Patients, I believe, are treated better with the internet. Although they may come across nonsense, they also sometimes find interesting things about their disease, which allows them to better heal themselves. I hope that schizophrenic patients understand better from the internet that their disease can be treated well, which allows them to take the first step towards the psychiatrist.
Indeed we must not try to persuade by discussion that a person who is in psychotic crisis that his ideas are unfounded for this or that reason, because quickly the invasive ideas will take over, however we can possibly persuade him that overall his ideas are often too worrying and are ultimately erroneous and that taking a treatment will make it possible to fix this problem, will make it possible to see more clearly. That overall it is not as before.
Sometimes it can also happen the idea/intuition that taking a treatment will lead to the wrong, in the wrong voice, that one would have to continue to suffer to save the world. In any case this impression came to me with beliefs a little complicated to explain.
I had the intuition that humanity lived in a simulated virtual world, like the Matrix movie, again I realized that this intuition was crazy. I felt that being in this virtual world was maybe what created excruciating suffering in me, discomfort and constant worry.
It would have been necessary, as in the film, to get people out of the Matrix, from this simulation to relieve them and allow them to access the truth.
I felt like I was betraying people who were struggling in the womb if I stopped suffering while taking the treatment, I was torn between the idea that if I took the treatment I would stop suffering but I would condemn humanity, or I would not take treatment and by a crazy supernatural thing, maybe it would save humanity. It was similar to the choice between the blue and red pill in the movie, if he takes the red he comes out of the Matrix and can fight with difficulty, but he can, or he takes the blue, stays in the matrix and lives serenely without worries in the manner of the traitor who prefers to eat the virtual meat steak in the matrix, enjoy life forget everything rather than go out and eat a dough served to the resistants.
I imagined myself to be one of their most important members, or the most important, the chosen one, I imagined that people in my entourage had certain roles in the matrix, and I felt guilty if I betrayed them.
Although I always have a questioning, a feeling of betrayal on my part when I think about it, in reality I did not hesitate to take the treatment, I still told myself that it was too crazy what I thought, that it would lead to disturbing actions at worst, that at best I will end up a tramp suffering psychically intensely, unless the matrix actually exists of course, in which case I will suffer intensely and then a miracle of the matrix would save me. Question to the con that I ask myself anyway, telling myself that I may have betrayed these people, that the disasters in loop that humanity will continue, that we will not get out of this circle!
The intuition that the matrix really existed was very strong in me, even though ever aware that it was a parasitic idea, and sometimes, rarely I still think about it.
My whole life is based on it because from a very young age, around 5 years old perhaps, this intuition has invaded me, and everything I experienced in my childhood is tinged with this idea, as if I forgot it, I forgot everything.
I had the idea that if my optic nerve and other nerves were hacked, then I could be made to believe that I was living in a fake world, the pixels of my vision being hacked like the pixels of a television screen, and I felt that this must be the case.
I think I had this idea, because of course I was paranoid with the impression that people (here the leaders of the matrix) wanted to make me suffer for no real reason, and also because I was intelligent, indeed when you are intelligent you question everything you learn, to really understand things, here I was questioning reality, maybe that's what pushed me to imagine the matrix while many other schizophrenics do not have this delirium it seems to me.
Perhaps some do not want to treat themselves for worries with ideas of the same kind, that if they take the treatment, they will not be able to save humanity in one way or another. I do not know if this is a problem that exists or not in other cases of schizophrenia.
I knew someone who had paranoid symptoms close to schizophrenia and who was not very nice, he did not seem to understand that his paranoid ideas did not hold water. I wonder if the fact of not being very nice or even a little nasty would not be related to the fact that he does not realize that his paranoia is foolish, indeed in the absence of a good effective network of mirror neurons in the brain, he can not understand that most of the people he meets generally have nice intentions. So he could not realize that there was a discrepancy between his intuitions that others wanted him harm and the observation of others in everyday life, who did not hurt him be nice, that would be why he was not aware that his paranoia did not hold the road, and therefore that he did not want to heal himself?
Maybe it was another reason that pushed him not to treat himself, for example I know that he was afraid of drugs, that it was for him the oil industry that created the drugs to make us sick to sell more drugs.
It's true that he spread his paranoia without complex as if he had no hindsight on it, he was also someone very stubborn, maybe that's also why he did not want to treat himself.
Already as a doctor, I believe that you shouldn’t put too much pressure on yourself. Even for a person with schizophrenia, it is difficult to understand another delirious schizophrenic person.
I think you have to be polite like you have to be with everyone.
I also caution against insisting on understanding what the patient is thinking at all costs. It can be very badly lived and even more if it is by the family. That’s why, as a caregiver, you have to ask questions, but not insist too much. Indeed, as I explain at the bottom of this page: it is disturbing to share your fantasies. Sharing your ideas can be difficult in schizophrenia when you are feeling bad.
