The crazy laugh of the Joker, (I am not the author of this image).
I remember that during the college period, it happened to me very often to be in situations where I laughed alone, where I imagine that a psychiatrist could have said that I had unmotivated laughter.
I was afraid that I would look very stupid and that I would be taken for a madman, but each time a crazy idea made me laugh.
I remember one particular episode where, like the other episodes, I couldn't hold back from laughing, without being able to explain to others the reason for what made me laugh, because it was shameful in my idea to think about it:
We are the only animals that know how to laugh, why? maybe because it allows you to escape from time to time stress due to thinking too much about always the same thing and to see things from another point of view in these moments?
It was at the pony club, around the age of 14-15, every time before we did the riding session, we had to look for his horse, brush it, prepare it and put the saddle on it, and this time, I thought of the sketch of dummies where Alain Chabat advertises for tonyglandine, my beep is concrete! I looped in my head this scene and for 20 minutes, during all the preparation of the horse I burst out laughing from time to time trying to remain discreet because I felt that I was going to pass for a madman, and it frankly bothered me to pass for a madman.
I think what was going on in my head was a hypersensitivity to feel some things as funny, here the presence of Alain Chabat who says his looking serious! 🙂
Also as my mind tends to get stuck on certain situations as I explain in another chapter, here I was stuck on the situation of this sketch. Finally I was very ashamed to think about it, because I thought that in the pony club, with these people who seem to me in quotation marks a little chic, it would have been unacceptable, shameful, unimaginable, that someone thinks of tonyglandine, my beep is concrete! This shame also contributed to my gene and the fact that it made me laugh. Also, because of this shame of these thoughts, the people who would have asked me why I was laughing would not have had the clear answer of my true reason, but I would have rather rambled: "no but it's nothing, it's a silly thing" and I would have done everything not to answer, Afraid he will find out that I was thinking of tonyglandine!
Patients do not want to treat themselves: at least for me, this was clearly false because it led to anxiety, and although sometimes delirium convinces people that it is good that they continue with these ideas, I think that most of the time delirium is more experienced as something to be eliminated from the mind, for disturbing good judgment rather than improving it. I believe that people often do not like to have paranoid ideas (the fear of being persecuted in an unjustified way).
After in this situation it is completely normal to try to stop the treatment especially at the beginning if you believe that you are cured, or to reduce it, because the antipsychotics of second generation are still a real scumbag for health …
… often make you unwind, can give tics, often make you sleep, can somehow make it difficult to concentrate, promote diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and maybe also promotes cancer a little because it makes you obese, since obesity is associated with more cancer.
So before judging a patient who stops or decreases his treatment, try to understand why he does this, it is possible that he does not have a critical aspect of his delirium, but it is not at all sure that this is the cause.
He may be led to think that he is cured, that he does not really have schizophrenia but that he had something else (after all he is not a doctor and does not know the definition of schizophrenia so he is not necessarily sure that he has schizophrenia from which today we do not really cure, he may hope to have another, less serious pathology).
If in addition his treatment does not work very hard (which can happen during the first months sometimes) and that during his periods out of crisis he was not too bad, then we can understand all the more that he tries to stop the treatment.
Then it is necessary to judge according to the patient's past whether it is urgent or less urgent that he resume his treatment. For example, for my case I once tried to stop the treatment because I was trying dietary supplements known to have effectiveness in schizophrenia, although I really believe that they have some effectiveness, it is not enough to stop the treatment, but they help. There was no absolute urgency for me to resume treatment, indeed in the past I have never done anything or I have never done any dangerous action against myself or others although I have remained without treatment for a very long time.
You, health students, are in the process of constructing in your mind the concepts of diseases, arranging them, understanding the ins and outs of them in order to ultimately know how to treat people. I find that you are not being guided clearly enough in this acquisition.
During my medical studies, in one of the most renowned faculties of France, schizophrenia was explained very badly, I think, giving the impression that schizophrenic patients have brains turned upside down! That the ideas they feel are not normal, that we should not try to understand them because it is foolish, that there must be something screwed up in their brain.
The courses at the university gave, I find, the impression that for schizophrenia and for psychiatric pathologies, that the patient's brain reacts in a totally aberrant way!
It seems to me that in the medical community the impressions, the ideas about schizophrenic patients are worse than in the general population because of the courses that explain very poorly. After having done an internship in a psychiatric department will usually help caregivers to better understand.
I was also afraid myself when I wasn't being treated that there was something really messed up in my brain, even though the idea of me being mistaken for someone foolish bothered me a lot too.
