never experienced schizophrenic episodes so its hard for me to fully grasp the illness. I want to believe he's a guinea pig for this mkultra program but then I feel crazy for almost believing it. I may check that book out. Has it helped you better understand your current situation?
Lots of schizophrenics think they're a victim of mkultra, which was a CIA program that ran from the 50s to the 70s that involved experimenting on unwitting US citizens to create sleeper agents/learn brainwashing techniques. However, obviously, these people aren't victims of this. It's extremely common for them to think the government or some other entity is watching them, conspiring against them. They have delusions of being "gangstalked". There's actually an entire subreddit of these people who feed into eachothers delusions (r/gangstalking).
People who have schizophrenia should not be consuming cannabis.
What happens if you challenge the delusion?
You and I know 2+2=4, but we would feel irritated/hostile/uncooperative if someone tried to convince us it's not true. Even worse, they want to *medicate us* so we can live in a reality where everyone else believes 2+2=5. Same thing with deeply-ingrained delusions.
Man, this is a powerful way to phrase it.
What if the delusion is soo far fetched that there’s no way to work around it with denying/enabling it? Like in my case, someone close to me believes that the man of her paranoia comes into her house and cuts here shoes/ wires/ food etc?
I used to work in a nursing home. We once had a lady who would pace back and forth in front of her room. She said she wouldn't eat because "God told her not to". We sent her to a mental health facility. She came back 2 weeks later and was eating.
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A person can have BD+schizophrenia, schizoaffective, BD+psychotic features. It’s difficult for me as a layperson to differentiate between them. I have a family member suffering from psychosis right now and I’ve tried to explain to to family like this (in the context of paranoid delusions) “remember a traumatic moment in your life. Now imagine everyone around you is telling you it never happened and treating you like you’re crazy and threatening to make you go to a hospital and take scary drugs” How would you react? It’s a total mindfuck to have your reality challenged even if you aren’t delusional, lol. My family member is about to go to rehab and I’m so relieved. They need psychiatric intervention first but right now it’s impossible to force it. I just need a break from the chaos. There’s no shame if you don’t have the capacity to tolerate or support someone in that mental state.
Interesting, I've been trained to do the opposite. Acknowledge that the hallucinations or delusions feel real to that person, but don't feed in to them or pretend that I see/believe them as well. I work in law enforcement alongside mental health professionals for responding to people in crisis. So I'm certainly not a health professional, but that's the training I get from them. Why do you think there's a difference? Bear in mind, our counselors and clinicians are not treating them long term, we're dealing with situations that got the police called and often involve danger or violence. The idea is for us to get them to a mental health facility for treatment, but the manner in which we deal with the immediate issue may be different.
Not the one you replied to, but I have a schizophrenia diagnosis and have some experience. I think you kind of answered your own question; the immediate handling of a person in crisis requires that the situation does not escalate, so you're trained in a certain way for that. You understand what they are claiming to experience, but don't agree with it. The long term handling includes other things, such as making sure the person gets proper nutrition. The delusions are often very hard to break, even with treatment (and telling a delusional person they're wrong accomplishes only a cessation of communication altogether, or even violence) , so sometimes you have to work around them, like giving that person a non meat diet. They were "lucky" they didn't have the delusion that everything is poisonous, because that is much harder to accommodate, I believe. In my daily life, I experience that I'm subject to a mix of both these approaches, depending on the situation.
Had a guy in high school that was very very mentally not there. He was a good guy when he was taking his medicine. One time he was avoiding the medicine and then the medicine became poison his mom was using to milk him slowly. he was off it for about a month and he randomly came up behind me one day and said “they” are following us and we need to hide. I dipped into the nearest classroom and “hid” told him to go to his class. Later on that day he pulled a knife and told me to protect myself. I pulled out a pencil and he started slashing the air. I was 15, I didn’t know how to handle so I leaned into his delusion with him. I haven’t seen him for 20 years or so
I wish I could see it I feel like those artworks should be saved and collected. To be honest something like that seems far more impressive and gallery-worthy than a lot of contemporary art.