It is also difficult, sometimes impossible, to persuade a patient to seek treatment if he does not want to. Don’t blame yourself for failing to persuade your patients. You shouldn’t harass your patients too much in general either. If they are very very badly and risk being dangerous for themselves or for others, then we can insist. I think the ethic is to let people do their thing and just have a conversation as equals. Rest assured as a caregiver, without being completely sure of my knowledge, it seems to me that a patient must really be going very badly for him to be dangerous for himself or others. A schizophrenic patient who is just angry enough is unlikely to do any harm. You don’t lock up someone with no pathology that’s pissed off enough. You shouldn’t lock up a schizophrenic patient just because he’s too upset. It doesn’t make sense.
A few tips for communicating with the patient:
Some patients would not be aware that these ideas are parasitic
Apparently some patients with schizophrenia are not aware that their slightly crazy ideas are parasitic ideas. I don’t want to stigmatize these people either, I don’t know this subject of schizophrenia. This is called anosognosia. As a result, they would not understand how to treat themselves. This is what is explained in this document which also gives advice: “Anosognosia in schizophrenia”.
I really believe that I am aware of my problems and I know that they need to be treated. This domain of anosognosia is unknown to me. I don’t want to talk nonsense about these people.
Understanding what the patient is feeling
Try to understand how he feels. I think he won’t mind you asking what he thinks and feels. Except perhaps if he is in a period without treatment or a period where he is really bad and he can be too touchy. And so he would feel this question as if he were taken for a madman. I’ve felt that before when I was too touchy.
Explaining to a newly ill person that it can be cured
Another element when faced with a patient without treatment and never treated: I think it is necessary to tell him that the problems he feels are known. What he saw happens in some people. There is a treatment even if each patient has different thoughts, a different experience. So giving him treatment will really solve his worries. It helps other people and it will allow him to see things more clearly.
Explore some symptoms if it doesn’t bother
Especially for psychiatrists or psychiatric caregivers, I think you should ask the patient for certain symptoms. I think most patients won’t talk about themselves being shy or tying themselves up in fear of being part of the wrong group. I experienced this symptom of wanting at all costs to hide what I felt that I was ashamed of. What I imagined to be shameful. Afterwards, it is not useful to highlight this, if there is no treatment 🙁 . I had it passed following bactrim, but it is not a recognized treatment.
Ask what does not satisfy the patient in his life
I think that as a doctor, you have to ask the patient if there are things that do not satisfy him in his life, precisely in order to be able to improve. For example, it was only recently that my psychiatrist understood that I sometimes felt too paranoid, that it bothered me to be too fat because of the treatment, that I had trouble working and carrying out my projects. Yet I have seen it for a long time. Although I really like my psychiatrist and find him very good, he kinda missed it. Finally the doctor and especially the psychiatrist is there so that the patient is satisfied in his life, suddenly it is important to ask him.
The risk and the fear of being overwhelmed by my worries were there.
For example, it is highly unlikely that a plane would crash into our building and kill us, yet it was a fear I had. It is highly unlikely that an earthquake would happen where I live, cause my building to collapse and block me in the rubble to death, but yet it was a fear that I had and that could obsess me.
Here I explain why some people with a psychiatric disorder have a character, at least what I imagine they feel. I am thinking in particular of people who are borderline and who stumble and answer you badly and angry, who we have the impression that they are exasperated and that we cannot calm them down by speaking. I draw a parallel with my experience.
I put back what I put in a previous article:
"When I was hospitalized, just to make the diagnosis of my disease and to adapt my treatment when I was doing it quite well, I ended up not supporting the look of the caregivers who, I had the impression judged me on my ideas, my behavior, as if at every moment they made a silly idea about me. I went home after a week and I was very happy because it was more tenable, it bothered me to think that the caregivers, when I was hospitalized thought that I had had impulse phobias or had some silly stereotypes about me, and that I could not fight against these silly and reductive stereotypes that they had on me, at the risk of getting upset and looking like a dangerous madman, making these stereotypes worse."
And especially this point:
I felt like people, especially caregivers in this case, had some silly stereotypes about me, and that if I tried to fight those silly stereotypes by talking to them to persuade them, I would only make the silly ideas they had about me worse, at the risk, in the case of a caregiver that they find that I am in bad shape, that I am a dangerous madman and that he locks me up, so it was extremely difficult for me to speak serenely at the end.
I imagine that a similar thing could happen with a rather heavily borderline person, but that it often happens that it ends for them with a burst of anger and not infinite restraint as for me.
Indeed, I believe that the symptoms of schizophrenia and borderline disorder are the same but much weaker for borderline disorder, this is what we heard in medical school, and I think it is right, with one clarification, it seems to me that in schizophrenia the guilt of doing harm, especially by speech is increased, which leads people with schizophrenia to force themselves not to get angry with others, to be afraid of hurting others, while in borderline disorder, guilt, fear of hurting others, are it seems to me (but I say maybe a stupidity, do not throw the au-probe in doubt) a little diminished. It would be in my idea why the male side of borderline disorder is the antisocial disorder since men feel a little less well the feelings so the suffering in others, so that it bothers them less to make suffer, and that suddenly angry, they are less embarrassed to attack others.
