What is Schizophrenia?

Every time I've approached people online about this, they just call me stupid and give me answers that to me apparently have nothing to do with it. The most I've learned about Schizophrenia was from the "Schizophrenia for Dummies" book I found online.

One ground fact I want to get across to anyone new to schizophrenia is that it is not multiple personality disorder. There is no "Jacob #2 says hello". That has absolutely nothing to do with Schizophrenia.

This actually taught me a lot, and the main thing I bring up that everyone just hatches an egg about is, the different types of symptoms. Positive, Negative, and Cognitive. Don't get the wrong idea with the Positive symptoms, that's just the title. Its still schizophrenia and in reality there's nothing positive about it.

Negative Symptoms:

• An inability to experience simple pleasure from people or things
  around him: This is known as anhedonia.
•  Lack of initiative, motivation, or willfulness: This is known as avolition.
•  Lack of or limited speech: The person may be slow in responding, have
  only a limited range of response, or not even respond at all. This is
  known as alogia.
•  A lack of emotions or feelings: The person may look expressionless —
  not showing any signs of happiness, excitement, or anger. This is known
  as flat or blunted affect. Some research suggests that this may be more a
  matter of appearance rather than a reflection of the individual’s inability
  to feel emotions

Positive Symptoms:

• Hearing, in the form of auditory hallucinations: The person hears voices
  or sounds that aren’t there. Auditory hallucinations are the most
  common type.
• Sight, in the form of visual hallucinations: The person sees something
  that isn’t really there. Visual hallucinations may be visions or signs to
  which the individual with schizophrenia attaches great meaning or
  significance.
• Smell, in the form of olfactory hallucinations: The person smells odors,
  usually bad ones, like rotting organic matter, that no one else smells.
• Touch, in the form of tactile hallucinations: The person feels the presence
  or touch of someone or something when no one is actually present.
  People with both mental illness and substance-use disorders commonly
  feel bugs crawling over their bodies (sometimes as a result of using
  cocaine).

Cognitive Symptoms: 

"If the person returns to school or work, tasks that were in the past very
doable, can now seem insurmountable. For example, the person may be
unable to focus or concentrate. Neuropsychologists have devised and
administered very specific tests to identify the particular thinking problems
and where they occur in the brain.

Working memory (the ability to hold a fact in mind to be used later — for
example, to remember that the 4 p.m. train will be on track no. 5 has been
found to be impaired in many people with schizophrenia, as have verbal abilities.
Cognitive symptoms make it extremely difficult for some people with
schizophrenia to carry out what seem like simple tasks or to be able to hold
down a job. For example, people with this type of cognitive problem should
choose jobs that maximize their skills and minimize the need for working
memory. (It might be difficult for them to be waiters who have to remember
complex orders in a busy restaurant.)"

 The disease till today has absolutely no cure, but there ARE treatments, and you CAN in fact overcome the disease. Some people live with it for life, some kill themselves, but there are select possibilities that someone can literally grow out of the schizophrenia. The common ages for schizophrenia to occur are roughly around ages 21-24, so if you're young you have nothing to worry about. Though it is quite possible obviously.

Monistic Idealism. - Attempt at Explaining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monistic_idealism


I learned about Monistic Idealism through my English teacher, Dan Bristol. He barely brought the subject up, practically just flying through a sentence and those 2 words caught my attention.

To me as I interpreted this, its a theory, belief, etc. That is just based around everything in the universe existing merely in consciousness. Now this is actually pretty interesting, because we can't really prove anything outside of our own conscious. People usually start to become skeptical of things similar to that around age 10 even. I would love to say that its unlikely, but its the only theory I've found personally that wasn't possible to disprove but couldn't necessarily be proved. Religion is both, can't be proved or proven. This has a slim line of possibility.


Me posting this is obvious. Does it exist to you? Do you exist to me? And do I even exist? To what degree do I even exist, and what am I?

It breaks down farther and farther, but it all concludes to the idea that none of those thoughts are possible to prove outside our own mind. It does tie somewhat like religion where you believe what's in your head, but this is much more literal.

Perfection. - Beginning my blog.

While thinking of a name for this blog, I was thinking about depth of things, and in the depth of my own thought on depth; I began to think about how damage is what makes us think in depth. How perfection would only make us stupid, and has always like it said been non-existent, but used for the metaphor of it.

When we make a mistake, we learn. We don't just do something perfect every time, if we don't mess up on anything, then there is no consistency with our abilities.

When I speak of perfection, it always reminds me of debates I've gotten into about normality too. What is normality? To me I would define it as a stereoscopically socially perfected personality. We can never reach it, but there still are people we look at in society as perfect so frankly as far as I'm concerned normality doesn't exist. Being weird, and other labels can be truthful to an extent, but generally lead back to the comparison of normality.

Weird how it all works out, huh?