[orionblastar]

I suffer from schizoaffective disorder and I don't behave and act as Terry does. It ruined my career when I developed it. I could still do the work, but once you are mentally ill people start treating you like crap. A lot of my symptoms are like Asperger's Syndrome but I have enough social skills to get married so I couldn't be that, so they used Schizoaffective Disorder instead.

If I was diagnosed with autism it would be different, Microsoft and others have plans to hire autistic people. But schizophrenia and autism get treated with the same medication.

I learned meditation from Buddhism to screen out negative thoughts. You can correct a schizophrenic. John Forbes Nash Jr. was a schizophrenic and he got better over the years until he died recently in a taxi crash.

I can't explain Terry's racism, or his behavior. He does have programming skills and a high IQ and can produce results.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/schizophren...

Sometimes when you have a high IQ, you develop a mental illness as a side-effect.

People thought Steve Jobs was Schizophrenic: http://www.thoughtsontransitions.com/2011/11/reading-steve-j...

[FlannelPancake]

Hey! I'm sorry to hear that people treated you poorly. That's really shitty and in an ideal world people would treat you as an individual, and not as a representative of a disease.

> John Forbes Nash Jr

That's not really fair - John Nash was an exceptional person in a myriad of different ways. He's very much an exceptional case in the same way that Stephen Hawking is very much an exception when it comes to ALS.

In general, it's a pretty poor idea to confront someone suffering from disorganized thinking caused by schizophrenia about that disorganized thinking (maybe not in a clinical context, I wouldn't know). Just because John Nash was able to function to a high degree without medication doesn't mean that everyone will be able to, or that it's fair to hold everyone to that standard.

[orionblastar]

In my case I had panic attacks due to stress of being picked on, was told to 'snap out of it' and couldn't.

Most thought I was autistic and not schizophrenic, but schizoaffective disorder is rare and like a combo of bipolar and schizophrenia. It is not as bad as schizophrenia, and you have some schizophrenics who are in a mental hospital for life because they can't cope with it.

I used to earn a good salary as a programmer, but management didn't want someone sick with a mental illness working for them. I had worked so hard and stressed myself out that I developed the mental illness and ended up on short-term disability. When I returned two weeks later I was fired for having a panic attack and not snapping out of it. After that my career was over and it was hard finding work that wouldn't give me a hard time for being mentally ill.

[thaumaturgy]

> You can correct a schizophrenic.

How about, instead, "You can correct some schizophrenics"?

For me, that would put them on about the same level as Tea Partiers or AGW deniers -- I'd treat them as individuals and make a judgement call based on whether I might be able to have a reasonable conversation with that particular individual.

[orionblastar]

Yeah some but they have to want to get better and take a treatment plan and work to get better.

Tea Partiers and AGW Deniers chose to be that way, a schizophrenic didn't chose to be that way they developed a mental illness and it might even be genetic or due to environmental factors.