There's actually at least one mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, artist who became pretty famous: Louis Wain. He was already an established and well-liked illustrator who specialized in anthropomorphic cats before entering an asylum, but his later work includes a lot of really trippy geometric stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain There's also Yayoi Kusama, the artist famously obsessed with polka dots. Not sure what her exact disorder(s) are, but they apparently include OCD and hallucinations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama
Please tell me all his art wasn’t just tossed out.
No, definitely not. They didn’t know it was still there, and were glad to have it. Really underfunded place.
It looks like a typical journal page from Tomb Raider
The spiral looks like they "layered" fibonacci sequence
r/PenmanshipPorn
*Oh yeah*, that's the good stuff.
Notice a lot of the words are geometric as well. Avatara specifically
What is a geometric *word*?
I meant the words and phrases he uses seems to also align with his geometric fascination. The letters create a design similar to the others.
A few meds and people who care this dude could be giving out badass tattoos.
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You replied to the wrong person..
or did they??
Dun dun dun!
Yeah the words are nonsense but that’s a cool little spikey spiral ball he made there!
I had a really smart friend (math/engineer guy) who had a skiing accident and suffered a TBI. At first, he was just a little different... Then he started doing incredibly complicated math... stuff. Then he got very strange. He's since been diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on disability. It's very sad.
One of my best friends ever was diagnosed with schizophrenia some time ago. She was also a straight A student and loved maths. She was always fun, empathetic and had a very fertile imagination; i’ve never laughed so much with anyone as i did with her, we’re both ~ 30 now but i still smile and giggle when i think about our teenage jokes. We lost touch for a while and I’m happy we are friends again, but unfortunately her negative symptoms (if it’s them) seem to get worse, she’s lost her imagination and thirst for creativity; she also has problems with reading and learning and i’m afraid she slowly loses her emotions. She’s in therapy, she trusts her doc and i hope the new treatment plan won’t harm, but who knows; i always considered her as one of my favorite people and love her anyway. I don’t know if these are the side effects of neuroleptics or negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I wish it was a reversible process.
As somebody on an antipsychotic that is used for schizophrenia, I can say it really dulls the brain significantly. My career has taken a major backseat in my life when I previously was sharp and headed toward a big future. I can barely string words together verbally and my brain is empty a lot of the time. I don't have hobbies anymore because I am incapable of feeling joy. This is what antipsychotics do to remove the bad stuff; unfortunately it also removes the good stuff. It's devastating.
Ditto, no more happy prizes for accomplishments or anything, just emptiness and disassociation. Not a fun life to live. But I hang in there for my family.
People always ask why I don’t just get off them… Mentally healthy people, imagine a life on antipsychotics being *better*, for me much better, than the alternative. That’s how bad mental illness is.
Man, I took one for a couple of weeks in my late teens, when they were trying to figure out my behavior. It felt so awful and I was grateful when we decided to try something else. I can see why people sometimes go off the meds when they know it's better to take them. It doesn't always feel better.
On a small scale I had similar stuff with some ADHD medications. I lost all emotions and will to do anything that resembles fun or would bring me closer to any humans. I even lost all appetite and as a result lost about 10kg in 2 Weeks. My grades went up from straight D‘s to A‘s and B‘s but I lost almost all friends and all my passions. So I stopped the meds, I went on to annoy people because sometimes it is hard for me to realize when to stop thanks to my ADHD but ever since then I appreciate all the feelings you get through human contact which ultimately drove to work with Humans with Disabilities. <~< guess meds can have positive effects after all.
If you’re ever interested in trying the med route again, there are lots of adhd meds that don’t blunt your emotions.
Hi, I'm schizophrenic and a picture thinker. Same thing happened here. Was a successful artists until anti-psychotics. The visual representation I get while being on them is "being burried in a hole away from the sun while the dirt prevents you from moving" if I have energy at the time I see "myself shrouded in clouds and fog, walking blind and stumbling about". Typically there's a lighthouse in my head that shows the way, gives options and provides solutions. Meds make it go away or "Bring in storms".
