Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff

Can I ask how you are sure they haven’t had some novel insight that you just don’t currently understand? Like maybe they are bad at explaining but whatever pattern they noticed is valid?

I’m not defending them as I don’t know any details, I’m just curious how you came to be certain about your assessment.

I wonder about this as well...like maybe there's some comfort in automatically "diagnosing" someone when they might see patterns or think in ways that challenge your priors..

EDIT: Imagine being powerful and wealthy and assured in your position in the Catholic Church and someone comes along and questions geocentricity and says you're wrong. It's a pretty easy leap to huffily say well, they are "mentally ill, crazy, delusional, paranoid"

I can't speak for the above person, but what the OP of this comment thread said also tracks with my own experience of schizoaffective disorder: when I'm psychotic, the pattern matching part of my brain goes into overdrive and not only does my brain erroneously fill in the blanks in sensory input (causing hallucinations), it does the same thing on an abstract or logical level with ideas and people. It's easy to fall into the trap of paranoid delusion when you feel like you're seeing connections between so many otherwise benign, disconnected things and events.

I think what really gets me is that despite my constant vigilance and skepticism toward my own thoughts, I simply cannot talk myself out of how truly real those delusions feel when they happen. I can even acknowledge how absurd they are, even in the moment, but I can never shake the feeling that they're still very, very real. It's so maddening. The best I can do is to just not act on those thoughts.

Maybe the above person's family is actually unearthing valid insights, but if they're prone to psychosis, in that state they'll be prone to finding connections, associations, patterns, and so on between things in a way that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It'll feel very real to them in the moment, but when they exit that state (if they do) they'll likely be on the same page as others in thinking those ideas were a stretch.

Do you take adhd medication by any chance?

I'm not certain, but, in the case of my family member, their "certainty" is that everyone is conspiring to kill them. As I am one of the "conspirators," I can assure you that they are dead wrong.

Also, in my days of yute, I was fairly profligate in the use of ... mind-enhancing chemicals, shall we say. They basically gave me the same exact certainty and "insight."

Once, I decided to write down the marvelous insight that I experienced, while tripping. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff in a notebook, and then read it, a couple of days later.

It was pure gibberish. Made no sense at all.

[EDITED TO ADD] I should say that I had the luxury of having two distinct states of mind, including a "control state," in which to review the ramblings in the "enhanced" state. This is not a luxury that someone suffering from schizoaffective disorder has. They have no idea that their thinking is off.

I used to on and off in the past, but I found it made me more prone to mania, so I've since stopped. Why do you ask?

Stimulant induced psychosis is very common. One of the major side effects of those medications, just like their street cousin, is paranoia.

I don’t really believe in the dormant/latent argument because once you shift down to the underground (as in, entertain all possibilities, even the possibility that you share something in common with drug abusers) where people abuse drugs, there you can see just how common psychosis is.

The drugs fuck people up. Interestingly, after many years of laying off the substance, many do find their way out of the psychosis.

Many people are actually caught in this trap and don’t tell anyone because they are struggling between reality and their delusions and trying to present a calm face to the world. It’s often directly the result of the substance, but it’s allowed to fester in the person due to all kinds of reasons (”hey, I’m really going to confess this is the crazy shit that feels believable to me?”). By the time they are done wrestling with reality and unreality, often they are left extremely damaged from the ordeal psychologically.

Talk to them for 2 minutes when they are having an episode. The effects are not subtle.

It’s an extremely debilitating condition.

I can't say I've experienced psychosis due to stimulant use personally, but I see what you mean. For me it's maybe brought on instances of hypomania a few times, but I get how it could trigger issues in others, especially in high doses.

My instances of psychosis outside of depression/mania tend to be triggered by stress. I don't use drugs or take any stimulant medications, but they still just happen sometimes. It sucks. I'm thankfully not in an active episode at the moment, but I do suffer on a daily basis from the "negative" symptoms of schizoaffective disorder (i.e., the symptoms that take away function, like anhedonia, avolition, alogia, etc).

Schizophrenics do sometimes have novel insights. I've noticed that schizophrenics tend to be extremely talented at coming up with deeply cutting insults. Like, insults that will change how you see yourself forever. Something about high pattern recognition. Plus an ability to mentally "go there", to countenance dark things that other people willfully ignore.

all kinds of authoritarian regimes and movements certainly do this.

that said... you just have to have a conversation with someone experiencing psychosis. it's a totally altered state of consciousness, they are sensing and understanding the world in a radically different way. it's never just an otherwise normal person with a nonconformist belief.

My brother has schizophrenia. He has never met or interacted with any jewish people, and lives in a part of the world where they have no influence. He still fell entirely for online antisemitism and will text me insane messages about the typical theories.

You misunderstood. I meant that they thought that they were superintelligent people who should teach others and lead the world, but they had schizophrenia.