An amazing story: A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry.
New research suggests that a subset of patients with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia may actually have autoimmune disease that attacks the brain
Something very interesting I accidentally came across while investigating what neurotransmitters are involved in an orgasm (turns out to be basically all of them, but oxytocin and vasopressin are specific to sex, love and friendship):
Brain (nervous system) dysfunction can be demarcated, for the sake of clarity, between genetically or cognitively caused
E.g., the behaviour that is diagnosed as #schizophrenia, can be a #genetic or cognitively caused phenomena. Although, medically, only the former should be diagnosed as schizophrenia
As for the latter, mistaken beliefs such as hearing "god" in the mind (dualism) can cause behaviours that mirror schizophrenia, but, can be mitigated with education
This Stranger, My Son: A Mother’s Story (1968) by Louise Wilson
Yesterday, I read This Stranger My Son: A Mother’s Story (1968) by Louise Wilson. It is about a family’s experience with schizophrenia. Aside from the consistency with which clinicians blamed Louise Wilson and her husband for the illness of their son, a nonsense that has disappeared in its more blatant forms but still persists in more subtle narratives of some today, the book is still remarkably relevant for its descriptions of family turmoil and the paucity of healthcare or social supports for parents and their severely ill children. In fact, I think it is the best of several books I have read about the experiences of parents seeking help for their children with serious mental illnesses—it is honest and beautifully written.
Well, today I slept til about 9am which is super late for me. Then about 30 mins later fell back asleep til around 11. This is after staying in bed all day yesterday playing my ps5, which I'm also doing today.
Needless to say this is outside of my norm of waking up around 7am. My head feels fucked, and I just can't use any brain function aside from vegetation via game. I tried talking to my aunt about what's going on with my head. but couldn't verbally articulate my thoughts well enough to be of any help to her with regards to helping me (that was last night after a full day of being out of home base, very exhausted).
I've discussed this quite a bit with my therapist, with regards to getting med adjustment via a couple day inpatient visit to a local behavioral health facility here in town. This is supposed to be the next step if my prn med doesn't help, otherwise this could go on for weeks or months.
If course rest and isolation from stressors is right up there in importance with the prn med. I'm kinda OK just doing nothing in a zero stimulus environment, but leaving my cave as I've had to do a few times in past few days, has made things worse.
The problem is that I have been affected by the stress from my moving and living situation, and have been working outside my comfort zone with my aunt to get my finances and life in order. I'd legit be homeless in addition to broke if she wasn't helping me, but it's taking its toll.
My aunt is now on a joint checking and savings account with me, and is fully managing it for me. I will also be canceling my credit cards. I have to tell her about literally every dollar I spend, and for the first time since divorce I'm on a budget.
Anyways, the latter bit about my finances, that's a big part of my stress and current mental and emotional degradation, and it's not going to just go away.
Anybody got any observations of an increase in #schizophrenia since #Covid began?
I tagged a post on Reddit who had some interesting things to say about it and every single comment was like "gee I wonder why?" "Ohhhh maybe it's marijuana!", completely ignoring that the commenter said the word Covid.
A little pissy about my post being taken down.
I'd love to see the numbers.
Also if each episode does damage to the brain like a heart attack does to the heart.
I sat in a room with my ex and 3 kids and told them I have schizoaffective disorder and we talked about what that means for me and for them.
It went really well, and lots of good questions were asked. Nobody treated me like a serial killer monster took me over.
Psychotic disorders are so stigmatized, and hard to talk about. But I felt like I owe it to all of them to arm them with real knowledge. They know I'm still the same person I was when I had the undiagnosed disorder.
It was hard to do, but also cathartic. I told them that I'm sure they will have questions as they process this on their own, and to go ahead and ask me. I'm trying to be open, doing my part to destigmatize the illness with my kids and their mother.
Also my ex apologized for misgendering me, but said that it's just hard to get used to, and she isn't doing it maliciously, she is trying to get it right. It felt sincere.
I imagine my ex will get some catharsis as well, because there were certainly times throughout our marriage when this illness made things worse. I'm sure she is having plenty of "aha" moments as she processes.
She thanked me for talking to her, in the same room. Up until I took olanzipine for the past month, this was not possible--I couldn't shelf my delusions around her long enough to feel safe talking about anything more than basic child info.
Anyways, I'm sure at some point I'll fall back into psychosis and ruin any good progress that might come of this discussion, but hopefully not.
Just thinking about how my mom and other family all recognize my mental illness now, because they have mothers, brothers, and sisters with mental illness and same symptoms I have. So, suddenly, it's familiar to them.
But, because it's stigmatized, nobody talks about it (except me who talks about it all the time--I know, big surprise right?). But everybody is caught by surprise with me because I didn't appear to be unwell or something? I'm just that good at masking, right? Why are people surprised? Because mental illness is STIGMATIZED. I knew something was wrong with me, but was not safe in my marriage to talk about it and was afraid to seek a proper diagnosis. I started telling my therapist "I think I'm schizophrenic like my grandma" 8 years ago. And I've been chasing a diagnosis to fit me the whole time. Except that any time psychosis comes into the picture, I lied to myself and others because... Stigma. I didn't actually want to be perceived as "crazy" and/or dangerous. I'm not dangerous, I can say that much for certainty.