But as I said before, I think this way of seeing things is wrong and the basic functioning of the brain is good, but some functions are extremely exacerbated or diminished.
Here is another argument for this idea: if ever a somewhat disturbing idea came to mind, such as the fact that a plane would run into you and kill you, immediately you would relativize the risk, if the idea worried you for a moment, the next moment allowed you to tell yourself that the risk is very unlikely, and the idea of death even if it ever happens is not so serious.
On the other hand if 5 disturbing ideas came to your mind every moment, that I dread death because you imagine it as a cold and inhuman emptiness, that you fear the suffering causing death, that you do not have time to relativize these disturbing ideas that come to mind that already 5 new disturbing ideas have arrived to you, you would be psychotic, yet the ideas are no different from a normal mind but just more intense and more frequent than on a normal mind.
Also we should not look for noon to 2 pm, and we should not rely on the rumors that circulate about this or that pathology, for example for anorexics, although they can really suffer from many other symptoms alongside their anorexia, I guess they do not eat surely first because they are not hungry. I believe that there is a biological anomaly that causes this.
I think a mechanism is put in place and causes them to be as hungry as someone who has just finished a huge 800g meal, while they are hungry. That's why they are disgusted with food. What mechanism causes them not to go hungry? this is a real question to ask, I believe that scientists had put forward that bacteria in the intestine create a molecule close to the satiety hormone, it is for example an idea to explore, and that perhaps when bulimia is triggered, it is because there is an autoimmune reaction against these molecules that, in the end, block the satiety hormone and thus cause great hunger.
I believe that sometimes anorexic girls want to lose even more weight because they are too fat, be careful as a doctor not to generalize necessarily, all patients (and patients even if it is rarer for men) necessarily feel this, or at least, they may be aware that it is an exaggerated feeling and that it is dangerous for their lives.
I have already seen doctors be persuaded that these patients want to lose weight to be beautiful because rumor says that anorexics think so, while they themselves testify that this is not the case, and although I can not read the minds of patients, I think it was not. A friend of mine who had anorexia and was a doctor gave me the impression in her testimony that when she was hospitalized as a teenager for her anorexia, the doctors seemed convinced that she wanted to lose weight, while today she tells me that she did not want to lose weight but that she had a lot of difficulty eating… I believe that if we want to have the exact point of view of patients with certain diseases, we must look at the testimonies of these patients but when they are better, and not on the rumors that circulate in the medical community. We must not despise these patients and take them for idiots as I have already seen doctors do, or impose on them the idea that they have ideas that they do not have.
Indeed, understanding how patients feel is not easy at all. But just because it's not obvious doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
I think that the best way for doctors to understand the feelings of patients, if it is a subject that interests the doctor, is to base themselves on the testimonies of patients as well as on the word of peer helpers.
Be careful and try not to reveal any of the patient's thoughts that they are ashamed of. But I think it's important to try to understand the patient and communicate with him about his feelings, if he wants to and that the treatment he takes sufficiently reduces his delirium (which is the case for almost all schizophrenics on treatment).
It can be difficult to understand the ideas that come to mind, to classify them, to describe them.
It is normal that it is difficult to understand patients because it is very hard to feel in someone else what you have never felt.
It is also difficult to understand patients, because, I believe, there is a kind of fear of the patient in a lot of pathology to say what he feels because he can be ashamed of his ideas, as for example when I was ashamed of being crazy.
Or he cannot explain to himself and therefore to others, what he feels, for lack of capacity for introspection or by a set of ideas that invade his mind and prevent him from understanding himself. As a result, it makes it difficult to understand what the patient feels.
For example, for me, I was afraid to say that I was paranoid to a doctor because I feared to be locked up, it was of course without treatment.
I was afraid to tell the details of my discomfort because I would have thought that my interlocutors would have ended up thinking that I was completely sick and dangerous, and the idea that they see me like that, would never have left me.
Also patients may have the impression that what they feel is obvious, that others must know well, that it shows. Yet not necessarily. So they will not testify to this feeling.
There are also the timid patients who lie in their testimony and who twist what they feel to hide from others and from oneself what they think, out of shame of these thoughts. This was my case before bactrim (a treatment I tried and which I find helped me a lot).
Also, patients should not be miscategorized by their pathology. Here's what I once wrote in a forum response, and that's how psychiatric terms should be used to better help people, not categorize them:
In the field of psychology we find in the majority of situations, types of feelings or ideas that other people have and make them suffer, we group it under a name of disease, term that can be hurtful, such as bipolar disorder or other. However, if the psychologist or doctor does his job well, this term should help to better understand his patient and not to identify him as someone not normal, whose people with the same pathology all have the same thoughts and the same behavior. Colleges should say in their course that we should not categorize people like that, but rather seek to understand them.