Indeed I tried not to be unpleasant so as not to hurt people, I feared that I would be taken for a dangerous madman, it paralyzed me more than pushed me to get angry but also because I was afraid of doing harm.
when you're angry, you don't think about that 🙁
I think that in borderline people angry at others, at doctors, they make these scenarios, they are afraid that the discussion will end in a rant, they imagine that they will explain that it is fine, without persuading the doctor, and even by insisting and explaining by A + B we will not believe them suddenly they will be afraid that the doctor will make them hospitalized, so the moment they talk with the person they imagine they were going to get confused with, they can't help but be frankly upset, talk dryly, and suddenly, sometimes the discussion, unfortunately turns into a rant!
To defuse this, you have to understand what the person fears and explain that it will not happen,
… for example I was afraid of being locked up, if I had been told that to lock people up, they had to be quite clearly dangerous for either or others, and that being frankly worried and angry was not enough to lock me up, it would have reassured me a little… After it is completely true that if my treatment was too low, then other concerns of the same kind would have come back a little later.
I believe that the functions of mirror neurons are exacerbated in schizophrenia and diminished in borderline disorder, I explain it here "Thoughts on schizophrenia, difficulties in understanding others, compassion and empathy, psychopathy and antisocial disorder.". And that this difference can lead to a rather different behavior with yet full of similar ideas, such as susceptibility or anger: for schizophrenics, the fear of doing harm would push them as I imagine not to blame things on others if they are angry (as I have experienced many times), while for borderline disorder, they could be quite bad if they are angry, but with an ever-present restraint: the fear of passing for someone bad, without really understanding that shouting at others makes them suffer.
I realize tonight by completing this chapter that yes my guilt, my concern for others, my desire and the feeling of a duty to help others is exacerbated. I do not tolerate not worrying about solving the injustices and sufferings that exist here and there, so I am always worried and want to save the world. That is why I am trying to write this document, I tell myself that the information explaining schizophrenia here may have an interest, an importance to help if this document becomes known.
When I had these fades, I was not as powerful as a squire, I really had no confidence in myself at all.
Barrier definition: abrupt interruption of the subject's speech during a sentence. The speech resumes after a few moments on the same or another subject. The subject cannot say what happened in him during the time interval, there was a "blank", a "void" of thought. This symptom is quite characteristic of schizophrenia.
Fading mental is a minimum equivalent of blocking: thought engulfs for a few moments. (Wikipedia)
In clearer (if I understood correctly what I was told) the patient starts a sentence, slows down his speech and does not end his sentence, then resumes on another sentence.
I think I've already had this symptom and here's how I felt at those moments.
With friends, when I spoke during these periods where I was surely worse than usual, I had the impression, when I said a sentence that what I was saying was stupid, null, uninteresting, that people would end up finding it frankly stupid if I continued, then turning the gaze elsewhere, this impression was very strong and I was ashamed, so by an uncontrollable reflex, so strong was my gene to say a silly thing, I gradually stopped my sentence telling myself that I had done well to stop it before the end because it would have been silly to go to the end, the others having certainly already understood what I wanted to say and already found it uninteresting. In fact I didn't realize that others surely didn't understand what I meant at all and might find it strange.
Also surely at these moments, my mind filled with constantly flowing ideas had trouble understanding what others understood from what I was saying at the moment I said it, I had trouble visualizing what others must have understood with my words, often I had the impression that they had enough elements to understand where I wanted to go, while surely not, I realized that I was misunderstood, but I could not express myself to be well understood.
And then I also had frequent memory lapses, my mind invaded by ideas, making me think one thing and then another, and then I forgot the first thing I had thought of. So much so that my word was hard or impossible to follow.
I think if you are psychiatrists and ask your patient why he has this fading, he will not give you my explanation, because he may be embarrassed to reveal that he is ashamed of his sentences, that is what I would have done at those times. Also because his mind confused in a thousand worried ideas, impressions, he can have a lot of trouble understanding what drives him to do this.
On the other hand, if you put a patient several months later, when he is much better, facing this fading, I think he may be able to tell you that yes, he stopped his sentences gradually because he was ashamed to finish them, if he remembers this moment.
I'm not completely sure that others feel this way during their fading, but I have this memory of not finishing my sentences because I was ashamed to finish them during these periods.
I think that contrary to what we can imagine of schizophrenia, (who are people known to misunderstand others and who often have symptoms of high-level autism), schizophrenia does not decrease empathy, it increases it. You have to understand how empathy and compassion work to understand this and understand why I think empathy is increased in schizophrenia (contrary to popular belief).
