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

(www.psychiatrymargins.com)
262 points Anon84 | 5 comments | 28 Jun 25 21:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.828s | source
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suzzer99 ◴[28 Jun 25 22:20 UTC] No.44408657[source]▶
I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis. She thinks she's in some kind of Truman show that she calls "the game". Since none of her friends or family are willing to admit to it, then we must be in on it.

We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.

We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.

Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.

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winrid ◴[28 Jun 25 22:32 UTC] No.44408738[source]▶
If you have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia it's starting to seem like drugs that seem harmless like marijuana (specifically THC?) can definitely bring it out. At least, that's what seemed to happen to my mother and another friend.
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tony69 ◴[28 Jun 25 22:40 UTC] No.44408778[source]▶
In Europe this (some rec drugs bring out latent schizophrenia) is taught in med school as a “known fact” (source: psychiatrist friend) so it’s well beyond “starting to seem”
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euranon96 ◴[29 Jun 25 11:30 UTC] No.44412235[source]▶
Do you know what is considered as "latent schizophrenia"? Is it like in your 40's or 30's or just couple years after the mean?
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lucidrains ◴[29 Jun 25 14:10 UTC] No.44413306[source]▶
if you are a man and make it past age of 29 without starting to hear voices, you can breathe a sigh of relief (I did)
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1. heavyset_go ◴[29 Jun 25 17:29 UTC] No.44414781[source]▶
Unfortunately, this is just statistics. There are cases that lie outside of that age range. I know of two cases, personally.

Things like stress, drugs, childbirth, significant life changes, etc can trigger psychosis and latent schizophrenia at any age, it's just statistically more likely to happen during adolescence and the period right after.

Another way to look at this is that adolescence is when someone experiences new stresses, significant life changes, drug experimentation, etc, which can be triggers for schizophrenia especially during age-correlated prodromal phases.

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2. lucidrains ◴[29 Jun 25 17:43 UTC] No.44414887[source]▶
indeed, it just becomes less likely
3. suzzer99 ◴[29 Jun 25 18:23 UTC] No.44415176[source]▶
Yeah, in this case it seems to be menopause + losing her job and having all the free time and nothing to focus on plus who knows what other stressors. I think something bad happened with her Phish friends.

The really tough part for me is she was out of work, so I paid her to be a beta reader for my book. She's a brilliant person and very detail-oriented. She went way over and beyond what I asked for. She spent months and took three passes on the book making different kinds of notes. Then her problems seemed to come on right at the end of that. I worry that all the increased mental activity, and then suddenly not having anything to focus on again, might have been the trigger.

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4. mfro ◴[29 Jun 25 19:06 UTC] No.44415476[source]▶
Sounds like it was bound to happen. If she hadn’t hyper focused on your book, she’d likely have found something else.
5. heavyset_go ◴[29 Jun 25 23:09 UTC] No.44417465[source]▶
I can identify with the guilt. In my case with my friend, their behavior lead to me distancing myself from them, not knowing what was going on, and I was his main source of socializing. Same thing happened with several of his other friends. The isolation definitely was something that amplified the progression of his illness to detachment with reality. Didn't help that the people he sought friendship from in lieu of us were scammers who fed into his delusions to take what little he had even when he became homeless.

If I could go back in time, I would do things differently, but at the same time I can't blame myself for not understanding what was happening and doing what was, at the time, the healthiest thing for myself.

Sorry to hear about your friend.