It is true that I sometimes focus my ideas on doctors, in this document you will see, rest assured, I am not completely crazy either :). There are several things to say about this.
It probably comes in part from my illness that makes me worry too much about it, that I'm too susceptible and that it bothers me not to be taken seriously when I tell a doctor about a strange symptom, that I'm mistaken for a dangerous madman, or that we don't take into account a symptom that is important.
You should not feel above others as a doctor, I had this feeling thinking that patients were stupid since they were far from having been able to succeed in the first year of medicine, and I thought I saw that in this environment.
In reality, even if on some points, we doctors have better abilities, patients may have good reasoning, or even false sometimes, but we must seek to understand patients in a discussion of equals where we can be wrong from time to time, rather than in an approach of overwhelming superiority.
Also because having been a medical student I saw some colleagues have a fear of schizophrenic patients almost insane, that is, even taking them for dirty dangerous mabouls, although taking schizophrenics for dirty types was not widespread among doctors, on the other hand being afraid of schizophrenics, among my acquaintances, was quite common and that I think is due to the bad explanations they were given on schizophrenia and people with psychiatric problems in general during their study.
But then, when I meet a doctor to whom I learn that I am schizophrenic, if the contact goes badly right after, I am led to ask myself the question: "is he taking me for a dangerous madman who will invent symptoms in his head" because I have already seen this sometimes in the medical community, and it's painful to have this impression that the more we tell him about his symptoms, the less he believes us, this is not the case with all the doctors, and those with whom I have this impression, I'm not sure it's totally true, but sometimes the contact is tense.
This impression of not being believed, it must be admitted, is also a little too present at home because I am too worried because of my illness, most certainly.
In front of the doctor, the idea that when I tell a strange symptom they do not believe me and take me for a crazy, it worries me and annoys me a little because it means that they do not believe me and that they will believe me for nothing, that I will see other doctors, it won't help, it's the door open to all the worries that I could not be well cared for.
If ever this kind of impression is present too often in my home, that it becomes heavy and worrying for me, I will end up increasing the treatment a little.
This evening when I retouch this text, I feel serene and I realize that classically I feel guilty for having the impression of not being believed by the doctor, because that is what creates this tension with the doctor, and that suddenly, I tell myself that I am responsible for this, that it is because I am crazy that the contact goes wrong and the doctor will come out of the consultation with a bad impression on me. Tonight when I complete this text a little, I tell myself that it pisses me off all the time to feel guilty for everything 🙁 That I would like my brain to let go of my sneakers a little on this subject:)
It must be recognized that there is sometimes a little truth in this impression, indeed, according to the feeling of a lot of my friends with their doctor, they sometimes testify to this, that sometimes the doctor seems to think that their symptoms are in their heads. There's also the fact that the doctor friends I still meet today are a bit like that, and when I meet them, it makes me feel like they're all like that, sorry friends, but that's the way it is. We must also recognize that a lot of doctors are smarter than that, and although they are not sure that the strange anecdotes I tell about my health are real, they still take them into account in case it is real, it is the right behavior to have when you are a doctor.
Doctors who are afraid that I will reduce the treatment who tell me: "be careful, it must not decrease it a little" with a panicked look as if they were convinced that I was going to do it, as if when I reduce the treatment I was going to switch to a world without logic where I do not understand that I must take the treatment, it's also a bit of a pain (I really feel like my former GP was like that). As if the so-called anosognosis of schizophrenia was going to make me stop all treatment overnight while the treatment relieves my worries, my deep discomfort and my paranoia that I may be afraid will push me to do stupid things or get too angry in inappropriate situations, no, I will not stop my treatment definitively, it seems to me that this is the case for the vast majority of schizophrenics.
A patient who reduces his treatment, will not, in my opinion, fall into a senseless world where, after that, he will never want to resume his treatment. Most certainly if it goes wrong again, he will resume his treatment.
However I add an important clarification, a person with schizophrenia told me that he was convinced of the veracity of his delirium during his first seizures, I will not tell you what proportion of schizophrenic people are aware or not of his delusions and especially want to no longer have them, I know that there is a continuum in schizophrenia between these two extremes, and I believe that at the beginning of schizophrenia, it is common to adhere to delirium.
As I already said in a previous chapter, psychosis is not something completely abnormal where logic would have disappeared.