Here is my point of view on the empathy that I have developed after many years and after confrontation with people who lack it: it is the mirror neurons that must manage this surely…
Their role is to understand what another person feels who is in a certain situation, and they also allow to have a certain introspection, to understand oneself or even, to understand why one had such emotions, such feelings, following what event (it is brain imaging studies that have determined this). In fact I tell myself that it works like this: with our experience (whether it is real experience or lived experience in scenarios that we imagine) we notice that when we are in this or that situation we feel, we think, we want this or that thing, for example when we bend down with our hand towards the ground, it is that we often want to catch something fallen on the ground, when we are naked in front of people we are ashamed (unless we are exhibitionist :))
In relation to this experience we will be able to operate our mirror neurons: If we see a person bending down with his hand towards the ground, we will automatically imagine that he wants to pick up something, if we see a naked person in front of a crowd, we can imagine and feel that he is ashamed, (unless one is a pervert :)) etc etc. We will feel what others feel, think or want according to what we would feel, think or want in the situation of the person we see or imagine (if we read a book for example).
So why do people with schizophrenia misunderstand what is felt by others (at least without treatment or that the treatment is not great)? I think that it is not only this mechanism that works badly, it is that the experience of schizophrenics is very different from the general experience, so they can not feel what others feel, since they themselves do not feel that.
The population, the people frightened me, I wondered how the others managed to live there peacefully.
Me when I went to a party, I was afraid of people, I felt embarrassed, I was ashamed of not saying anything, not knowing what to say, I imagined that what I could say would pass for null, stupid or serious and shameful, I was half stunned, stuck in a corner of the room where there is the evening, being afraid to pass for the null, the twisted, the madman of the moment. So it was difficult for me to answer a person who told me that I was happy to go to a party, I could not conceive that it was possible so much my suffering in this situation was intense, I absolutely did not feel the happiness of this person when he told me that, and so I couldn't interact well with her, telling her, for example, that I was happy for her.
The gas engine of my thoughts!
When I passed an exam, given that I was afraid of the future and ending up in a psychiatric hospital (because I believed that there was no treatment for my problem), success in this exam did not make me happy to succeed in life, it was just a burden, an inhuman effort that I had made to have this exam and that I had betrayed myself to make myself suffer like this.
As a result, it was difficult for me to conceive that others could really be happy by seeing the results of their exams, yet they seemed to be seeing their outpouring of joy at the results of the baccalaureate, I thought that I was seriously abnormal not to understand them.
Besides, it made me very strange to see happy people in situations where I would have been in distress. A feeling of guilt, that I should have been different.
I had heard that in borderline disorder there is a similar phenomenon: these people imagine that others feel what they feel, while often people feel something different, borderline have such a distorted vision of what others feel, because they too feel things a little differently from others.
I feel like for autism, it may be a bit like extreme shyness, or contact with others is only felt as a fear, yet it's possible that their mirror neurons work well. It seems to me that often autistic people feel the guilt and possible suffering of others (but I may be wrong on this point, it is not a subject that I know well)
Antisocial people don't think of others, especially when it comes to sharing dessert. Me too sometimes I don't want to share the dessert, but it's because I'm greedy.
how antisocials work
Antisocial people or those who behave badly such as paranoid personalities,
I feel it, they, on the contrary, have mirror neurons that work badly. They feel little suffering in others, and little the feelings, thoughts and wills of others.
This is what I understood by opposing people who were more or less bad with others in their word (they yelled at others, and given the subsequent situation of subordination of the people yelled at, they were afraid of the consequences if they responded, such as being fired, so they were tyrannized and stunned during these situations, it was quite obvious when we saw the scene), by making them understand that their behavior was intolerable and especially made others suffer for this or that reason, I realized that these people did not realize that they were making these people suffer, but saw these people as culprits who sought to spoil the situation,
these somewhat antisocial people fell from the clouds when they understood from my explanations that in reality the people they were yelling at were more terrorized victims than culprits.
… they understood and largely stopped this bad behavior. This obvious reaction of understanding that these people were terrorized victims did not exist in these somewhat antisocial people.
To draw a parallel, when you stumble on a stone in the forest, if you are a little angry, you can start insulting the stone. On the other hand, if we are in the same situation but it is another person who makes us stumble involuntarily, then we will hold back even if we may be a little angry, because we should avoid scaring him and accusing him of something of which he is innocent, which would be unfair. For an antisocial person whose mirror neurons work badly if he stumbles against a person he will insult him because for him the person who made him stumble is like a stone, it is just a thing that is painful to him and that opposes his path.
Apart from the fact that mirror neurons are used to understand others, the rest of the things I say here about empathy, schizophrenia and antisocial disorder remain hypotheses that I created, however it seems very coherent to me, in my opinion it is surely right.
My modesty led me to find it disturbing to imagine that adults in the 19th century could have painted this naked woman on the grass!
I had the feeling of gene, of discomfort to share my fantasies with my parents. I think it's a normal thing but greatly exacerbated in schizophrenia.
