[ignignokt]

As a schizophrenic myself (fine now with medication) it makes me sad when I see comments like this. The stigma is immense, I've yet to tell someone I know without being treated completely differently by them.

Edit (just thought I'd expand a bit on the comment): Schizophrenia's a ridiculously wide disease, if you ever look at the symptom list in the DSM you'll see just how many symptoms are possible, personally I spent 2 years doing essentially nothing (i.e barely any social contact, no programming etc.) and only hallucinated a few times. The problem with treating schizophrenia's mainly the drugs that can help (antipsychotics) are a) expensive and b) really hard to comply with due to the side effects (personally I can easily sleep 12 hours a day due to mine and you're always at risk for tardive dyskinesia).

It'd be nice to live in a world where having a mental illness wasn't seen by a lot of people as a personal failing of some kind, but we're nowhere near there yet.

[olalonde]

I bet you get that question a lot, but I just read http://lesswrong.com/lw/e25/bayes_for_schizophrenics_reasoni... and was wondering if it was possible for a schizophrenic to tell whether he is hallucinating. Also, would be really nice to hear your thoughts on that article. Thanks!

[ignignokt]

My worst hallucination was when I thought people were breaking into the house I was living in at the time. For me at least there was absolutely no difference between the people I was seeing who weren't there and the police I called because I thought people were breaking in. Eventually the police ended up essentially walking me around my house proving to me there was no one there and even then I was still "making up" lamer and lamer pieces of evidence for the break in in my mind.

I told them several times I wasn't hallucinating and I think they were pretty freaked out about the whole thing until they found my meds and realised I wasn't high or abusing some other drugs.

Retrospectively it's pretty easy to see the point where I started seeing things but at the time (at least for me) it was a really slow and insidious process.

I read the article but luckily for me I was never really delusional for very long at all, aside from a couple of incidents like the one above I wasn't really hit by the hallucination/delusional side of schizophrenia so I'm not really qualified to talk about what it's like but I've read before that (sort of like bipolar patients) a lot of schizophrenia patients simply refuse to believe anything's wrong at all, which is one of the big challenges when trying to gain medication compliance.

[MusicOS]

This woman called-in to a radio show on abortion. She said how glad she was not aborting her downs child. Then she said really awful things describing her life.

You should get a job at Unshackled.

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