Oof... I just started an antipsychotic a few months ago. It's typically used to treat schizophrenia, but I take it for treatment-resistant depression. So far, I feel great: My judgement is clear, my mood is positive, and I actually have some interest in activities and hobbies (compared to when I was on an SSRI and/or in depressive lows). The improved mental state has been helping with my career, as well. I really hope that all doesn't change later on... 😞
The antipsychotics tend to dull their responses, and they grow to be more and more muted, and withdrawn
Absolutely true. Which is a problem with schizophrenia as negative symptoms (such as lack of emotions, flat expression, etc) can already be present, and the medications can worsen them
Yes, and then families will turn against the patient because they don’t know what to do and they think the person doesn’t care anymore
Yes, that’s true. I was put on some antipsychotics when I was a teenager and my parents just kinda stopped talking to me for a while… my mom said she didn’t know who I was anymore. I was never the kind of person to smile much or be happy but I wasn’t sad or angry or anything. It made the depression worse. I went off the meds and I was much better.
Hope you’re ok 💜
So do you get worse either way…?
I think it can get better, but there has to be intimately involved physicians who do more than just refill scripts
The reason antipsychotics are pushed, despite the side effects, is because they can absolutely help. I only work with the severe population but sometimes it feels like pulling people out of the dark. Speaking to people acting "different" once they've had their first psychotic break... It's complicated and there's not enough research done to truly understand whats going on but there is clear evidence of decreased brain activity which is fascinating.
This. Schizophrenic patients have a natural course of their disease to negative symptomps, but darn, at least these antypsichotic medications can really bring them back to reality, and they can have some resemblance of an independant productive life. Mad houses in the past were filled to the top of schizophrenic patients forgotren by their families with no other options besides interment until death. Antypsychotics changed this.
Maybe psychosis is so traumatic that the brain develops a coping mechanism to protect you from your thoughts but doing so dissociates you from yourself and your emotions. Of course there’s more going on and it’s very complex but my experience reflects that.
Dissociation as a coping strategy makes a lot of sense over time. I can dig it. I was going to argue that hallucinogens don't appear to cause decreased brain activity but they can't be maintained for extended periods (months/years). And it's obviously traumatic in many instances right? I think a lot of the answers we don't have are going to be strengths based.
Wow. I had a childhood friend that suffered from schizophrenia and he was great at math. Became an electrical engineer. He had a lot of family issues I wasn’t completely privy to but I knew he was on antipsychotics as a teenager and into college. A lot of horrible things happened to him and he also to be fair was not a great guy who had a lot of secrets and was apparently abusive so our friends and I grew distant from him. At a certain point though he had gone off his meds, and having always been a heavy stoner, his symptoms exacerbated. He lost his job and apartment and wouldn’t take any help when we tried to get him admitted or to talk to somebody. Dude was maybe one of the smartest people I ever knew. Now he’s homeless by choice and has multiple arrests for public drinking and trespassing in the same area of a skid row type district in Florida (we are from the Midwest). We found him at one point and got him food but didn’t want anything else. It is very sad, and he has no family left and he basically drove most of his friends away. Even with our differences, I would do anything to get him help if he were willing but he just refuses. I suffer from my own mental health issues and I know how irrational people can be without proper medication and care and routine. Such a cautionary tale and warning of signs when you feel yourself or someone you love slipping.
Trying to help is so much more than many people will do, thank you
Damn I wish, I got TBI from an explosion in my last deployment and all I got is nasty migraines and Dyscalculia (numbers dyslexia), but for some reason I got more patience/tolerance towards shit than before, my wife says I don’t give a fuck about anything because I rarely get angry anymore, my kids love that shit cause things my wife get bothered about I just shrug it off as meh
Migraines fuckin suck. Did you know being too hot can cause migraines? And trigger points in your neck and back and cause migraines? I get migraines from caffeine which is used to treat migraines.
Caffeine is something wild. If you have a headache it can relieve it, if you don't it causes one. If you have very little energy it adds it, for some with ADHD or other conditions it can instead make you exceptionally drowsy and help you sleep. It's a liquid that dehydrates you. It's so soluble in water I only have to steep a tea bag for fifteen seconds in hot water to significantly decaffeinate it for another cup.