I had the impression, if I was in a somewhat fantasy situation with my parents, to be happy and smiling, that I had to, like the people on TV in the series, be able to share anecdotes about who I was in love with, when it really bothered me terribly to talk about it. It was a kind of torture, a form of obligation, a bit like a rape of the spirit, or I felt that the situation forced me to share my fantasies with my parents, that it was not normal not to share them. For me being in love with a girl and wanting to date her was already an unspeakable and ridiculous fantasy. In the end I never talked about it with my parents and so much the better, I was not ready for that deep down.
I didn’t like sharing my experiences with doctors or my family, if they forced me to, I felt extremely disturbed.
I think this can be found in patients at the onset of schizophrenia without treatment or when the treatment begins to take effect, when the family asks the question of what the person having schizophrenia feel. The person will deflect the subject unresponsive, very embarrassed, as having a kind of mind-raping feeling to bring up topics that they feel are very personal, very disturbing, very shameful from their point of view (I remember feeling a bit like being extremely ashamed of the content of my thoughts and being forced to describe them, rather than being soothed by the realization that my thoughts aren’t that serious, it would have made me even more ashamed, with the impression that the others are looking at me and judging me like: “you must not think like that”, a bit as if we had to make him accept that he was wrong to think so), perhaps friends and not family (whose family we mechanically have more modesty) could more easily approach the subject. I have very distant memories of these very deep genes to approach subjects, I don’t remember very well, I tell myself that it’s a bit as if we are terribly afraid to admit that we are a virgin, we imagine that if we admit it everyone will fall on us and lecture us, and that we will feel guilty and that we will not dare to answer or reject these requests, this modesty of confessing one’s feelings is very similar to this, it is annoying for the patient’s family who would like to help the patient by understanding him, but you should know that broaching these subjects can be terribly disturbing.
Overloaded mind, I have lots of ideas in mind in the background. I realize the next morning that the night before, I was stuck on certain ideas. For example, when I did this drawing a few years ago, I remember my mind was stuck on the idea that I had to do amazing art to wow the audience.
What I describe in the title is a phenomenon that has importance in the functioning of my thinking, especially when I had no treatment but even now. I don't think it has a name, but it's important.
My brain stays activated for a very long time in the background on what I saw a few seconds or minutes before, and it can create a vicious circle where it made me think about this situation for hours. For example when I saw the zapping (it's a 5-minute show on canal + that took excerpts from other programs, one after the other, they take excerpts where we saw surprising things, often funny, or strange, watching this show, it gave me the impression that canal + made fun of these programs), we are in the context where we wait for something surprising, funny, mocking, and well for 5 minutes after seeing the zapping when I changed channels, I still had the impression that there was something funny that had to happen in the TV shows I saw. In fact, looking at the zapping, I was in the situation where all the sequences are funny, where there's something funny or ridiculous to highlight, and my brain remained in that context, in that situation.
I don't know why, my super-active brain was always seeing faces in the smallest drawings, lines, tags, shapes.For example today, often when I work the day on a project, where I say to myself every moment: I have to move forward, I have to finish it, so the next night I stay until 7am in this context, when I wake up, I am not really relaxed, I remain in the idea that we must move forward on the project, that it is very important for this or that reason. It is, very often, only the sleep from 7am to 9am that makes me forget the stress and the situation of the previous day. This idea that I stay in the background about the ideas I have, about the motivation I had, for a very long time after it stopped, is often found at home in many other things, I guess it is also the case for other schizophrenic people, I think especially in weird ideas, or I keep a belief for a few hours for example.
Paranoid delirium :
(be careful apparently this definition is not widely used in english medical word as it doesn’t even exist on english wikipedia)
is constructed from multiple mechanisms (hallucination, illusion, interpretation, intuition, imagination);
includes multiple nested themes, it is unstructured, hermetic, blurry, weird;
is unsystematized, that is to say that it does not obey any internal logic: the themes are linked without logical link, intertwine, merge giving an impression of disorganization of meaning and thought. (Wikipedia)
I will try to explain to you what this definition means, if I understood correctly what was explained to me during my medical studies:
… Delirium first:
A delirium is a false and fixed belief that cannot be changed in light of conflicting evidence. (English Wikipedia)
A delirium is for me, the impression that something is true, without having any evidence that holds the road of that. In truth, it must be understood that: "to be a proof that something is true or not" is subjective, so, depending on the doctor who examines the patient, he may find that the patient is or is not delusional, if the doctor finds that the evidence is not plausible then the patient, could be considered delusional, otherwise not. In reality when a patient is really very bad, and worries or imagines things really crazy and is agitated, then, yes there will be no doubt. If ever the doctor has a doubt, I think we must keep this doubt, try to investigate, if the patient wants well, and not bother the patient too much with it.
The mechanism of a delirium is simply how delirium comes to mind: by hallucination, illusion, intuition.
The theme is on what focuses the ideas, hallucinations etc that come to the mind of the patient, for example, if the theme is persecution, then the patient will interpret that if a person stays behind him it is to harm him, he will have the intuition that it is likely that the government of our country or another want to make us suffer, will have a hallucination of someone pouring a toxic product into their glass. I believe that often in schizophrenia the most common theme is persecution, but this is not always the case, there can be several themes at the same time. Another theme is the delirium of ruin where the patient will have the impression that everything will be destroyed that there will be disasters leading to the end of the world, in a worried and pessimistic vision.
