Have you read any good books on schizophrenia? Either, for instance...

Have you read any good books on schizophrenia? Either, for instance, a novel or story that has a major character with the illness, or a good nonfiction book. My brother has it and I want to learn more, but he's not open at all to talking about it (or much else). (inb4 "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" - I will not read a book with this title unless someone can give me a very good reason to.)

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If you mean medical schizophrenia, R.D. Laing is a good place to start (read The Divided Self).

Deleuze and Guattari take the medical model of the illness and move it more to the realm of philosophy

Check out Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, my man. It's a book written by a late 19th century schizophrenic.

I have it. More likely that I have bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder.
I don't know any good novels or stories. I only know the research by Badcock and Crespi. I'll dump some of that stuff but can understand if it doesn't interests you. They propose that schizophrenia and autism are diametrically opposed. They have plenty of stuff that backs up their theory but time will tell.
Some of the stuff I will dump contains features of schizophrenia (and autism) so perhaps that interests you.

Badcock wrote a book about this theory, the imprinted brain theory, but I don't think it is worth it, I much prefer the papers.

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I'm not sure how valid it is

thank you sir. Hope you're doing okay.

VALIS maybe

I'll give you a bit of a summary too. There's negative and positive symptoms in schizophrenia. The delusions, hallucinations and so on are the "psychosis" and this is the positive (addition) part. Flat feeling, incapable of feeling pleasure or enjoyment is part of the negative symptoms. Medications might play their role in the latter too.

I hope your brother doesn't have a severe case. I know a schizophrenic who has the delusions, hallucinations etc. (psychosis) on a weekly or monthly basis. I've only had it two times with years in between. And I don't suffer from any cognitive decline which many schizophrenics have. That and because of other things has made my psychiatrists and other care takers think I might be bipolar instead.

If I knew your brother I would advice him to excersise and take care of his diet. The medication can be unpleasant but it is a necessary evil. My experience with psychiatrists is bad and good. Some described me medication (anti-depressants) that I didn't want to take and forced on me. And they described me addictive pills. I understand (now) that it is sometimes necessary to take such pills but they seem a bit overly eager and sometimes even force you (they intimidated me and used my mother) to take certain pills.

Good luck to your brother, let's hope he will recover.

Read Philip K Dick. He was fucking nuts m8

VALIS
A
L
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Continental philosophy: schizophrenia
Analytic philosophy: autism
Have fun

OP, Philip K. Dick suffered from psychosis so this is a good choice. He also did a lot of drugs so I've heard, but drug-induced psychosis and psychosis from schizophrenia are the same as far as I know.

Definitely seconding Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber--this is widely acknowledged as being one of the clearest and most compelling descriptions of mental illness by a person who was suffering from it.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is good, especially when it's describing the delusions of the three patients who believe that they are Jesus, though the psychiatrist's attempts at treatment and rationale for their behaviors are somewhat myopic.

Even though you seem to be against Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it would probably interest you to read chapter one of Anti-Oedipus, "Desiring Machines," since it's kind of a phenomenological exploration of how schizophrenics connect to the world. The rest of the book spends more time on the "Capitalism" aspect, but the first chapter nails the schizophrenic worldview imo. The good thing about that chapter too is that Deleuze and Guattari are extremely well read and offer a deluge of sources on mental illness that would probably interest you, from psychological literature to fiction and memoirs. If anything, just look up a list of works cited in Anti-Oedipus.

Other works to consider:
"On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia" by Viktor Tausk - early psychological examination on how and why the image of the machine factors in to the paranoid schizophrenic worldview

Most works by Samuel Beckett, especially the novels Murphy and Molloy

"Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"Lenz" by Georg Buchner

"Secret Snow Silent Snow" by Conrad Aiken

Authors with schizophrenic-esque writing:
Pynchon, Kafka, Joyce (daughter was a schizo), Nietzsche (especially the books in the last 3-4 years of his life--look up his "madness letters" too)

No it is not.
A man knows hes tripping out as opposed to schizophrenics loosing all sense of reality.
You can convince someone fucked up on acid that they are tripping.
You cant really do that with schizophrenics.
Theres a few other differences though.

Artaud, Michaux, Schulz

>A man knows hes tripping out
>knows
Confirmed for never having had a proper psychedelic experience

>Artaud
Beautiful and enthralling as his writings are, they're not very good at letting you understand what having his disease is like. Especially since he hated medicine so much.

It's really fucking easy to forget you're tripping when you've taken enough acid, but if you remind them they'll probably remember taking it in the first place. It's a bit harder to convince schizophrenic people of things that didn't happen, that's their job.

I think there's a difference between the effects of drugs and drug induced psychosis. When I said drugs I didn't mean psychedelics. But your critique is still correct because I don't know what Philip took.

