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#schizoaffective
locketdream · 2 days
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hallucination trauma IS trauma
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tortiefrancis · 1 year
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hey fun fact did you know that if you're on the schizophrenia spectrum, have psychosis, have psychotic symptoms or traits, etc, that you're loved and your symptoms and traits should not be vilainized or seen as evil or ugly?
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neuroticboyfriend · 1 year
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it's never too late to start brushing your teeth again. i basically never brushed my teeth for a whole 10 years. a decade. A DECADE. i still struggle to brush my teeth once a week, but it all started with brushing my teeth once every few months. so i mean it when i say brushing your teeth once a week, a month, a year, or even a decade, is better than nothing.
and still, nothing is not shameful. it is not immoral to struggle with self care. and it is also not pointless to keep trying. anything you can do, even if its wiping plaque off with a towel, is enough. it is good to take care of yourself however you can, even if it's just trying to muster the will to. reading this post is good, too.
i believe in you and i am proud of you, even in the smallest of steps. it's okay. you can give yourself grace.
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grendel-menz · 11 months
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Ramblings about schizophrenia
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reasonsforhope · 7 months
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Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.
Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.
"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.
Her name was April Burrell.
Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.
April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.
“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...
It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...
Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.
After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.
The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.
Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.
And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.
Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.
“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...
Waking up after two decades
The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...
The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...
A joyful reunion
“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.
In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...
Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.
“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...
The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.
“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”
“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”
...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.
Bringing back Devine
When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].
For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.
Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.
She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...
She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...
Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.
“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”
After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.
In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...
Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...
Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.
Expanding the search for more patients
While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...
The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.
Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.
For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,” said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”
Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.
Changing psychiatric care
How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...
Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.
“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.
In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.
Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.
As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.
Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.
Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.
“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."
-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023
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madpunks · 6 months
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please include schizospectrum people in your mental health positivity post. please actually include schizophrenic, schizoaffective, schizotypal, schizoid and other psychotic people. still to this day, i get called dangerous for being schizophrenic. my last ex told me they "knew" i would lash out and become dangerous and that they shouldn't have dated me specifically because i'm schizophrenic. i never lashed out to hurt them, by the way, but they routinely hurt me.
schizospectrum disorders do not make someone inherently dangerous. people still believe this firmly. our fight isn't over we still have to continue to speak about schizospec people and how unfairly we are treated. we are dehumanized instantly the second people find out about our conditions. we are treated like ticking time bombs. people openly admit that we are scaring them when we talk about our psychosis and how it affects us.
people tell us to calm down and that our delusions aren't real and that we're overreacting. people give reality check us and force us to try to think in ways that scare us. people refuse to trust our own accounts of our own lives and what is happening to us, even when we are not actively delusional or hallucinating. people infantilize us and treat us like we're stupid and have zero autonomy.
we are not dangerous. we are not scary. we are literally just existing in a world that refuses to accept us. please keep talking about schizospectrum struggles and how we need to be seen as just another human, just like anyone else. we can be as unique and varied as anyone else with any other neurotype. we are not all the same person, and we are not inherently dangerous or scary.
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ooppo · 1 year
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myrddin-wylt · 7 months
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good morning to these people and these people only: autistic people who constantly put their foot in their mouth, bitches with NPD, undiagnosed freaks who bamboozle the DSM, bipolar or mood disorder girlies and non-girlies in a manic rage, low- or no-empathy weirdos, and psychos (reclaimed). please survive.
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zebulontheplanet · 7 months
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I’m allowed to come off as emotionless. I’m allowed to have a flat effect. I’m allowed to be blank and show little emotions. I’m allowed.
I’m also allowed to smile then. To laugh. To cry. I’m allowed to be all of these things and be treated as human.
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schizodiaries · 8 months
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The thing about psychosis, in particular the delusions, is that in the moment, the beliefs are our reality. A delusional person doesn’t just believe they’re the reincarnation of Christ. To them in that moment, they are the reincarnation of Christ. They don’t just believe the cops are after them, the cops are after them. They don’t just believe their family members have been replaced by aliens, their family has been replaced by aliens.
This is one of the reasons psychosis can be so traumatizing. We don’t just believe in bizarre and unusual things, we’re actively experiencing them. We’re prone to such outrageous and scary beliefs that are out of our control, and to us, they’re as real as the air we breathe. Keep this in mind when considering the mental state of someone in psychosis.
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deludedcrayon · 1 year
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every so often im reminded that i really am completely alone in this
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stampcollective · 1 year
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people with ‘scary’ and ‘weird’ mental issues i love you.
i love schizophrenics. i love psychotic people, i love people on the schizospectrum, i love people with DID and OSDD, i love people with NPD, i love people with PPD, i love people with SPD, i love people with ASPD, i love people with personality disorders, i love people who hallucinate, people who have delusions, and people who have paranoia. i love people who are mentally ill in ways that are viewed as strange and scary by society. 
it is not your fault that you struggle. you are valid. you are deserving of care and you are deserving of love. your issues do not negate any of that.
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cemitadepollo · 8 days
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Not a day passes by without me being mad as shit that ableism against demonized mental illnesses is normalised.
We are not criminals. We are not dangerous. We do not owe neurotypicals a complete explanation on why we developed our disorders and why we aren't serial killers that kidnap people.
Fuck hollywood, fuck ableist criminology and fuck saneism.
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schizoetic · 3 months
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Just because something you experience in psychosis isn't happening in reality, it doesn't mean it wasn't real to you. The trauma you get from those experiences is real.
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pplatonic · 3 months
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You cannot know the history of schizophrenia as a diagnosis without coming to the conclusion that the fault of the misinformation surrounding schizophrenia and its setback in its research in modern society is a direct result of the laziness of past clinicians.
Negative symptoms used to be the focus of this illness when Kraepelin and Bleuler defined it - Kraepelin thought them to be more important and Bleuler literally defined them as FUNDAMENTAL symptoms.
Then in the 60s and 70s, since hallucinations and delusions were easy to spot and define, they were given more and more prominence in the hopes of "improving diagnostic precision." In real people language, that means they were lazy and wanted a quick checklist to go off of instead of, you know, caring about their patients.
What resulted from this is that now nearly everyone thinks schizophrenia is just hallucinations and delusions. On the medical side of things, the only treatments available for it treat psychotic symptoms, and the majority of the research focuses on them. Which leaves the rest of the debilitating symptoms untreated.
There are corrective adjustments being made to return to the emphasis on negative symptoms, and cognitive symptoms accompany that, but it should have never changed in the first place. Plus, the majority of society isn't adjusting their worldview to align with current perspectives on schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia was historically about the negative symptoms, and it always should have stayed that way. Schizophrenia is not just a "disorder that causes psychosis." It has negative, cognitive, disorganized, and catatonic symptoms as well.
Schizophrenia is a disorder affecting thought, behavior, and emotion, that is accompanied by psychotic features when left untreated.
Stop boiling down illnesses to basic symptoms. Teach and treat them wholistically.
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221bluescarf · 3 months
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if you *really* want to try and understand psychosis, I always offer the experience of dreaming.
Almost everyone on the planet dreams, and I find it to be a perfect comparison for psychosis... Anything can happen in a dream and you don't question it. This is your reality. If you're suddenly an astronaut, you don't typically question it. If there's suddenly a dragon, you don't typically question it. A monster can crawl out of the bushes or a stranger can appear in your house. Anyone can be someone they're not. Danger can come from anywhere. A pleasant dream can easily become a nightmare.
The only difference is that you wake up in the morning and it's over. And most people don't judge you for it. When you "wake up" from psychosis, there's often shame and people judge you.
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