Another important point (this is my opinion, but with the analysis I make of my past thoughts, I think it's right)…
schizophrenics are not foolish, I think that the brain, the circuits, the positioning and the arrangement of neurons is normal, that the functions that are useful for reasoning are normal, it's just that some functions are extremely over-activated or under-activated, causing the behavior and speech of the person to appear senseless.
No interest in this image, just to embellish the site 🙂
I take an example: anyone (or almost) being harassed really intensely by his boss, his classmates, his colleagues, will end up seeing persecution everywhere, will have the impression that this persecution will never stop, will want revenge, and will see a sneaky attack in the slightest action of his leader, of his colleagues, etc.
In schizophrenia where often there are ideas of persecution, I think that the functions, the neural networks that activate that when there is most certainly a real persecution, here activates for just one idea that comes to mind.
So these ideas of persecution only happen when the person is long and intensely harassed in normal times (moreover this feeling has a use, it pushes the persecuted person to fart a lead, to get angry frankly against his executioners, which can scare them and fix the situation, or to flee this situation so harmful).
It is surely the evolution of species that has programmed us in this way so that we can save ourselves. Indeed when we are harassed at work, that we do not advance in our life, that so we are all the time stressed, angry, that we have depression and we lose money, and also because it can prevent us from making the right decisions in our lives, all this, on average, will surely decrease our chances of having offspring, so that people who do not have these genes that make you crazy / paranoid when you are harassed have disappeared over the generations.
No interest in this image, just to embellish the site 🙂
Well I think that in schizophrenia this activation of ideas of persecution is done so easily and intensely (because the neurons are frankly out of whack)… that the fear of persecution is activated for almost nothing, giving the impression that unlikely persecutions are likely.
This is a normal phenomenon greatly amplified, and can lead to the idea that aliens will come to torture us or that robots hold us in slavery in a virtual machine (as in the movie Matrix) to make us suffer because what seems totally improbable in normal times seems very likely here.
I think that for all the symptoms of schizophrenia and the majority of psychiatric pathologies, it is so, it is just a disorder, an intense exaggeration of normal functions that are activated too easily, I explain it for many other symptoms on this site.
I really felt that it was very likely that we were all locked into a computer simulation like in the Movie Matrix, although I knew that most people didn't have that idea, and that this intense fear was completely abnormal in my mind, and that there was a real chance that this scenario I imagined wasn't true.
Afterwards, even if the symptoms are really only an exacerbation of normal functions in the brain, it is still necessary to give antipsychotic treatment before doing psychotherapy. I think we can discuss, but having a discussion with a schizophrenic person without treatment will not cure him (this is what I have heard in medicine, and from my experience, it is clearly true) and this kind of discussion although it can change a little bit of ideas for a while will end quickly, in my opinion to disturb her more than to help her.
By dint of accumulating ideas and impressions that are there expressed more intensely than in normal times that go in one direction, we deviate from the ideas commonly accepted in the population, yet the brain can be the same, but a biological disorder, I think, can be well reversible, could quite explain this by favoring certain impressions and ideas to the point of ending up totally out of step with the opinion Medium.
Another example: the idea that there could be people who can stay in the air or do telekinesis, some will be led to think that it is foolish to think that, well I will explain here that a normal brain can think this provided …
… that some ideas and impressions are just a little exacerbated, to understand what I am going to explain here, one just needs to have a minimum of ability to understand what others may think and feel:
You certainly think that to rise in the air is impossible because the laws of physics prevent this, you think that because you think that the law of gravity and the other laws are so and absolutely cannot change, that an effect always has the same consequences, because maybe you are somehow Cartesian, but if we think carefully we can ask ourselves, basically, if we are totally sure that the laws of physics are indeed immutable, that the law of gravity can not be taken in default (indeed in physics several laws have been put in default, and were only approximations of reality), that necessarily they are laws that govern physical phenomena and not rather something supernatural that regulates all this. By reflex I tend to think that the laws of physics are immutable, that it is they who rule the world. At the moment, I will be unable to think that it is possible that people can stay in the air thanks to their concentration, but I have known a person thinking this, and we must recognize that if we forget the physical laws, which after all nothing proves to be true (because indeed the world in which we live may be a simulation by a clever mind), apart from the fact that we are afraid that they are false and that our beliefs collapse, we must recognize that in this case, staying in the air by thought is possible.
