Schizophrenia, only a difference, not a disease

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Gosh, I didn't know being crazy was a wonderful thing. I'd love to hear voices in my head and see strange people all the time and have them bug me when I don't want to hear them or see them. I'd love to believe there are cameras in my home and the government is spying on me. I'd love to commit crimes and murder just because the voices told me to or I believed I was sent out to do it.


^All sarcasm^


Schizophrenia is a very serious illness. My aunt has it and she is unable to live a normal life and she can't even take care of herself. She doesn't know who she is and she thinks she is someone else and she thinks she has been married four times and has eight children instead of two. She doesn't even know my own mother so my mother doesn't see her as alive anymore nor as her sister. She says her sister is gone.
I'd rather have it mild if I were to have it and have it treatable so I can still live my normal life instead of in a mental hospital or in a group home.

Schizophrenia and OCD, like autism, are conceived as spectrums. Aside from that, the similarities between the schizophrenic spectrum and the autism spectrum are almost nil.

What does this have to do with autism?

Wow, if your mother doesn't see her as alive or as her sister just because she doesn't know her, I sure hope that none of your mom's relatives get Alzheimer's. I hate to know what she'd think of them.

I've been involved with the psychiatric survivor and ex-patient movement for just about as long as I've been involved with the autistic rights movement. I've been in mental institutions and schools not only with other autistic people but with other people considered to have severe mental illnesses including schizophrenia (a label I once had myself). So I've known a lot of people that a lot of society sees ample reason to throw away and treat as defective.

And if you think they're just unaware of the way they're treated, you're as wrong as when people say that people with "LFA" are unaware of how they're treated and viewed. It was a "severely psychotic" girl who taught me practically the meaning of ableism when she said that society wants people to come out of a cookie-cutter and that if you aren't a cookie-cutter person then you get thrown in a mental institution. She was also the only person there who tried to pull the staff off of people they were abusing, while shouting at them in a way that made clear that she knew exactly what they were doing, and she paid dearly for it.

(And... having a relative view you as already dead? That strikes me as awful no matter what you have (and I know it's a common thing to say about "regressive" autistics). I've had similar experiences to that, because of losing certain skills, and it is every shade of horrid that it could possibly be, even if we're not supposed to know or understand who the people are that are saying that about us. Try lying down, tied with your arms alternately in a lot of pain and going numb because they're nearly pulled out of their sockets, in a tiny room, with people standing outside of it talking about how you don't exist anymore, how you're as good as dead, etc., because you've lost a whole bunch of skills that you were expected to always have (but that you knew it was only a matter of time before you lost them because you just couldn't sustain them). Try hearing people say they want the 'real you' back, when you know you're the same 'real you' you've been all along, and that they're the ones who have been out of touch with reality in that regard, because you were aware for far longer than they were that you couldn't keep up the act they wanted out of you. Then talk to me about someone else being considered "dead" by their relatives as if this is a statement about their condition rather than a statement about their relatives.)

Which reminds me, whoever said this stuff about crimes, it's a known fact that people with these diagnoses don't commit violent crimes at a higher rate than normal. They're more likely to have a crime committed against them. Most of them aren't murderers, and most murderers aren't them, either, it's really disturbing to hear that sort of propaganda repeated, nobody here would stand for it if it were about autistic people (and people do try to say things equal to that about us).

It always amazes me when I see autistic people who know full well that "But I have a relative who doesn't speak and bangs his head all the time, how dare you call any aspect of autism good?" is a fallacy, but then use exactly the same reasoning if anyone says they themselves (who have a particular other condition) find something positive about say, schizophrenia, or quadriplegia, or something else that people aren't "supposed" to find anything positive about. Then it becomes drag-out-the-horror-story time, and all of the analysis used to see why the stuff said about autism isn't accurate, is suspended in the rush to believe psychiatry or the medical profession about some other condition with no room for ever seeing it another way.

And believe me, there are a lot of people who'll do the reverse to us. They'll say one of those other conditions is fine, but either autism doesn't exist, or needs to be cured in all cases, or needs to be cured by psychoanalysis (yes I've heard this in parts of the psych survivor community), etc. Which leaves everyone unable to move beyond their particular condition, which is exactly the kind of medicalized splitting-apart that pervades the disability communities.

Meanwhile, people like me and others I know have hung out with other ex-patients to go down to the psych wards and try to keep an eye on staff who certainly don't want us there and do things to try to keep us out when we legitimately have a right to be there (and know people who are living there at that point). And hung out at places for people who are mainly currently in the psych system, and met people with the full range of viewpoints from "My condition is a disease" to "I get really good things out of my condition sometimes even if others see me as having a disease" to "I don't believe in labeling my experiences, good or bad, in medical terms, at all." And I heard all three of those in all "levels of functioning", as usual.