What I understood in medical school of the word systematized is that it means that delirium is plausible, while when it is not systematized, it is implausible.
For example, if someone tells you that a person got behind him at the ATM to look at his blue card code and then steal his card, it's plausible (it's then rather a paranoid delirium), of course the person must constantly worry about such things so that it ends up being considered a delirium.
On the other hand, if a person explains to you panicked that aliens want to land on earth just to make people suffer by creating illusions in the sky, that, at least for me, seems implausible, so it is an unsystematized delirium. In schizophrenia, it is non-systematized delirium, therefore implausible. I think that the basis of the non-systematized, implausible delirium is to have the impression that it is probable, here that it is likely that extraterrestrials want to make us suffer for no real reason, we arrive at such an idea by accumulating elements that gradually support this hypothesis, while seen from another angle in a more serene person these elements are not really evidence thereof.
A certain polemicist who has focused his hatred on Muslim people certainly has a delirium of persecution, because although he manages to persuade some of his listeners which would suggest that his delirium is consistent, what pushes this polemicist to think this is surely that he is convinced that Muslim people wish him harm without valid reasons. What can be blamed on him is that he is attacking people, most of whom are innocent, and that he does not realize that these words are causing these people to suffer.
An endless source of paranoid ideas was in my mind! It was hard.
It can happen that people attack us for no reason, for example children at school sometimes abuse their friends a little for no reason. So it's not completely silly to have a delirium of persecution, this kind of worry can be a natural mechanism, however the problem in paranoid delirium, when it comes to persecution, is that we are convinced that it is very likely that people want us harm going so far as to kill us or make us imprisoned, even if there is no element to think so, or only very weak elements.
For my paranoid delirium of persecutive theme my mind bounced off what could happen in a loop, creating the idea of a manhunt, a plot that scares and turns incessantly.
While in normal times people are going to be just a little suspicious, they're just going to be a little bit afraid that other people can overtake them in a queue to buy something, nothing too serious;
I could go to imagine that if the person doubles me in the queue and I dare to make a remark, it gets angry, makes the police intervene, that the police do not believe me, that they imprison me…
… because following the annoyance at the fact that they do not understand me, they take me for someone dangerous, then if I flee the police station because I have no choice, that an army of policemen will pursue me, that even if I try to persuade him he will not believe me because I imagine him limited to not wanting to believe the common sense, that I will be forced to go abroad as a fugitive, then I should take all my cash from a bank before leaving so that I cannot be found by withdrawals of money from an ATM afterwards, etc. So suddenly, I tried to say very kindly to the person who doubles me, that I should not be doubled :). (Tonight, in correcting this chapter, I'm rather serene to such an extent that it's almost unthinkable for me to think that someone feels that way, but yes, I felt that way!).
Here are some other examples of persecution delirium:
I was afraid that a relative, someone who had been friends with me, whom I no longer saw, and who had a character that seemed to me to be manipulative, would go and tell everyone around me, after I had become angry with him and I no longer saw him, to the girl I no longer saw but with whom I was still in love, that I was a monster, a big asshole, that they would think it was real and that they hated me and my ex whom I had left and whom I was afraid would accuse me of rape (when no sexual relationship had happened, but I felt that she wanted revenge). And so that these people hate me, and it went around in circles in my head, it made in my mind a cabal, a manhunt where this ancient acquaintance did not stop, and would not stop for nothing in the world to hurt me like this, and that even if I tried to see and persuade these people there it will not convince them. And I made scenarios or even if I hit him, even if I tortured him he would continue to make me suffer, and in these scenarios that I created out of hatred and fear that it would never stop, even if I killed him it would create a curse on me until death and even after, who would have destroyed everything that was important in me, making me tortured forever. I imagined such scenarios, to be frank I hated this loved one and wanted him to harm, but I understood that my hatred was disproportionate, crazy and that certainly the ideas I imagined were false, even if I felt them without being able to control them, and so this was one of the reasons why I should not take revenge: So I thought that if I actually hurt him, I would go after an innocent person, and that would be serious, horrible, unfair.
I was also divided by something else, I felt that he felt very bad (because I told myself that he had psychic problems, indeed, today I think he had a borderline or antisocial disorder) and I felt responsible somewhere for his suffering, I worried about the suffering of everyone and felt responsible for it. He because I felt in the end that he voluntarily made me feel even more guilty for having made him suffer by abandoning him, I found that he was a manipulator, who destroyed my innocence because by trying to help him, I received only his hatred and the guilt of not having helped him who would continue to pursue me until my death. I hated him all the more for having killed in me this innocence, those last moments when my mind was still serin.
I must specify that first these scenarios of revenge scared me extremely, I was afraid of hurting him, I would most certainly never have hurt him even if I had never had treatment, I would have just become hateful for life :(. Also I realized that my fears were foolish, indeed why feel that absolutely, necessarily he would want me bad? but yet they were these fears, and there was nothing I could do about it.