If in addition the person who thinks this has the impression that it is good that people have supernatural forces like flying in the air, that this is a good thing, because for example these people could save the world from its misfortunes, then we will tend to want to believe that yes, people know how to stay in the air thanks to thought. Indeed, these ideas that the world necessarily always rests on the same physical laws is a subjective idea (indeed nothing proves that we are not in a world simulated by an evil mind that makes us believe that physical laws exist, after all, why this hypothesis could not be right), and if the brain wants to believe that these laws of physics exist or on the contrary that these laws of physics do not exist, one can arrive at radically opposite conclusions making others look crazy.
There is really a weird thing in the mind!
To tell the truth, everything is subjective, if our emotions push us to feel something strongly, there is always a way that we take into account that the arguments in favor of this impression and that we do not think about the arguments against it.
Having an impression of something, for example having the impression that the neighbor who did not answer us when we said hello hates us, causes the fact that certain ideas will be born in us more easily, so we will not have in mind the ideas in favor that this person just did not hear what he was told. In psychosis it is the same except that the impressions are extremely intense, and block the appearance of ideas against delirium strongly, however many patients realize that in their mind it is wrong even if the intense impression remains present.
A weird drawing I made (not really related to weird ideas 🙂 ).
Yes, it can happen to have ideas, crazy intuitions, which seem very strange, it could lead to think that these patients, if for example they had the intuition that it was necessary to kill a neighbor, would end up going to kill him or that they could do any other serious acts, in reality it is not for a simple reason …
… (at least that's my point of view, but by observing people, it seems right to me), people all or almost all have a restraint in hurting others, because hurting others makes you suffer, and because you feel it is extremely serious. This restraint of hurting others is always present in schizophrenia (at least for me and for those I have met).
< class="sst-nothing">For me, and in my opinion for a lot of schizophrenics this restraint, empathy and guilt towards others is often even extremely exacerbated…
While I might be extremely angry with some, I was certainly never going to hurt them.
This anger was almost no longer present from the moment I took a treatment.
We sometimes imagine that patients with bizarre ideas adhere to them without worry. Me they created a lot of worries, and they convinced me that half of being true, I did not want to have them.
Personally I do not really believe that we learn not to do harm, finally it is surely semi acquired semi innate. No one explained to me little that making the neighbor cry was bad yet I did not want to do it, it would have made me suffer to do it, and that even if small we often want to do forbidden, for the desire of adventure, to show that we are brave, and because it bothers us to obey perfectly the rules imposed. This conflict in us between trying to do and not wanting to do that could hurt others is proof that we are worried about hurting others, otherwise there would not be this conflict in us and we would do the without even thinking.
Even if you get caught when you do something wrong as a child, it's surely not the memory of the child punishment that pushes people not to do adult harm, but because generally, for most people, it hurts them to do harm (that's my opinion).
So I remember reading a scientific experiment carried out around 2010 that goes in this direction that humanity is innate: we put 7-month-old babies in front of a video of two plush toys, one red and one blue, the video showed that one of the two plush toys prevented the other stuffed animal from achieving its goal: bring a balloon to the top of the hill. Then those who carried out the experiment put the babies in the presence of these two stuffed animals, and then the babies almost systematically took in their arms the plush that tried to bring the balloon to the top as a blanket (whether blue or red) and never the one that prevented bringing the balloon to the top. It is a bit of a scientific proof that from a very young age, children want to do good or at least that they already have an awareness of good and evil, that is to say to help others, as we would like to be helped, and not to do harm as we would like to be done no harm.
I invite you to first read the titles of each chapter of this page, because the document is very long, these titles will already give you important indications
I tend to judge doctors as misjudging people with psychiatric problems, or at least some doctors that they are not doing their job well towards these patients.
You medical students build your knowledge.
This judgment on my part is not good, especially if you make the effort as a doctor or nurse not to judge negatively and to be kind to your patients. But it's true that I've also seen doctors who seemed not to be benevolent, I can't blame these doctors too much because I know that the pressures of being a medical student drive you crazy (at least in my college it was so), susceptible, and push not to be kind. It's really how the situation of caregivers is managed by the state and hierarchy! As a doctor or caregiver I invite you to regroup and fight against all this (for example the guards of 24 hours are just dangerous for patients because doctors are less reliable after 12 hours of guard and dangerous for the doctor because it rots the health of the doctor not to sleep so long and it puts him in danger of suicide at the end of his guard, and in danger of a road accident if he returns by car, it is just unacceptable, I do not understand that we continue).