I've only once had a violent crime committed against me by a patient in a psych ward or anyone with any of these labels really, despite being around lots of people with these conditions while "unsupervised" -- and that person had a longstanding history of sexual assault, it wasn't just random "voices told me to do it" violence, but a secondary problem the person had unrelated to his level of reality contact (just as the sexual assault I experienced from an autistic person had nothing to do with autism). I've had many violent crimes, including attempted murder, committed against me by staff, and seen it happen to others as well all the time. And I've seen plenty of violence towards staff -- but somehow only towards staff, even though there were more of us than there were staff... if this were so random and nonsensical, we'd have hurt each other all the time, but that never happened. The few times there were staff who'd been diagnosed as psychotic, they were the only ones who never engaged in violence towards patients (because they knew full well what it's like), and never received it either. There was one woman there who had, and she could talk to anyone in a way that could calm them down, because she'd been there and wasn't doing mindless platitudes.

And as others have said, there's no one such thing as schizophrenia, there are incredibly varied experiences -- by which I mean far more varied than autism, which at least mostly seems to have things common to all forms, whereas schizophrenia doesn't -- so why is it that everyone's experience should be judged by some people's experience of themselves or even their relatives? I won't believe this just by a few people (some of whom don't even have the condition) saying "This is unilaterally awful and far worse than being autistic so it's definitely everything psychiatry claims it is," because I've known other people who either (a) disagree on the "awful" part, or (b) either agree or disagree on the "awful" part but believe that the medicalized and pathologized way of viewing these experiences is not the way to make them less awful. I know people who've set up entire support networks for people experiencing these things, because they know how awful some of the experiences can be, but who still view them as having some positive component, or as being a natural aspect of human difference (which in fact all disability is, whether you consider it "awful" or not -- since at least 20% of humanity will experience it directly in themselves, which strikes me as pretty common variation overall).

And those of you reacting in a knee-jerk way to the idea that even one tiny bit of these experiences could be positive or talked about in a non-pathological light, you're reacting just like some non-autistic people do who refuse to listen to autistic people who think there might be something even slightly positive or non-pathological about autism. I've been called a member of the "Autism Is Wonderful Crowd" before, even though that's not even close to my position, even though I'm far more forthcoming about some of the difficult aspects of being autistic than a lot of people who hold views that other people assume are similar to mine. Because that's how people stereotype views, if you say that pathologization may not be the best way to view something, then certainly you must think it's all wonderful and every aspect of it is just easy and wonderful and fun and exciting.

By the way, I've known people, in real life, who work on the Icarus project, and, they're real people, they're not people who act like life is perfectly wonderful all the time. They're not some kind of joke you can throw around, as if it's just beyond thinkable that anyone could possibly find anything beneficial whatsoever about being crazy, or about having a non-pathological view of what's called crazy at the moment, or who just plain think the psych system is messed up.

Very interesting perspective, anbuend. It's sad to see that psychiatry has become the new state church, able to incarcerate people for being deviants and declaring them mentally incompetent, demanding that their personnel gets to run the lives of the patients. Naturally I view most of the beliefs that delusional/psychotic people spawn as false, but some of it has merit, and they just might be able to get a perspective that people that participate in culturally enforced delusions aren't able to, something that might be of great value to mankind. Mankind in general is irrational, there are plenty of culturally enforced delusions even today, politically backed ones, but I won't start a flame war by mentioning which ones I'm thinking of. People with delusions diagnosed by psychiatry mostly just differ by having delusions of their own instead of the shared ones.

"Mental illness" and religion is pretty much the same thing. I do believe in an elusive god, but I'm skeptical of everything by nature, and I realize that the meaning to their lives that people with accepted faiths talk about is the same phenomena as the meaning "schizophrenics" might search for, a process in which they confirm their beliefs by filtering observations of reality. Rejecting the experiences of people labelled "mentally ill" might just set back mankind's understanding of its world. Just about everything in the world has proven to be more advanced than it first seemed, so a fear of being considered psychotic might cloud people's ability to uncover the full truth about various matters. I do always appeal to reason and Occam's razor of course, people should learn science, but I don't like that the beliefs of outsiders get much more scrutinized than those of established dogmas.

Opening one's mind is a slippery path though, so it might not be for everyone. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with psychiatry, but when I had just moved on my own during my late teens, things were a little stressful and I started moving on that path. I wouldn't say I ever came close to becoming mad or anything, but I do remember that I believed in some more stuff back then than I do now, and it didn't occur to me when I talked about it that people might find someone actually believing in this strange, but I saw it only as possibilities, I never tried to fight for these beliefs or act delusional. It scares me a bit that under the worst possible circumstances with ruthless doctors, someone might have considered that grounds for considering me mentally ill.