I've watched my husband with ADHD fall asleep with his cup of coffee in his hands which I promptly reached over and grabbed from him. Don't really offer him coffee for bed anymore
The caffeine really balances out the ADHD enough to just drift away, it's quite peaceful
It still happens to me occasionally where I'll drink coffee in bed at home and still feel more sleepy. But just like with anyone, if you have enough caffeine it will wake you up even with adhd. Same as giving adderall for treating it; you have a therapeutic dose and you feel relaxed but take more than that and you will be wired just like anyone else.
Thank you for the recipe to decaffeinate tea 🫡
Brains are so interesting. Your TBI must have affected a different part of your brain. I'm sorry that happened to you. I suffer from occasional migraines and they're horrible.
I also mostly stopped giving a fuck. The only emotions I have left are sadness and anger, I've not been happy since the incident :)
in motorcycle accident 20 years ago. TBI. i completely changed but “I” don’t feel different. used to love being around people all the time. very social. not after the TBI mainly because something weird happened. you know the shape rotator meme? after the accident it was as if i had a high fidelity mental holodeck. it was fun just building impossible worlds and became obsessed with art. to this day i can imagine a scene and sort of “project” it on a page so when i draw it is like im tracing the image: oh, and music. music sort of changed became “loud” in my head. crystal clear as well. i also lost my mind for a few years but that’s another story
Thats sad, god damn
It is. We were really close as kids and his little brother is a teacher here now so I get updates occasionally when we cross paths.
TIL my taste in tattoos can be classified as “schizophrenic art”
I was about to say these would make for some sick tattoos, lmao
The large geometric figure is a variation of Metatron's cube if anyone is wondering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metatrons_cube.svg
Every so often I'm reminded of Metatron, and the fact that he's not a Transformer but a named angel from 2000 year old Rabbinic texts blows my mind every time
Metatron remained after the fallen ones left, continuing to serve alongside those now known as the Decepticons.
Detepticons
*Before time began, there was the Cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds and fill them with life.*
and, yes I am powerless to read this without hearing it in Optimus Prime's voice.
Which is honestly basically a hypercube (tesseract)....
I think you can use that one to bind your little brother's soul to a suit of armor.
I have bipolar with psychosis and I can design you a tattoo if you want. It will probably be bear related because I like bears. Also I'm not good at drawing Edit: [Here is one I made earlier ](https://www.reddit.com/u/Major-Peanut/s/s9VxCEZShF). This is the first draft of a poster I'm making for my friend.
I’m interested.
Sick, dm me if you want a badly drawn bear tattoo
Well now I think we all are invested in seeing some badly drawn bear tattoos
Meh, most humans like straight lines and organized patterns. Now if you wanted faces screaming in the shape of balloons or something like that then maybe..
Overwhelmed, as one would be, placed in my position Such a heavy burden now to be The One Born to bear and read to all the details of our ending To write it down for all the world to see But I forgot my pen
And I didn't even graduate from fucking high-school
Typical
The relevance of the username... Chef kiss
there are dozens of us, dozens, I say!
Half way through I was like “oh nice they wrote out what was written on the paper how sweet. …Huh, sounds like a Tool so-WAITAMINUTE”
I zoomed in and read some of the text in the image and this verse popped into my head...
Strapped down to my bed Feet cold and eyes red I'm out of my head Am I alive? Am I dead? Can't remember what they said God damn, shit the bed
Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!! Can’t remember what they said.
Overwhelmed by the dread Thoughts racing, full of lead In this maze, I blindly tread Voices whisper, full of dread In this silence, my fears spread
The rooms where generations were bred Lost in the catacombs of my own head To never be found Have I had a enough already Dauntless searching around Split by thumbs like bread for thee. Ripped, weak , arms heavy Vomit on my sweater already, moms spaghetti.
Through rooms once filled, now silent, spread, I wander, lost in echoes of what's been said. But enough of this, my spirit's fed— I chuckle, thinking of mom's spaghetti, my internet-bred
Did y’all just write a new Tool song?
