Best 67 quotes in «schizophrenia quotes» category

...I'd learned right away, a psychiatric diagnosis like schizophrenia is a hypothesis. There is no test to prove you have schizophrenia. The best doctor on earth cannot 'see' schizophrenia in your blood, in your hair, in your piss, in your genes.

If he surrendered the advantage of the gun he would find himself floating in the gutters of an inhuman world, a part of the daily flotsam and jetsam of a hundred thousand abortions whooshing down the wormhole drain, drowning in a sea of pus-streaked semen and warm piss and menstrual juice and dead fetuses and radiator fluid and bloody diarrhea, seeking refuge inside the cathedral ruins of an embryonic sac, curling up to say his prayers then whispering goodnight, God speed, good riddance, gadzooks, the sac shrinking, disappearing into the frigid, humpbacked void of sodomized angels, wingless now, lecherous gargoyles sporting skeletal appendages without feathers, it would be a birth in reverse, the collapse of the universal soul. He wasn't sure how to save himself.

If ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge. The only time knowledge might appear to mutate is when ideas are altered by the individuals holding them, but that does not prove the meme “hypothesis.” In fact, if the meme “hypothesis” were true, then the evolution of ideas would be quite strange indeed. For every time a good idea was received through memetic transmission, there would be mutations of that idea, rapid one's, most of which would be complete nonsense. Sure, the nonsense ideas would “die”, but they would appear at first and remain until they did. One might argue that this is made manifest in discursive thought, but one would be patently, at the base level, incorrect. This is, unfortunately, is one of the logical consequences of the meme “hypothesis” that, as a parasite, all information becomes discursive thought. Schizophrenics are typically the only people to experience discursive thoughts, and most people are not, in fact, schizophrenic.

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.

in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and .

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion. While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic

It is psychotic to draw a line between two places. It is psychotic to go. It is psychotic to look. Psychotic to live in a different country forever. Psychotic to lose something forever. The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic. Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy. It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.

I tried to figure out the answer in books. The more books I read, though, the more it became clear that there was no simple answer as to what schizophrenia is, or what causes it. There was, if anything, a charged and polarized disagreement, a complicated one, one I had never known about before.

It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not. To never feel completely alone even when you are.

It’s not possible to run away from yourself. Unless, of course, you’re schizophrenic and can take holidays outside your mind.

Maybe having schizophrenia is my big fuck-you to the status quo. Only, I guess at this point, being normal and well-adjusted would be, like, the biggest fuck-you of them all. So I guess I'll just try to shoot for that, if I can.

I survived schizophrenia.

Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.

Patients with DID or other dissociative disorders may be misdiagnosed as Schizophrenics on account of their auditory hallucinations, distrust, feelings of depersonalization, and on the MMPI (Kluft, 1987; Spiegel & Fink, 1979; Steingard & Frankel, 1985).

Now, Emily didn't make a sound. There was something more defining about the soundless reality that condemned the paradigm of passion.

One of the most studied ideas as to what causes schizophrenia is the 'chemical imbalance theory,' which derives psychiatric pharmaceuticals themselves. Though the 'mechanism of action' of drugs marketed for their 'antipsychotic' properties isn't understood--plainly, drug companies believe these drugs are effective in lessening psychiatric symptoms, but they don't actually know why--what is known is that they affect chemical levels in the brain. It's therefore supposed that abnormal chemical levels might somehow be crucial to understanding what's different about the brains of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Testing chemical levels inside brains remains impossible. Despite billions of dollars of investigation, the chemical imbalance theory has never been confirmed.

Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.

Research has also revealed that women who have developed PTSD in relation to early childhood sexual abuse often develop borderline personality disorder. Some severe cases will result in the development of dissociative identity disorder or depersonalization disorder. Patients who have been exposed to protracted and repeated sexual abuse may also develop schizophrenia simultaneously with PTSD.

The medication given during mental-ill health makes you rather weaker in body, in soul and in spirit.

Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia. This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.

Many DID patients have been misdiagnosed as schizophrenics and treated with neuroleptics.

The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?

There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.

The SCID-D may be used to assess the nature and severity of dissociative symptoms in a variety of Axis I and II psychiatric disorders, including the Anxiety Disorders (such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and Acute Stress Disorder), Affective Disorders, Psychotic Disorders, Eating Disorders, and Personality Disorders. The SCID-D was developed to reduce variability in clinical diagnostic procedures and was designed for use with psychiatric patients as well as with nonpatients (community subjects or research subjects in primary care).

Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid?

Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behaviour that we don’t understand. In the nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression… but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, were poured into this label melancholia… Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing… A book about schizophrenia [says that] the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system. I said, that’s it! That’s it! Now I understand!

The truth is schizophrenic and has as many faces as there are people.

The sound of her phone shocked her out of the dark world that was currently playing in front of her eyes from the book in her lap. She wondered sometimes, why she bothered with books. If she wanted to hallucinate, all she had to do was get up in the morning.

the stigma of severe mental illness leads to prejudice and discrimination. Stigmas are negative and erroneous attitudes about these persons. Unfortunately, stigma's impact on a person's life may be as harmful as the direct effects of the disease. Corrigan, P. W., & Penn, D. L. (1999). Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma. American Psychologist, 54(9), 765–776.

They say I don’t exist. They say I am an extension, an indulgence, imagination of a schizophrenic person.

This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.

Tout ce qui est horrible porte un versant magnifique

Tony Cox, still a painter and not yet married to Yoko Ono, pioneered in the use of mescaline for draft-evasion. 400 milligrams taken before his own preinduction physical prompted an angry outburstas an orderly took a stab at his arm to draw blood. Tony roared, "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" and was led into the presence of a psychiatrist with whom he engaged in a protracted discussion of the merits of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting, all the while naked. Tony got his 4F classification, presumably on grounds of schizophrenia, and went on to counsel others liable to military service, using the same approach.

Undiagnosed DID patients received incorrect diagnoses of schizophrenia in 25% to 40% of cases in two large series (Putnam, 1989; Ross, 1989), while in one stores 12% and in the other 16% had received electroconvulsive therapy.

We defend so cautiously against our egoically limited experiences, states Laing in The Politics of Experience, that it is not surprising to see people grow defensive and panic at the idea of experiencing ego-loss through the use of drugs or collective experiences. But there is nothing pathological about ego-loss, Laing adds; quite the contrary. Ego-loss is the experience of all mankind, "of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even [a journey] further into the beings of animals, vegetables and minerals." No age, Laing concludes, has so lost touch with this healing process as has ours. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic approach serves to begin such a healing process. Its major task is to destroy the oedipalized and neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a nonfascist subject—anti-Oedipus. Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a group that no longer functions in terms of beliefs and that comes to redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that weighed it down, "but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist. . . He must come one day.—

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.

What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.

When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?

You have got to get creative if you want anyone to notice your goddamn teenage angst.

You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

I feel like schizoid is a precursor to schizophrenia or manic depression. I feel like I'm manic. I have parts of schizoid, parts of Asperger's. I'm a smorgasbord of neuroses.

For schizophrenia, the recovery rate with drug therapy is under 15%. With nutritional therapy, the recovery rate is 80%.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

As I explored my soul, now I know I have survived schizophrenia; hearing voices, reduced social engagement, emotional expression and lack of motivation.

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)