This person who was somehow a friend that I had not chosen and who had been seeing me for two years was, I still think, quite bad at least at that time (I had not chosen him because I did not like him well from the beginning, but being extremely timid, I had never dared to oppose him for fear that he would get angry), he was a problem for a lot of people around me, but I must admit the fear of persecution was totally disproportionate. My ex-girlfriend was also really quite resentful, but here too the paranoia was really too intense, I hope she would never have accused me of rape when we had no intercourse while all our hugs were consented. It must also be admitted that the situation I had experienced with her had certainly made her suffer because of the misunderstandings and the fact that I rejected her without being able to control myself, I blamed myself and still blame myself for this, I did not manage to contact her again.
The likelihood of being attacked for free depends on what's in other people's brains, which is actually unknown. However seeing that it never happens or very rarely that people attack other people we should end up being reassured.
Here are examples of arguments in favor of our paranoia that I have gradually accumulated:
For this acquaintance that I met for two years, the fact that he told me that he was extremely resentful was an element that made me not able to think of anything other than: "now that I have suddenly abandoned him he wants me badly because he is upset that I hate him". Or the fact that constantly during our conversations he seemed angry that I did not appreciate him enough was proof that he was sick and would like revenge, indeed his look and behavior barely hid that he was exasperated by the fact that I am not interested in him, it meant two things: he doesn't care about hurting others, because he doesn't hesitate to make me feel guilty, he's resentful and can't stand for a long time that I wasn't interested enough in him, he's dangerously crazy. Vexed that I did not recognize him, he who seemed to see me as a father, at least someone important to him, I could not find reassuring elements to tell me that he would not attack me.
Having spoken to him again the other day, he seems to me to remain someone quite susceptible, but more pleasant than before, but apparently he did not blame me more than that for having abandoned him. It left him with a question but no more.
When you have schizophrenia, you can be paranoid without there being any real arguments, but if in addition there is more or less a real reason to be worried, as here with this person who behaved badly with others, there is a way that the situation catches fire in the brain with worries and crazy scenarios that we imagine.
It was, in front of him, scenarios where I imagined that he was going to humiliate me, make me look like a monster or an asshole by telling lies about me to the girl I loved but whose contact I no longer had etc etc …
the shame of being sucked when I was little:
I developed at a very young age the idea that if we are weak, ridiculous, psychically fragile, and null, that others would go to see him and take the opportunity to make us turn into a mess (at least that was my feeling). I then totally lost confidence in myself and feared that it would show that I would suck and that I would be persecuted. I had to hide from others the fact that I sucked, otherwise I would be attacked or harassed. I feared in the face of the scum I was afraid of, that my null side would be noticed (I'm sorry to use the word scum with racist connotations, but it's true that young (10 – 12 years old), because of the lying media or their face that may seem a little more aggressive, I was afraid of Arab people, fortunately this is no longer the case 🙂 ).
We can not say that the idea that "some people want to make fun of others just to laugh" is completely absurd, moreover it happens for children from time to time and sometimes for adults also that they make fun of others for no reason. But what is notable is that these ideas invaded my mind, with the impression that it was highly probable, and so it led me to fear such an act of aggression, mockery or harassment all the time. And I felt guilty if I had that kind of worry about being harassed. Every time an idea made me suffer I felt guilty for having this idea and tried to reject it, to no longer have it.
Besides, it makes me think of this symptom whose name I do not know:
Feeling like the laughter around comes from people making fun of us, (this is a common symptom of schizophrenia).
I believe that this symptom is simply due to the fact that we constantly fear acts of aggression, harassment but especially here mockery.
I would sometimes see a group of cheerful young people pass by me, and I dreaded that they would laugh at me, and so as soon as they laughed, I inevitably wondered if it was that they half openly did not care about me!
I felt with my depreciation that others saw me as a draw and I felt that they were going to make fun of me for it, I was afraid at every moment to make a blunder that would show that I sucked. I felt that it was justified to make fun of a draw, so as soon as I had an attitude, something that showed that I sucked (I don't have a specific example, but let's say for example stumble to the point of almost falling), so I tried to hide it (a bit like Pierre Richard in his films) because in a way it was justified for people to make fun of me. I should have if people really made fun of me for this, opposed them and told them that we should not take people for nullos if they stumble, but I felt that if I yelled at them if they laughed when I stumbled, that it would have been unwelcome, indeed this kind of laughter was not necessarily bad, I understood that something was wrong in my mind, but yet I kept the intuition, the reflex to think that the laughter of others if I stumbled were wickedly mocking at the moment they laughed, thinking just after that they should not be but it hurt me terribly anyway, I was susceptible to this, I understood that it would have been wrong to tell them not to be mean, because there was a good chance that in reality it was not mean laughter. I thought it was wrong to have these intuitions because they made me angry with these people, who should not laugh badly. It was the mixture of all these ideas at once when I was experiencing this.