I think that indeed, it can happen that sometimes patients turn a little or get annoyed (I think that for schizophrenia, usually they get annoyed internally to avoid being unpleasant with others and being frowned upon, because they fear to hurt others) or remain a little paranoid and susceptible. But precisely with what I am writing here, I think I can help you not to be afraid of these patients, and to better guide your schizophrenic patients.
I also caution here about insisting on understanding what the patient is thinking at all costs. It can be very badly experienced, that’s why as a doctor you have to ask questions, but you shouldn’t insist too much either, indeed as I explain at the bottom of this page: it is disturbing to share one’s fantasies, sharing your ideas can be annoying in schizophrenia when you’re feeling bad.
Schizophrenics get much better when they have treatment
A bit of serenity returns when you take the treatment
Patients with antipsychotic treatment usually get much better,
they often return almost to normal although very often remaining disabled by the disease and having difficulty following a job, moreover only 10% work (many friends medical students had not understood this until the 7th or 8th year).
During lectures, students learn the symptoms present during seizures, it should be known that these disappear a lot with treatment.
Having weird/crazy ideas doesn't make it dangerous
A weird drawing I made (not really related to weird ideas 🙂 ).
Yes, it can happen to have ideas, crazy intuitions, which seem very strange, it could lead to think that these patients, if for example they had the intuition that it was necessary to kill a neighbor, would end up going to kill him or that they could do any other serious acts, in reality it is not for a simple reason …
… (at least that's my point of view, but by observing people, it seems right to me), people all or almost all have a restraint in hurting others, because hurting others makes you suffer, and because you feel it is extremely serious. This restraint of hurting others is always present in schizophrenia (at least for me and for those I have met).
For me, and in my opinion for a lot of schizophrenics this restraint, empathy and guilt towards others is often even extremely exacerbated…
While I might be extremely angry with some, I was certainly never going to hurt them.
This anger was almost no longer present from the moment I took a treatment.
Personally I do not really believe that we learn not to do harm, finally it is surely semi acquired semi innate. No one explained to me little that making the neighbor cry was wrong yet I did not want to do it.
From my point of view, schizophrenia is only a disruption of neurons, causing normal brain functions to be exacerbated or intensely diminished.
Another important point (this is my opinion, but with the analysis I make of my past thoughts, I think it's right)…
schizophrenics are not foolish, I think that the brain, the circuits, the positioning and the arrangement of neurons is normal, that the functions that are useful for reasoning are normal, it's just that some functions are extremely over-activated or under-activated, causing the behavior and speech of the person to appear senseless.
No interest in this image, just to embellish the site 🙂
I take an example: anyone (or almost) being harassed really intensely by his boss, his classmates, his colleagues, will end up seeing persecution everywhere, will have the impression that this persecution will never stop, will want revenge, and will see a sneaky attack in the slightest action of his leader, of his colleagues, etc.
In schizophrenia where often there are ideas of persecution, I think that the functions, the neural networks that activate only when there is most certainly a real persecution, here activate for just one idea that comes to mind.
It is true that I sometimes focus my ideas on doctors, in this document you will see, rest assured, I am not completely crazy either :). There are several things to say about this.
It probably comes in part from my illness that makes me worry too much about it, that I'm too susceptible and that it bothers me not to be taken seriously when I tell a doctor about a strange symptom, that I'm mistaken for a dangerous madman, or that we don't take into account a symptom that is important.
You should not feel above others as a doctor, I had this feeling thinking that patients were stupid since they were far from having been able to succeed in the first year of medicine, and I thought I saw that in this environment.
In reality, even if on some points, we doctors have better abilities, patients may have good reasoning, or even false sometimes, but we must seek to understand patients in a discussion of equals where we can be wrong from time to time, rather than in an approach of overwhelming superiority.
Also because having been a medical student I saw some colleagues have a fear of schizophrenic patients almost insane, that is, even taking them for dirty dangerous mabouls, although taking schizophrenics for dirty types was not widespread among doctors, on the other hand being afraid of schizophrenics, among my acquaintances, was quite common and that I think is due to the bad explanations they were given on schizophrenia and people with psychiatric problems in general during their study.
But then, when I meet a doctor to whom I learn that I am schizophrenic, if the contact goes badly right after, I am led to ask myself the question: "is he taking me for a dangerous madman who will invent symptoms in his head" because I have already seen this sometimes in the medical community, and it's painful to have this impression that the more we tell him about his symptoms, the less he believes us, this is not the case with all the doctors, and those with whom I have this impression, I'm not sure it's totally true, but sometimes the contact is tense.
My thoughts have a stressful, metallic, inhuman tone (though I can worry about others) when I'm off medication.
