My flat mate had a paranoid schizophrenic attack last 10 days ago. We had days of Russians invading, wedding plans...

My flat mate had a paranoid schizophrenic attack last 10 days ago. We had days of Russians invading, wedding plans, conversations with the tv and hostage takers on the phone.

We finally got him some medicine.

I have been looking for answers for this condition and the outlook does not look good. I however have trouble getting anyone to talk to me directly about what is happening due to patient confidentiality.

I hope my friend gets better and wish to help him however 10 days have gone by and I have started to think off my own concerns.

We share a mortgage, it seems unlikely he will be able to return to work, I also don't want to live in fear of attack for years to come.

I doubt he will agree to sell, so should I stop paying my mortgage, force a repossession and go through bankruptcy.

It seems extreme but I don't know if it is possible to live with my friend anymore.

You're a bastard, just drop him off into the middle of a jungle.

I don't have access to a helicopter. I was thinking off telling him I saw Russians tampering with food in the supermarket. Hopefully he will get arrested and the hospitalised. It seems the only way to get him help is for him to do something extreme.

Any medfags on yet?

Is there any hope for a paranoid schizophrenic?

Actually in the new DSM V there are no separate subtypes of schizophrenia. They are just schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a progressive, chronic, disabling disease. Medication just slows the disease down but doesnt cure it. These are the hobos that wind up living under a bridge talking to themselves.

>implying message know shit about mental health
Nigger they might take an into in undergrad then maybe do a psych rotation while in residency. They know Jack shit.

He's probably fucked, but it does sound like rapid onset so there's a not insignificant chance his mind will sort itself out.

What you described was an isolated incident, right? Has he had instances of these attacks before? If not, there is a possibility he'll be fine. Medication might help if it's not, but you might have to cut your losses in that case. Either way, sounds like the incidents are fairly uncommon so get him pills to take when he goes through the grinder again.

Just get out. You need to protect yourself.
most mortgage contracts have a clause for medical emergencies.

Yeah first time though went on for days, it is surprisingly hard to get the health service to get involved. I couldn't convince him to go to the doctor until after he had the police round because he saw the door being kicked down.

He is my friend, he is not to blame and it feels like the only sensible option is to abandon him.

>should I stop paying my mortgage, force a repossession and go through bankruptcy.

Are you 14yo are did you just bounce around care homes all your childhood? Because no one taught you a fucking thing is seems to function in the real world.

The answer to your entire post is, "keep him on his meds, go about life normally."

This is Veeky Forums You need if it still exists.

Adv gave me nothing. Having read about meds it seems people are more likely to relapse than not as they have horrible side effects which don't seem worth it when the meds are working.

from what I have read so far there it seems that he has less than a 20% chance of no further episodes.

If they start medicating him, it's going to be a rollercoaster unless he's got massive luck. It takes a while to find the right mix for a given person. That said, paranoid schizophrenics are very, very rarely actually dangerous.

From what you've said in this thread, there are two factors that are indicative of a positive outcome in a few years (assuming actual schizophrenia and not just an isolated psychotic episode):
Like I mentioned earlier, rapid onset usually means rapid end...this is one of those cases where if it comes strong out of nowhere, it's actually a good thing. If signs and symptoms slowly build over time, that's a pretty damn good sign the person is permanently fucked, especially if there are no interventions made before it gets fully blown.

Secondly, age. The older the better prognosis.

The other big thing that you need to think on when thinking about prognosis is how many of his direct family have dealt with this before. The more, the more likely it'll get worse.

As for dealing with it, talk to his family, bring his other friends in on this. Treat this shit like a drug intervention.

Speaking of drugs, are you sure he didn't just take some bad shit?

Thanks for the answers. He drinks, he doesn't do drugs (I do).

So far his dad said he doesn't want to be responsible, his mum is analcoholic and his sister sent me a thank you text.

He has a very poor support network.

i guess I give him 6 months while I work on my exit plan and then reconsider.

Wait a second...was everything he saying coherent?

Like, crazy, but complete, correct sentences (basically did he speak like he normally does)?

No. He would forget what he was saying halfway through a sentence or ramble from one thing to the next without making a point. When he did talk everything was tied in to a conspiracy of the Russians to destroy the economy and that he had to marry a Greek girl we know to save the pound.

Also he has recently been suspended from work for making mistakes and had had trouble at uni so I think this was building for a while.

Hrm...that does still point to schizophrenia or possibly schizo affective disorder...but I'm honestly not fully convinced. I've also no direct knowledge of what's going on, so I'll defer to whatever professionals have said, but I'll add the caveat that I usually hate the Dx of schizophrenia. It's a sort of "I don't know" as often as it's not.

With the drinking and problems at work, there's also the possibility of bipolar disorder. This bit of craziness can easily be a manic episode. Is he the kind of guy who every so often comes up with some idea to fix his life, get everything in order, start a business, and the like then that fizzles out and he returns to being more quiet, more reserved, kinda bummed/negative outlook on stuff?

Could get a lock.

You can handle him during the day, right?

The majority of homeless people are schizophrenic. Please try to help your friend a bit longer so he doesn't become a crazy homeless man.

I don't think he is bipolar. He makes plans like the rest of us and does his best to follow them.

I should say that the go said it was paranoid schizophrenia right away so I guess my question is less "what is it" and more "what do I do".

If he is schizo the it seems safe to write him off as fucked.

Go = gp

The trouble is that I don't think it is something I can help. How do you help a faulty brain?