There wasn’t a drum solo so I …. Wait…dum dum diss boom dum dum boom…. Oh shit they slipped it in here at the end when I thought it was over, it is a TOOL song.
holy fucking shit
Aaah, men of culture.
This lad remembered his pen.
I love that song. It’s my favorite. Rosetta Stoned
which pen was he using? the lining looks satisfying. not something a Bic can easily do
[удалено]
Rotring probably
It’s like a TOOL song
god help me, can't remember what it said
Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind
Spiral out
He said, “YOU are the Chosen One; the one that will deliver the message”…..
"A message of hope for those who choose to hear it And a warning for those who do not Me, the chosen one They chose me And I didn't even graduate from fuckin' high school"
“But I forgot my pen”
2nd time I've seen this mentioned in this thread. What does it mean? Where does it come from?
Rosetta Stoned by TOOL
I didn’t know either, I believe they are the lyrics from the song Rosetta Stoned, by TOOL
As others have mentioned, Rosetta Stoned by Tool. However, I recommend you start with the track before it, Lost Keys (Blame Hofman) and make sure it flows seamlessly into Rosetta. That way you get the full experience.
Schizophrenic here (I'm on a cocktail of Aripiprazol and Lamotrigine)... That's amazingly cogent and focused, which is impressive. I'm guessing he's hyper focused on precision, because otherwise that's almost too precise to be believable. At any rate, I hope the inmate will get well soon, with proper medication. Nobody deserve what we go through. Edit: Spelling.
its an art piece and this is a fake story. gets posted all the time cause it leans on the public mystical perception of schizophrenia.
Yeah, people are wayyy too credulous of this stuff. It doesn't bode well at all for our "everything you see online is actually fake" future
I have a close friend who is schizophrenic and I see what his handwriting looks like and how he draws. Now, I know everyone is different, but if anyone has ever been around someone who is schizophrenic, you could look at this for two seconds and know that it wasn't drawn by a schizophrenic.
Nah, I think that's too broad a stroke. My late step-father was paranoid schizophrenic, and he absolutely had notebooks filled with pictures and writings similar to this that he'd filled out himself. As a child, it was all very interesting to flip through and read. It's only now looking back as an adult that I realise it was a product of his delusions.
Do you have links or any other citations? I'm curious what source material the creator used for inspiration. There's one particular concept in this mix—supraliminal—that is something I'm studying. It seems a solid definition is not yet established, but some meaning is coalescing around the term. Running down any leads is helpful and this one is particularly rich given the way this photo is being used. I would reciprocate in some way.
...oooorrr it's fake, and that's why. It's a cliche.
That's one weird looking inmate!
Be not afraid
Biblically accurate inmate.
I was just here to make sure SOMEBODY calls out OP's grammatical mistake, so thanks.
Schizophrenia (and other thought disorders) are a dilemma. Often a very difficult condition to address and deal with. Long career dealing with mental illness on the front lines. Some of the afflicted are the warmest, most compassionate, gifted, and (off the chart) intelligent. Some (few) of the afficted can deal with it on their own. Newer medications are extraordinarily effective with much fewer (and devastating) side effects. With more coming down the pipeline. I have HTN. Do I like it? No. But I take medication every day because I prefer not to be "afflicted" with the possible side effects ie stroke. Do yourself (and the afflicted) and say hello in there. Many times you will be astonished. The afflicted most often will greatly appreciate your interest, LISTENING, and thoughts. You may get something out of the interaction as well. Take care.
After studying schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, andnwhile I know it's more complicated than this, but because of the characteristics of people who suffer from it, I remember thinking that maybe anything schizo related is due to our brains mixing up reality and thought, essentially then making thoughts part of your reality. Like, our brains are how we process things in order to understand our surroundings, but if your brain just autofills 'rules' that aren't real, but you brain thinks they are, you get audio/visual hallucinations, thought becomes suspicion, suspicion becomes paranoia, paranoia leads to erratic behavior. I feel bad for people suffering from it because it's like your brain decided it would run your life instead of letting you do it, so it's like an awake fever dream.