As an example here is what you can feel without treatment, this is what I experienced when I stopped the treatment for a month to test something, it must be admitted that it is extreme, but that the vast majority of schizophrenics will no longer have these problems under treatment.
I was, during that time, very upset all the time. I was afraid of myself and of getting upset about others wrongly since my mind was messing around and I was angry about all the time. Then I had the impression that my GP was going to want at all costs to believe that I was going badly and go and get annoyed with it (I think there was a background of truth with this GP that I changed, even if I worried too much), to be locked up or at the limit to pass the message to my other doctors, and that they do not believe me and risk having me locked up. I imagined that I would not be able to reassure the doctor, that I arrived in a Kafkaesque situation, I began to think about it non-stop, non-stop, so I resumed a treatment after that.
Too many ideas at once
And then when ideas and impressions accumulate too quickly, they are negative, megalomaniac etc. we can not take the time to undo them. This is also why a simple exacerbation of a phenomenon normally present in everyone can lead to going crazy, at least that's my point of view.
And at one point there is a phenomenon of vicious circle: ideas create the same kind of ideas that create the same kind of ideas, we are obsessed with our thoughts. The patient thinks only of this and what he says may seem incomprehensible if his reasoning leads him to forget the counter-arguments yet obvious to someone not worried.
When we see certain things only in a certain way and arguments in favor of this way of seeing accumulate, it can form in quotation marks a delirium.
Psychiatry courses in my faculty were bad
You, health students, are in the process of constructing in your mind the concepts of diseases, arranging them, understanding the ins and outs of them in order to ultimately know how to treat people. I find that you are not being guided clearly enough in this acquisition.
During my medical studies, in one of the most renowned faculties of France, schizophrenia was explained very badly, I think, giving the impression that schizophrenic patients have brains turned upside down! That the ideas they feel are not normal, that we should not try to understand them because it is foolish, that there must be something screwed up in their brain.
The courses at the university gave, I find, the impression that for schizophrenia and for psychiatric pathologies, that the patient's brain reacts in a totally aberrant way!
It seems to me that in the medical community the impressions, the ideas about schizophrenic patients are worse than in the general population because of the courses that explain very poorly. After having done an internship in a psychiatric department will usually help caregivers to better understand.
I was also afraid myself when I wasn't being treated that there was something really messed up in my brain, even though the idea of me being mistaken for someone foolish bothered me a lot too.
But as I said before, I think this way of seeing things is wrong and the basic functioning of the brain is good, but some functions are extremely exacerbated or diminished.
Patients want to treat themselves in general, but the treatment is heavy which pushes to stop it, and sometimes they can believe they are cured so stop it
Patients do not want to treat themselves: at least for me, this was clearly false because it led to anxiety, and although sometimes delirium convinces people that it is good that they continue with these ideas, I think that most of the time delirium is more experienced as something to be eliminated from the mind, for disturbing good judgment rather than improving it. I believe that people often do not like to have paranoid ideas (the fear of being persecuted in an unjustified way).
After in this situation it is completely normal to try to stop the treatment especially at the beginning if you believe that you are cured, or to reduce it, because the antipsychotics of second generation are still a real scumbag for health …
Yes, drug treatment (or in the absence of effectiveness by seismotherapy) is necessary
On the other hand, indeed a patient with the same kind of schizophrenia as me (with a lot of paranoia and discomfort) needs a treatment, trying to treat him without neuroleptics (or seismotherapy when neuroleptics do not work) is actually likely to worsen the situation and focus the patient's paranoia on the psychologist or doctor. This is what happened to me when I was followed by a psychiatrist in my 17 to 19 years old, without him understanding that I had schizophrenia. Indeed I developed and I kept the intense worry that he risked locking me up for life for my problems, I felt the fact of having confided in him for two years as a rape, I actually focused my anger against him (again my restraint and fear of hurting others totally prevented me from hurting him), this anger was resolved when I started having treatment, at the age of 23, it was no longer a problem.
The word neuroleptic is synonymous with the word antipsychotic. It's just that the word neuroleptic is more used in the 60s, and the word antipsychotic appeared later.
How psychotherapy works
Psychotherapy makes it possible to find serenity, but first, for schizophrenic patients, a treatment that works a minimum of well is needed.
Here's a bit about how psychotherapy works if I understood my medical classes correctly and rely on my feelings:
Talking and sharing your feelings, and trying to explain how some of the ideas you feel are exaggerated or false can help to have fewer of these kinds of ideas whether by a psychologist or a friend.