Don't picture the popular image of bipolar. It can present in a lot of ways, and the mania episodes are usually the dramatic, crazy parts. He could, theoretically, be manic, but mania by itself is super rare. That he drinks also complicates things because it is a self-medication for depression, so that could be leveling out his lows to an extent. But this is honestly just conjecture because without being able to actually sit down with him, I can't really say with any kind of certainty.

There are explanations that aren't schizophrenia though.

I asked about the plan thing because the way mania presents a lot of times is that someone suddenly has all these ideas or fixates on this idea that absolutely will make his life better/make him rich/win the girl/finally learn that language/etc. It's not so much that he does or doesn't attempt to follow through, but more that they're plans or ideas that he patently can't actually achieve them...There's also trouble sleeping, being generally excited, nervous, or a similar anxious state, along with sometimes having bits of paranoia thrown in (this is actually a side effect of the delusions of grandeur bit, i.e. he's important enough for x or y group to give a shit about)

By convincing him to take his meds, and drilling into his head that he must never stop even if the meds have side effects (and that if the side effects are too bad he must speak with his psychiatrist about alternatives), and that he must see his psychiatrist regularly and never stop.

Modern schizophrenic medications are a marvel, and I have known a couple schizophrenics one of whose life was saved when he finally began taking his meds after 10 years of homelessness, and one of whose life was ruined when he stopped.

Tell him to smarten up and make an effort.
Stop viewing schizophrenia as a mechanical failure he has no control over.

Find a way to reverse it.

>Source
Someone who was called schizoaffective at ~19. Found the means to reverse it, and found the source. Did not bother with garbage medication.

for what it's worth I'd like to note that the positive symptoms (previously and commonly referred to as the paranoid ones) have a statistically better treatment prognosis than the negative ones

there's a biological basis for schizophrenia and to say that you should just 'make an effort' is as ignorant as telling a person suffering from depression to just 'stop being sad'

further:
>Found the means to reverse it, and found the source. Did not bother with garbage medication.
your issues, your diagnosis and what successfully treated it can't be extended to everyone, especially not someone who seemingly doesn't even have the same diagnosis as you

anti-psychotic medication is complicated but dissuading someone from using it like that is ignorant and could hurt people

You were never Schizophrenic. You can't reverse actual Schizophrenia, you can only manage the symptoms to a degree. With your aggressiveness and narcissism, I wouldn't be surprised if you have a personality disorder,

Actually, it can go away.

>there's a biological basis for schizophrenia
There's a biological basis for everything you experience, every behavior you exhibit, and every response a part of you has to anything. This was handled in what I said very concisely, by treating something as a strictly "mechanical failure", that you have no control over, you're making a massive chain of assumptions about the nature of a given problem. What causes it to exist or contributes, what it is, how it can be interfaced with, and what it can become. Both in an abstract and an individualized sense.

This is the problem with psychiatry. Big talk, big assumptions with no hard backing, and very little for actual diagnostics and other approaches tried. In the average case it's straight to iteratively stacking or cycling through medications until the latest piece of shit you through at the wall in a dark room, seems like it stuck. It's all taken on faith. If anyone compromises people's lives, it's psychiatry.

Also:
>suffering from depression to just 'stop being sad'
While it's much more complex than that, this actually can work. You just decide to stop. Unless you have faith in "but my vague chemical imbalance, and my disorder that has nothing to do with my diet, lifestyle, and life.".

>your issues, your diagnosis and what successfully treated it can't be extended to everyone
Firstly, you need to bear in mind what psychiatric diagnosis actually is. It's not like looking at a patients symptoms, culturing some blood and finding gram negative bacteria or something. It has a massive subjectivity overhead, guidelines, DSM, or none. History has shown repeatedly how pitifully unable humans are at handling this.

>but dissuading someone from using it like that is ignorant and could hurt people
Telling them to jump right on it could too.

It's not like anyone is apt to listen to me either way. Even if they do, the probability of something terrible happening long term doesn't seem much different.

>You were never Schizophrenic.
I'm not sure how you'd tell the difference between true schizophrenia and not, with modern diagnostics. Sure, you can look at urinary content and metabolites which tend to have abnormalities that cluster in schizophrenics. But again, you don't know why they are that way. You can look at behavior, but that's just like working with a black box and very subject to confirmation bias. You could use a form of fMRI, if it wasn't terrible. See patterns of metabolic activity.

And then look at how many models of schizophrenia there are, and that each are known to be incomplete and net incorrect. Look at the features of early childhood treatment that also cluster in schizophrenics, as well as aspects of creativity..

Regardless. I did go quite mad. And I did identify and reconcile my issues, and drag my way back to functionality. People don't need to have the crazy drugged away, they need to learn new thought patterns and rebuild their frameworks so they can handle themselves. If there is a hard cause contributing, like faulty MAO function, dietary problems, or whatever (don't forget how central histamine is to schizophrenia), it must be identified and fixed.

>You can't reverse actual Schizophrenia, you can only manage the symptoms to a degree.
Prove it.

Also, you can't reverse actual sadness. You can only manage symptoms to a degree.

>With your aggressiveness and narcissism, I wouldn't be surprised if you have a personality disorder,
Tell me which one. I know you like to be told what to think and how to frame things, so I'll use you as a proxy to what "they" say.

What do they say about people like me, user?

nope
their only hope is an early death from their statistically shorter life expectancy

>analcoholic
Could you give me a number to his mom?
Just for... a friend

so long as they don't take too much chronic medication (overprescription has been linked as one of the biggest factor for much lower schizophrenia recovery rates in 1st world countries compared to 2nd and 3rd world)