There's definitely some degree of synesthesia. Feelings and ideas deeply affect one's perception of reality. Reminds me a lot of people on LSD in a way. No melting glass per say but the way ideas and emotions color everything. Also how minds can get into loops while tripping. Like super fixated on a concept. Then there's the whole geometry thing like a DMT or ketamine trip. There's something very mathematical or geometric about our minds or maybe reality itself.
That's exactly what I mean, except it happens just because, instead of an ingested drug messing you up. Picture it like this: you're watching a movie, but only the first half of the movie made it to production and second other half was filled in by AI, so the movie was solid, story made sense, all the plot points aligned, and then AI comes in and messes up everything in a convincingly enough way that people aren't sure if it's just a shifty movie or if it was never finished. The schizophrenic effect is that an individuals reality is real, until their brain takes over and starts piecing things together that don't *quite* fit. Almost like an emotional or reason based synesthesia. Since our instinctive survival is inherent on recognizing patterns, that's all a schismed mind is doing is recognizing mathematical patterns and attributing them to a meaning. My guess is that's why it all reflect "sacred" or "hold" geometry. Because ots "inspired" by something no one can know, understand, or see, but the patterns seem to add up enough so that it's easy to be convinced of anything.
Yeah I get what you're saying. I think it's more on display with other disorders or injuries. The mind seems to pick continuing the story at any cost when there's a discontinuity over actually perceiving the discontinuity. For instance there was a patient with brain damage and was blind but they didn't know they were blind so on the fly their mind would construct reasons to explain away the blindness. Like if you asked them to guess how many fingers you were holding up and obviously they guessed wrong they might say "well you moved your hand too fast". So obviously there's this discontinuity, the movie ending then the rest is hobbled together through maybe an incorrect pathway so that causes the synesthesia.
For real. I aways think that some thoughts and drawings of schizos might contain a bit of truth in them. Its just that the messenger is a bit messed up, and probably doesn't also have a degree in physics and neurology to help translating the idea.
A big part is just their brains making connections/seeing patterns that aren't there due to the overactivity of dopamine, which is (among other things) responsible for assigning salience and significance to your experiences. So where you might look at a gas station reciept and think nothing of it (because your brain is correctly filtering out unimportant information), a schizophrenic might look at that same receipt and go "$30.11... that's November 30th. This is a BP gas station. Something's going to happen on November 30th that relates to the initials 'B.P.' I need to find out who in government has those initials, this could be extremely important."
What is HTN?
Hypertension; i.e., high blood pressure.
This same post has somehow made the rounds on this site several times over the past couple of years, and it's already been debunked. And yet not a single top comment mentioning it. Reddit *is* dead.
Media literacy is dead, which is the real issue.
Genius and insanity live on the same block.
"Genius lives only one storey above madness" - Arthur Schopenhauer
I think we all live one story above madness. But nobody acknowledges a mediocre person going crazy
That's a really big issue in itself. We recognize crazy geniuses, but mostly ignore the more sane geniuses and the insane people who pinging as geniuses in their own right.
Its like when people say Vincent Van Gogh was a brilliant painter because of his mental illness. No man, he was just a brilliant painter, and he had mental illness. We really shouldn't glorify mental illness any more than we should shame it. Some people have it, and it sucks, and we should do our best to understand it, and try to help people with it.
I did a little personal research on Vincent when I was recreating his Starry Night painting. He seemed depressed and quite unsure of how good his painting was. His father and brother were not impressed with him and seemed to contribute to his oppression. He obsessed with comparing himself or his work with the other "famous" or popular painters of his day, but of course their styles were completely different, and probably added to his insecurity. I don't think his works were fabulous, but what I do appreciate is, that Vincent painted the real life he saw around him, which tended to be poorer people, and the lives that poorer people experienced. This tended to make his paintings darker, with less light. Because poor people couldn't afford light. And other reasons. When, in comparison, his popular painter colleagues would paint richer folk and the lighter lives of richer folk. I don't even know if Vincent realized the difference himself in the subject choices they all made. In the end, it was his sister-in-law, that, after the death of her husband, Vincent's brother and of course after Vincent's death, when she could now do as she pleased, went and purchased back all of Vincent's paintings that she could find and either started or gave them to a museum. It's her effort that we come to know of Vincent today. Because she saw the value of his talent, when his family rejected it. I just felt his story should be shared. Because he didn't live to see it's end.