We need more destigmatization. I know for safety reasons some people just can't. I don't know of many people who talk about it as much as I do, but would be great if more did.
Specifically my dad, two grandmas, and a first cousin, all have/had significant symptoms and diagnoses related to/same as mine, and nobody liked to talk about it. Had they done so, I might have recognized myself, might have gotten help sooner. Keeping secrets did me no favors. My mom said her mom knew since she was in her 20's, and that cost her a marriage, because if my grandpa would have known that her disordered and erratic behavior was mental illness, he would have stayed with her. It was a decades old secret.
I'm going to yell about it until I'm purple in the face, but at least y'all know some of the reasons why by now. And if you have these diagnoses, your children stand a chance of inheriting it, if the environmental triggers come into play, that chance is increased. This is why I WILL eventually talk to my ex and kids about it. It's that important.
I am awake, with coffee in my veins, nearly mentally and emotionally prepared to continue with the second half of my SSDI 10 page function report.
It's super stressful because it's a pretty important form. But also my therapist and psych have received similar paperwork. My therapist has been working with me for nearly... 8 or 9 years I think (time is a soup) and she knows me better than anybody here in my life bubble, and I trust her to give an accurate picture of my function/lack of.
I've been whinging about the hell I live in having to work, and how hard it is, since the earliest days (the actual work expected from me was minimal and easy, also should be enjoyable because it was related to what i studied in college). So this won't seem like I'm complaining about it out of nowhere--complaining is pretty light descriptor for somebody who has curled up crying and psychotic on the floor of a locked office.
(Side note, I am super distracted and irritated by the starlings nesting in the rain gutter--noisy, tappy, scratchy, clicky. But it won't be my problem in a week)
Remembering I held a $70k/year salary job for 13 years, and now I probably couldn't show up reliably to a 10 hour /week job. And I haven't had an income for 7 months. It's also incredible considering:
I'm autistic.
I have cptsd
I have schizoaffective
I have generalized anxiety disorder
And let's toss transgender in there too
This is to say that I am a walking talking unemployment statistic.
How did I pull it off all these years? Well, I didn't really. My brain is dying from mental illness and near constant spoon depletion. But did I have a choice to work? No. It was painful nearly every day I've worked.
One of my most severe and long lasting psychotic episodes was fed and nourished by politics and news. Specifically, it was triggered during the early days of an infamous presidential candidacy.
Every time I see a related post in my feed without a cw, my eyes are initially drawn to it, and then a little bit of anxiety is dropped in into my bucket. I have to actively talk myself through every little drop of anxiety, but the fear is that my bucket will eventually fill up, potentially leading to another episode.
I like to occasionally bring this up because it is important to those of us who are affected by politics.
*This was my response to a post in my feed, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the original poster with all the hashtags so I just copied it here.
Although there is AN AVAILABLE APARTMENT, the #homeless outreach team is denying fair access to affordable housing based on my #disability. After #gaslighting me and blaming countless #microaggression transactions on my #schizophrenia, I was told summarily to give up on getting help, and to try a provider with a waiting list of over a year w/ #section8.
I have been homeless and sick for over a month, and all they have done is purposely ignore me! #FortWayne#Indiana
The longer I struggle with psychosis in my life, the more uncomfortable I become with people casually throwing around of "psychotic, psycho, psychopath," in contexts that have nothing to do with mental illness. I see it here, I just did minutes ago, and it made me feel gross.
I am psychotic, sometimes, when unwell, but not all the time. Bipolar can have a psychotic component. Psychotic disorders have psychosis as a primary feature. But I'm not a psycho or psychopath. My ex has called me a psycho, which is unfair and cruel.
Psychopathy is a descriptive word for a particular flavor of person with traits falling under a cluster b personality disorder, specifically antisocial personality disorder, aspd. The other flavor is sociopath. Neither psychopath nor sociopath are diagnoses, they both fall under ASPD.
You possibly interact with people who experience psychosis and you don't even know it. I would hazard a guess that people here wouldn't have thought I have a psychotic disorder if I didn't talk about it ad infinitum. Me doing this actually helps with visibility of an often invisible illness, and helps towards destigmatization. I hope.
See in particular r/SchuylkillNotes I think it is.
I've found a few similar things in NYC, although I don't know if they're similar enough to count.
#hypergraphia is definitely a thing, and (layman's guess) coupled with #schizophrenia it might have led to similar behavior in multiple people independently.
"Severe COVID-19 infections linked to increased risk of schizophrenia"
"People with severe covid-19 infections are more than 4 times as likely to later be diagnosed with schizophrenia than people who have not been infected, though the risk of developing the condition is relatively low"