I also don't like this idea of the therapeutic state telling us we can't achieve this and that because of this and that condition. They're turning us into victims when they coerce us into believing that and offering entitlements based on a diagnosis. Barring an actual physical obstacle, almost anyone no matter mental make-up can become a productive person if he or she has to, but with the therapeutic state around, people become trapped instead. It saddens me to see the European "welfare" model apparently being exported to the US too. Human beings have adapted to deal with everything under the sun, yet become sorry excuses for people when someone else is taking care of everything for them. The person at fault is the one telling you that you can't make it on your own and offers you subsidies instead.

I won't participate in a validation of how wonderful it would be if certain forms of social assistance were not offered to anyone (and how pathetic people supposedly are who accept receiving it, and how people who need that assistance are not real contributing members of society), any more than I'll participate in a validation of how wonderful it would be if all of a certain kind of people would just accept what psychiatry wants for them (and how pathetic they are until and unless they do so, and sometimes even then still remain pathetic).

I often find that people who don't believe in a lot of what psychiatry does, seem to take a libertarian (small-l) stance as given. I don't know why, aside from the fact that most critiques of psychiatry have been from that standpoint. I much prefer one of the other disability rights stances on a lot of these things, which acknowledges human interdependence, while also acknowledging how a lot of the ways we're treated in the psychiatric (and other medical, but at least other medical has some science behind it) system are horribly harmful. I also think that people who need help because they are in severe emotional distress, whether because of delusions or not, ought to get it. I don't think that people ought to go through some of the things that I and other people I know went through without it. I don't think that a plug-and-play system of institutions, therapy, and drugs is the answer though, because it clearly hasn't worked for nearly anyone I've known in the system. Nor do I think that making certain sorts of people expendable is the answer.

My objection is not to psychiatry. I see one for my OCD. I object when psychiatry has flirted with social engineering, including defining what is and is not normal.

I actually had a psychiatrist too for a long time.

But I basically don't see psychiatry as a science, and suspect it would be more accurate if it scrapped everything and started over. I saw a psychiatrist because it was the best way for certain things to happen, but in a better world when it comes to psychiatry, it wouldn't be necessary -- some of it would be handled by neurology, the science of cognition, or other aspects of the medical and related fields, and the rest would be handled in a way that has far less to do with medicine.

I've also noticed a weird tendency for people (and please note this is a major generalization, and not about specific people) to have better experiences with psychiatry the more "mainstream" their diagnosis is. Or I guess, the higher on the psychiatric hierarchy. Depression, OCD, and a few other things seem to be seen as "okay" for people to have (at least to a point) and still be considered "normal" or "almost normal". Things like PTSD and bipolar seem to be somewhere in the middle, they can go either way. Schizophrenia and most other psychoses seem like pretty near the bottom of the hierarchy. And the closer to the bottom, the more thoroughly psychiatry tends to screw people over -- and I mean closer to the bottom by how you're classified, not by what your actual neurotype or mental state is or isn't.

But basically, the power structures inherent in psychiatry are dangerous to psych patients (unless they happen to luck out, which can happen, but the whole spectre of involuntary commitment and other things such as that remains), and the idea that it's a field of medicine, rather than a weird sort of hybrid of assorted things from psychoanalytic theory to neurology to assorted means of controlling people... just doesn't ring true for me. There are small elements of it worth saving, but not by putting up with the rest of it.

Reason why my mother doesn't see her sister alive anymore is because she has a different personality. She doesn't even remember her real past, the past she remembers is all in her head, none of it ever happened.


I'm the same way. I didn't even bother seeing my Dad's parents because they were gone too. They got memory loss and they can't take care of themselves anymore, they don't remember me or can't remember stuff at all. The grandfather I had, he was very strong and he could do anything. Drive, hike, fish, work on his land, take care of us grandkids. Then he started to fade off when I was in high school. My grandmother started to have problems after her mother died in 1994 at age 102. Her memory started to fade and she started to develope senile and then Alzheimers. I didn't see it till middle school. She still had her long term memory but couldn't remember anything recent like you watch a movie with her and she wouldn't remember seeing it the next day. Then she started to get Alzheimers and started to forget the people around her and me and my family and she lost her long term memory too. She finally got put in a home with other senior citizens. My grandfather died and she doesn't remember him at all which I knew was going to happen since she didn't even know who her own husband was. So I didn't really bother seeing them or bother to be with them because they were gone. But my Dad still saw them and now he visits his mother even though she doesn't remember him. I know my mother doesn't and I don't my brothers do either.

That happened, but it certainly doesn't mean that mental illness does not exist. Talk to anyone who has one, they'll tell you otherwise.

Only need to read page 2 & 5 to get it, but can read the hole of it if you want to...... Notice anything on page 2 & 5?

http://www.mss.mb.ca/booklet.pdf