Praise to the one who worked out schizophrenia in detail and scientifically in Wikipedia, but … Endogenous psychosis, dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway, infectious-immune rationale, clearly maladjusted affect, abnormal synaptic transmission of neurons … Thanks Wikipedia, but not today.
Our superstitious society, apart from knocking on unpainted wood, also practices surrounding some disease entities with anti-cult and assigning them randomly selected fatal properties. Cancer – Contagious, Avoid. Depression – what kind of depression there is, to get to work, not to invent miracles. Schizophrenia – aggressive madmen, hear voices … Let’s try to imagine, at least to a minimum degree, what happens in the closed and complicated inner worlds of the schizophrenic. What does he struggle with, what he fights for, how does he do it, and finally, is it really necessary to pull out a handy aspen stake, unpainted of course, from his pocket when he sees him?
Puzzle of a million double-sided pieces
There is no single schizophrenia or pattern schizophrenic, no fixed pattern to which symptoms can be easily attributed. – This disease is like a mosaic of various symptoms imposed on the personality of a specific person – says Alicja Rutkowska-Suchorska, a specialist psychiatrist and head of the Day Department of Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Leszno. – Schizophrenia is not only hallucinations and delusions, but also disturbed thinking when the patient talks about something but stops mid-sentence. Then he reports that his head was empty, he was lacking in thoughts. These are the so-called damaging, very common in schizophrenia. There is also a distraction of the way of thinking: a longer statement is devoid of order and logic, it concerns several different, completely unrelated matters.
One of the constant features of the disease is its episodic nature, which means that periods of intensity alternate in shorter or longer intervals with periods of calm. Even if the patient experiences delusions in the acute course of the disease, in 1/3 of cases such psychosis will happen to him only once in a lifetime. A large part of schizophrenics operating in the “episode to episode” system can live relatively ordinary, of course with the participation of a number of favorable factors, with proper treatment at the fore. It is becoming easier and easier to achieve, because modern psychotropic drugs work better than before, hit the unwanted symptom, and at the same time do not abound with nightmarish side effects.
Although the Greek name for the disease means the split of the mind, it is a mistake to identify it with the image of a man who speaks to himself with different voices and beats this “other self” in the face. Doctor Alicja Rutkowska-Suchorska describes schizophrenia as disintegration, splitting, disintegration of all mental functions. It manifests itself, for example, with a mismatch between emotional reactions and thoughts, which in turn may cause the patient, laughing, to talk about suicide plans.
The split of the mind can also be imagined as breaking a certain barrier that organizes and rationalizes reality. When it is leaky, they overflow, as if through a hole in a dam, and then mix real observations and ideas, words actually spoken by someone and voices that do not exist. When the mind is asleep, the demons wake up, the old truth (Wikipedia invites) and each of us has a head full of such demons. Imagine, however, that the head opens and the demons are leaking out into the gray everyday life. There is no longer a safe zone, no autonomy of normality, the demons are sober even when the mind is awake. When there is no escape, the chance to survive is to be locked in a psychotic space, because outside of it everything turns into scattered, double-sided puzzles, you cannot put them together or fit them. There is a schizophrenic in such a terrifying world, mixed with different realities.
Mind leak
Why does the mind split at all? And why is schizophrenia most common in people on the threshold of adulthood, which is why it is called the disease of young people? There is no definite answer to these questions yet. Doctor Rutkowska-Suchorska suggests the so-called the neurodevelopmental concept of schizophrenia:
– In simplified terms, it assumes that in people genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, the brain begins to develop incorrectly already in the prenatal period, which is additionally favored by, for example, viral infections of the mother (influenza!), Complications in childbirth, etc. As a result, already in the child’s brain there are slight morphological and functional abnormalities which manifest themselves as symptoms of schizophrenia in adolescence. This is favored by the abuse of psychoactive substances, including marijuana. Recently, schizophrenia debuts not preceded by a drug episode have been rare.
Another factor contributing to the onset of schizophrenia symptoms are the difficulties that a sensitive young person has in switching from a child’s mode of functioning to an adult and with adapting to the brutal requirements of the outside world. The peak incidence in men occurs at the age of 15-25, in women an explosion occurs on average ten years later, between the ages of 25 and 35.
The alleged aggression of patients with schizophrenia is a myth. If it does occur, usually in the form of autoimmune disease, the suicide rate among schizophrenic patients is as high as 10%. So there is no reason to be afraid of the sick, and the level of aggression is much higher, for example, in people addicted to psychoactive substances.
Hallucinations, inseparably associated with schizophrenia, most often occur in the auditory form, less often as visual hallucinations. A characteristic delusion is the patient’s conviction that others hear his thoughts, sometimes that he hears the thoughts of others, and his activity is reduced to a discussion with these voices. It is difficult for him to say that they do not exist, that they do not come from the outside, so he takes them seriously, which exhausts him to the extreme. This is how an airtight mind materializes, which does not screen its own projections from the real ones.
Schizophrenia is a serious and devastating disease, not cinematic madness, irrational frenzy, split aggressive personality. The schizophrenic is not an incurable psychopath, but rather a dissent with a scattered reality and a leaky barrier between the hallucinations that poison his life and the real world. He is looking for an escape and a way back at the same time. It’s complicated, complex, depressing, frightening, incomprehensible, but also conceivable and reversible, or at least healed. With proper pharmacological and psychiatric therapy, vulcanization of a leaky mind can and does work.
At the sound of the word schizophrenia, it is not necessary to knock on unpainted wood, it is better to knock on the door. There is a reason why the global schizophrenia agenda is called “Open the Door.”
Read more about this disease …
Text: Julia Wolin