For example: a person frankly depressing and feeling ignored because a neighbor did not answer him when he said hello, to this person we can explain to him that if his neighbor did not answer him, it may be that he did not hear, or maybe this person is embittered, but that the other people in his building and the majority of people are not, and that if his neighbor is embittered or depressed, it may be temporary.
Also for a lady I spoke to and who was always afraid of death, I will want to tell her: it is something normal to be afraid of it, being too afraid of it does not help to avoid death and ruins life, if you can ever get there so try to think less about it, if you can not think less about it for the moment, do not blame yourself because what you feel is not your fault, and if ever my words are not enough to overcome your too great concern, it may be helpful to take treatment 🙂 (although I wish her she wouldn't need it)
That's it, these points must, I hope already enlighten you and reassure you if you had not understood that.
I was sick since the age of 3, I have no memory of me not sick, I think we could not necessarily say that I was schizophrenic from 3 years old but at the age of 12, with my symptoms, I think we had to be able to establish it. I was not treated until the age of 23, because I did not have very visible symptoms (such as big hallucinations), I had above all a deep malaise, intense paranoia, strange ideas, the impression that I was demonic and unhealthy and that I was afraid of contaminating others by this, and that the fact that I could contaminate them was another reason for thinking that I was unhealthy and demonic, I was ashamed and afraid that people would know the content of my thoughts, because I felt them to be frankly unhealthy in the eyes of others.
When I went to see this psychiatrist, I was hoping for a miracle, like a message overboard or on a balloon, he didn't come, it was only later that I was able to be treated. I don't really regret it, so I was able to do a few years of medicine where I learned a lot.
That's why I hid my illness and my thoughts, that I didn't tell anyone about my illness. I saw a psychiatrist voluntarily from the age of 17, I made this gesture to consult him hoping that there was a solution (it was desperate because I was extremely afraid that there was no solution and that it would throw me into madness), but finally I hid from him that I frankly had paranoid symptoms (which would have made it possible to make the diagnosis), because I was afraid that if he knew it he would lock me up all my life in a psychiatric hospital because, not being sure that I was schizophrenic, I feared that he would think that I have an even more serious mental illness and that would push me to become dangerous ( my impulse phobias would have been proof that people like me become dangerous at some point in the eyes of doctors).
So I was followed by a psychiatrist until I was 19 years old without him understanding that I was schizophrenic and without him giving me the appropriate treatment. Giving my feelings, my feelings to this doctor without having the appropriate treatment frankly bothered me, and although this episode passed today, my consultations with him were experienced as a psychic rape because I lived them as forced, indeed I was afraid that if I left him, would not see him anymore, so he makes me lock up, too, the sharing of my ideas with him was experienced as a rape, as if I was telling a super disturbing thing to someone that I did not want him to hear. I was constantly afraid after the end of these consultations that he would come back and have me locked up for life, I was constantly afraid of that, and that's also why I felt these consultations as rape: their existence prevented me from becoming serin again, so it had destroyed me until the end of my life.
I kept hoping that at the bottom of the tunnel there was light 🙂
It was at the age of 23, after someone urged me to smoke a highly concentrated cannabis firecracker (during my first year of medicine) that I had a memorable anxiety attack and began receiving treatment.
It's very sad and painful to think that all your childhood was suffering but that's the way it is. It's hard to explain, but I still kept hope, a utopian, crazy hope, but it was still there all the time.
I continued my studies for a few years and gave up, I did not have the self-confidence, the motivation, the ability to concentrate and work, and the aplomb sometimes necessary to be a doctor.
I had created an account on the forum schizophrenia Atoute with this nickname (e884571) in 2011 (approximately) because at the time I was worried that we could know my identity with the nickname and so to be sure to remain anonymous, I put a nickname that could not give indications about me. I was just kind of a bit paranoid (although I had a treatment that made me not so bad) and I worried too much that the fact that I was schizophrenic might be known, and I worried that, if people I knew ended up knowing that, I can no longer stand their judging gaze on my self, too disturbing.
I think there are really misconceptions circulating about schizophrenia, and that's why I urge people suffering from this disease not to tell everyone, so as not to risk being frowned upon. And also, if you ever tell someone you don't know well, if they end up getting angry with you, they could make you walk by threatening to divulge that information, which can't happen if you don't tell people you don't know little. But I must also admit that I was paranoid and worried too much about this, and that I could not stand in a sickly way the look of others and their judgment that I imagined on me, so the fact that I knew that others know that I am schizophrenic would have deeply disturbed me and made life unlivable. That was the way it was, fortunately it improved quite well.