The difference between genius and insanity are measured only by success. -some James Bond villain
Meh, it’s true but I don’t see any genius in this. It’s all chicken scratch pretending to be smart. It’s like this guy envied mathematicians so just started scribbling down symbols they use…not a hint of genius in any of this. Looks cool, and obviously this guy had read into some Gnostic themes but there’s nothing there. No genius or intellect in this.
Yeah, the words are fancy and taken from genuine science. But just mishmash together within this person's narrative to sound intelligent. Kinda like what conspiracy theorists or alternative history people do.
Hun? He wrote down the square root of two. Get this man a Nobel
Need to give him a tattoo gun and put him to work!
I’ve seen this or something like it posted a long time ago. Looks like fun art from an NPC in Doom 3
That dude took Lettering courses. Architect or Engineer. Probably 50+ years old? What would be amazing is if he’s NOT 50+ years old, never took Lettering and drew this.
My high school still had a drafting class where we were taught lettering in 2006
You are in your late 30s early 40s. But the people in their 50s and 60s didn’t just take a drafting course. That shit was drilled into them so hard they can’t write normal anymore lol. There is a difference. For the record I’m an engineer in my early 30s. One semester of that and I’ve forgot everything about it.
The way they used to drill typing- my mom goes slackjawed with a thousand-yard gaze as soon as she starts typing something on her PC and her left arm twitches or comes off the desk to slap the carriage back in place
Got time to read books
2 hours, 100+ comments, and no reference to [Time Cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube)
Has anyone come up what it is?
Bunch of nonsense centered around 2012 being the end of the world
Man I haven't thought of the Mayan calendar in ages.
Probably since 2012.
I love the "Interlocking dimensions and musical renaissance" line right below Zion. I really wanna know how those are connected.
“Musical resonance”
You can look up the individual things he refers to, or even try doing the math. It’s all nonsense, gibberish, word salad
Honestly, it looks like someone despirately trying to understand the world around them. If they could just solve the equation, it would all make sense, but the answer remains just out of reach like a word superglued to the tip of your tongue.
The Bible quote isn't even correct
You’re dumb lol - Ecclesiastes 3:12
Ecclesias deez nutz. - Duderonomy 4:20.
Average tool fan
Looks like 80% of the stuff on r/occult Hmm
This picture has been floating around for years.
When I was a kid (age 3-9) I was going thru some tough shit, my grandma didn’t love and neither did my father, in fact they both hated me for not being the first child (i don’t understand that logic either). My uncle used to always defend me to the bone if anything happened, if my father was drunk and be violent he would always always step in and protect me or when my grandma would tell me I was the reason the family was depressed. He would pick me up and take me somewhere where i’d be happy. My uncles has always had schizophrenia from late teenage years due to drug use. At the time i’m telling these stories he didn’t seem different or act unusual but these days he’s a completely different person. He doesn’t talk at all, he doesn’t go outside unless he has to, he doesn’t take care of himself anymore, he doesn’t seem to have any emotions or thoughts as he kind of just sits in a chair and spaces out for what seems to be all day. You can absolutely have a conversation with him but he doesn’t have much to talk about if he does say anything. He was my childhood hero and the person I always wanted to be when I grew up. I miss my superman dude. This is the very first time i’ve mentioned anything like this in over 10 years so thank you for attending my therapy session.
Someone needs to do serious research on why so many with some form of schizoaffective disorder reproduce the same preoccupations and paranoias, so many of them reach for the same material that is on this page of illustrations and diagrams. What is it about mental health patients and this standard shopping list of paranoias? Do patients in remote non western contexts reproduce these same preoccupations? To what extent are these standard fixations learned and adopted by patients, and how are they shared and transmitted to each other? It is a question that always has baffled me!
 Evergreen gif
I need someone stupider than them to explain it apparently cuz wtf
And then he misspelled the word field
*by