No, no. PKD did enough speed and other shit that it permanently altered his brain chemistry and made him crazy. He was getting visitations from aliens and hallucinating that he was a Christian in Rome years after he detoxed

i've found acid the easiest to control of all trips, but i've taken enough shrooms that i refused to believe my friends when they told me i was tripping because i truly believed my consciousness had ascended the material conditions under which it could be affected by physical substances. even though i could remember taking shrooms, i kept forgetting that it was that morning and not 100 years ago because i felt completely detached from space and time and thought that i would be in the same psychedelic mindset for the rest of my existence. after this experience i've had no trouble empathizing with the schizophrenic mindset because for a few hours i was really trapped in the labyrinths of delusional thought trying to reason itself into articulating its endless meandering logic

>i've found acid the easiest to control of all trips, but i've taken enough shrooms that
That's because you took relatively less acid than shrooms in terms of their effects. It's equally possible to lose your mind temporarily on either. Or mescaline or ketamine or whatever else. The fact that you still understood the language your friends were speaking says to me that you didn't take all that much either time.

Not to mention fucking DMT. That was a journey and a half.

Speed will do that
But he was suffering more of a dementia where is delusions were prime suspect.
Schizophrenia there is an extreme lability on pretty much all cognitive dimensions.
And coping skills are often much weirder.
Drug trips are just percetion appercetion distortions.
These people have temporal,perceptual,spiritual,emotinal,functional,bioligical,and social lability.
A psychotic break is no fucking fun, angry one moment happy the next depressed the next moment everyone and everything looks like my dad. Shit my pants. Rub it in my hair. Satan still yelling at me, but why did my mom give me a firetruck that one year.

Schizophrenics often take speed to keep the voices away.
And they drink.
And they take drugs that garuntee them a new liver and kidneys down the line or death.
And their shit really is too much to put up with sonetimes by anyone.
They know this more than anyone else.
So they are scared and fucked 24/7.

is this a poem by rupi kaur

Well yeah but that's something else entirely. Zero to no sense of what a mind even is to lose in three seconds.

it was only a few hours after peaking that i could even understand my friends.

of course, with any psychedelic there's a point where you reach psychosis levels, but i've just found that a small to medium dose of shrooms is more of a rollercoaster ride while with a small to medium dose of acid i can focus better and i'm not carried away as much by overwhelming thoughts and sensations.

I find quite the opposite, I don't think it's really an experience that can be quantified and weighed up like that.

well that sounds like your problem nigga

at the end of the day this stuff various from person to person so much you can't really compare. most people i know, however, will describe acid as "cleaner" and shrooms a more rough and tumble experience. personally i prefer acid, in part because of my terrible shroom trip

I don't see how that's a problem.

Yes, that's what I mean; they're very personal experiences that vary for everyone.

I would recommend these in the following order.

>The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
>Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
>The Center Cannot Hold

The first is an incredibly engrossing, charming, and funny book about an experiment in which three schizophrenic men who believed themselves to be Christ were brought together by a psychologist in an attempt to snap them out of their delusion.

The second two are memoirs by schizophrenic people, the former who clearly lacks insight into his condition, the latter who has basically been cured and is looking back on it.

Dick likely had temporal lobe epilepsy and not schizophrenia (as did Swedenborg). These men still had a great degree of "self" present even in their delusional state, something that schizophrenia usually tragically destroys

Also FWIW Freud wrote a case study on Memoirs of My Nervous Illness trying to diagnose the origin of Schreber's disorder, so this is interesting (though highly outdated) supplemental reading as well

I wish I could read all the stuff posted here but I doubt I will read even one. Anti-oedipus seems like a good idea since it references other books, but it seems like a waste to buy a book just to read the first chapter. Wat do

download a PDF of it and look at the bibliography, simple

What if I get a trojan T_T

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"A Beautiful Mind: a Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics", 1994 Sylvia Nasar

I was diagnosed with schizoaffective 4 months ago during a two month psychotic break. I'd say Carl Jung's work (in order of importance: psychology and alchemy, mysterium coniunctionis, alchemical studies, aion, symbols of transformation, the archetypes and the collective unconscious) and the corresponding eastern thought/practices (Taoist alchemy and others) have been the most helpful to me. All of this focuses on quieting the mind and understanding the self in such a way that is beneficial to dealing with the possibilities of psychotic influences. The self is not what hears or sees or even (most importantly with regard to schizophrenia) thinks, but the self sees by means of the eyes and thinks by means of the mind, using them as tools. The true self is secure and hidden beneath layers of 'stuff' that we convince ourselves is actually the self. It takes a bit of reading to get into it, but Jung is relatable and he suffered some psychotic breaks himself (he argues that psychosis is sometimes just a symptom of the beginning of the process of internal alchemy, chi-gong psychosis, or kundalini awakening). At any rate, if there is any way your brother can convince himself that meditation would be beneficial and worth pursuing, it could have a very positive impact. It helped me see thoughts as objects that are not, in fact, part of the self. The meditative state is pure sanity, an effective medicine for insanity. Best of luck

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The psychiatrist Dr Colin Ross' books are great like "The Osiris Complex" - they are more about Multiple Personality and Dissociative Identity Disorders i think, though they all share some common symptoms with schizophrenia.

I read that book. Is it true that schizophrenia progresses from extreme schizoid disorder which causes the break down of the personality? Is this the current belief of psychological professionals?

Samuel Beckett's trilogy is schizophrenic fiction

Drug-induced psychosis lasts months after you've done drugs. I had it, and didn't realise I was having it. I did lose all sense of reality, without knowing, because you're out of touch. That's why a psych diagnosed me schizophrenic until a little time passed and I saw a new one, who said I just had a psychotic experience after ketamine/acid/meth.