How do I explain the presence of these paranoid ideas in my brain?
I had the impression, the intuition that a harassment would happen to me, that the global situation would worsen, that disasters would eventually happen to me, this intuition that I explain by the overactivation of the neural circuits leading to these ideas, leads to take into account in the mind first the elements that we see that are consistent with this harassment, this fear that this (imaginary) harassment will never stop… after all the fact of being of a certain mood means that we can see life in pink or life in black, that we see things differently depending on which part of our brain is over-activated or under-activated, there is no truth absolutely to which schizophrenics are completely foreign, there is no way to be completely sure that an idea is true or false, even for a schizophrenic person, it is just a discrepancy with the normal where paranoid worries come to mind so frequently with so much intensity, that we can not take the arguments that make us think that there is no reason to worry, and we believe in it strongly.
Well for schizophrenia, I think that the brain is in a state that favors the consideration of elements that make us believe that there is a risk of harassment (I think that a more or less direct disruption of neurotransmitters is the cause, without the overall arrangement of neurons being faulty), that there is a risk that the global situation will worsen until disaster, by dint of seeing that the bad sides, to accumulate only the arguments in favor of this, and to have the overall impression that it is likely that one will be harassed, these bad points on the situation, without being able to see the good sides because our mind working at a hundred per hour, can not take the time to analyze the elements in favor of the idea that there is nothing serious, in the end we are intimately convinced that it is true, even if we can be aware like me, that some points do not hold and realize that we are a hundred times more worried than others and that this is not normal.
The sentence to fully understand the feeling in this paranoia:
"It feels like it's very likely that we'll end up being harassed, that others want to hurt us, are sadistic for no reason more than that, or just to have fun and make fun of us."
For example when we watch the film Matrix the music (or for reports that want to highlight a hidden and harmful thing as we can see on TV) of conspiracy gives the impression, that there is something hidden, something to look for more deeply, if it can give you an idea of what we can feel.
Whether it's for my virtual world scenarios like The Matrix or for my scenarios where I imagine that police officers will pursue me non-stop. The disruption of my brain that pushed me to think about these two things is the same, I had the impression that disasters were going to happen and that it is likely that people want to make me suffer for no reason, that I would be more and more harassed and cornered.
Professor Jean Bernard Fourtillan has an explanation for this that seems to me quite conceivable: it would be the hormone of wakefulness that would be in far too great concentration in many cases of schizophrenia.
I believe he measured it and various observations such as the fact that Alzheimer's is due to too low a concentration of this wakefulness hormone and that people with schizophrenia never have Alzheimer's are strong clues in favor of this hypothesis.
I also find that this hypothesis holds the road because for me, the madness I experienced actually looks like a violent on awakening! Everything is too real, unlike a dream where the hormone of awakening is in low concentration and we worry little about reality, if an object disappears in a dream it does not shock us for example.
It's cobwebs and dead spiders tangled on the end of a stick, can we do more "dark ideas" as picture 🙁
Until very recently death and the idea of committing suicide scared me extremely, I would never have committed suicide, I was especially afraid that thinking about suicide would eventually lead me there.
I thought that people who tried to commit suicide or did, saw death as an escape, but I had never felt that way, until recently.
Following a continuous stressful period, where I was never serin, I began to tell myself that my mind would never be serene always anxious, and that it would remain painful until the end of my life, I told myself that because I found that it had been a very long time, about a year and a half, that it was like that and that it had no reason to change. I then felt death as something calm without problems, as a solution to continuous stress in the mind…
… very painful and which has no reason to stop until the end of life, death would be in this case a soothing thing finally. I just felt that, which already worried me a little, and forced me to take a few days off, I didn't go so far as to want to commit suicide, far from it, but I tell myself that it starts like this.
You have to know for those who read us that if you really consider suicide, you have to talk about it, to those around you, to the doctor, of course trying to avoid making them feel guilty, but by alerting them, and showing that you would like to be helped in this situation, that you would like to be brought a solution, friends will then be able to find solutions, whatever they may be.
How does it feel dead? Sacred question that will influence us.
I believe that there are several steps leading to suicide (this is what I had learned in medicine), I can say something stupid, but I believe that these are the following:
First of all, we feel death as a possible relief to our situation.
Subsequently, death is considered from time to time but not seriously.
Subsequently, it is seriously considered frequently.
We are planning a suicide.
We take action.
You should know that you should talk about it as soon as you get too close to the last step. There are people who make many attempts, a bit like an alert message, so you have to help them at this time. Some are really planning their death.
Also for caregivers who do 24-hour guards (this practice of guards so long is just an incitement to suicides, road accidents when the caregivers return home, and medical errors on the part of the state). It can happen that one commits suicide of relief following such a guard. It is therefore necessary to strive overall not to be too much in the idea of suicide … by forcing oneself to take a minimum rest, to prevent such a thing from happening after a long guard. It happened to several friends of friends of mine.
