Paranoid Schizophrenia Quotes

There's an old, frequently-used definition of insanity, which is "performing the same action over and over, expecting different results."... Now, I'm no doctor, but I am on TV. And in my professional opinion, George Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic. ... ...Other symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are: Do you see things that aren't there? Such as a link between 9/11 and Iraq? Do you - do you feel things that you shouldn't be feeling, like a sense of accomplishment? Do you have trouble organizing words into a coherent sentence? Do you hear voices that aren't really there? Like, oh, I don't know, your imaginary friend, Jesus? Telling you to start a war in the Middle East. Well, guess what? There are a large number of people out there also suffering from the same delusions, because there are Republicans, there are conservatives, and then there are the Bushies. This is the 29 percent of Americans who still think he's doing "a heck of a job, Whitey." And I don't believe that it's coincidence that almost the same number of Americans - 25 percent - told a recent pollster that they believe that this year - this year, 2007 - would bring the Second Coming of Christ! I have a hunch these are the same people. Because, if you think that you're going to meet Jesus before they cancel "Ugly Betty," then you're used to doing things by faith. And if you have so much blind faith that you think this war is winnable, you're nuts and you shouldn't be allowed near a voting booth.

Your delusions of persecution are a telltale sign of early stage paranoid schizophrenia.

almost every depiction you find in books or movies make people living with paranoid schizophrenia the villains. Can you imagine if books and movies did the same thing to people with cancer?

Illness is a reminder that we don’t really have any control. And I understand why people find schizophrenia frightening, believe me, I get it. Hallucinations, delusions, it’s difficult to imagine having a mind that is not fully your own, just like it’s difficult to imagine having cancer, where your body isn’t fully your own. But people living with paranoid type often experience less dysfunction than people living with other subtypes. They’re often able to live, work, and care for themselves. And yet, almost every depiction you find in books or movies make people living with paranoid schizophrenia the villains. Can you imagine if books and movies did the same thing to people with cancer?

Are you French?' I asked instead. 'Oui!' Foreign. Foreign spy. French Communist Party acted on Stalin's instructions during part of World War II. French Communist spy. Stop it stop it stop it I turned to Art, a black kid who was a foot and a half taller than me and whose pecs were about to burst of his shirt and eat someone. I gave him a two on the delusion detector. I didn't trust those pecs. 'Hi,' he rumbled. I waved weakly.

I was diagnosed a thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She'd always been a very suspect type of librarian--I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don't care what anyone says.)

When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?

Had he truly loved his wife, or in Sutcliffe’s world of paranoid schizophrenia, had she been the anchor that’d kept him from setting sail into complete insanity?

I was the big sister. I was supposed to set and example and lead the way so people would say, 'Hey, you're Alex's sister, aren't you? You two look exactly alike!' instead of 'Hey, you're Alex's sister, aren't you? Are you crazy, too?' The only example I was ever going to set for her was to always check her food before she ate it.

Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time, until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.

Lobsters fascinated me. Everything from their name to their claws to their magnificent red had me hooked. My hair was that read, the kind of read that looks okay on everything but people, because a person's hair is not supposed to be red. Orange, yes. Auburn, sure. But not lobster red. I took my pigtails, pressed them against the glass, and stared the nearest lobster straight in the eye. Dad said my hair was lobster red. My mother said it was Communist red. I didn't know what a Communist was, but it didn't sound good. Even pressing my hair flat against the glass, I couldn't tell if my dad was right. Part of me didn't want either of them to be right. "Let me out," said the lobster. He always said that. I rubbed my hair against the glass like the tank was a genie's lamp and the action would stir up some magic. Maybe, somehow, I could get these lobsters out. They looked so sad, all huddled on top of one another, antennae twitching, claws rubber-banded together.

grandiose paranoid schizophrenia.

What kind of religion would celebrate its High Holidays by reading about a biblical figure as heartless as Abraham—a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia, in Iona’s opinion—who nearly killed his son because he heard voices in his head and was rescued from the dirty deed only by other voices?

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

And John Nash, my mathematical hero, revolutionized analysis and geometry with the proof of three theorems in scarcely more than five years before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia. There is a fine line, it is often said, between genius and madness. Neither of these concepts is well defined, however. And in the case not only of Grothendieck but also of Gödel and Nash, periods of mental derangement, so far from promoting mathematical productivity, actually precluded it. Innate versus acquired, a classic debate. Fischer, Grothendieck, Erdős, and Perelman were all Jewish. Of these, Fischer and Erdős were Hungarian. No one who is familiar with the world of science can have failed to notice how many of the most gifted mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century were Jews, or how many of the greatest geniuses were Hungarian (many

As but one example, the title of this book comes from a 1968 article that appeared in the prestigious Archives of General Psychiatry, in which psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon described schizophrenia as a “protest psychosis” whereby black men developed “hostile and aggressive feelings” and “delusional anti-whiteness” after listening to the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or aligning with groups that preached militant resistance to white society. According to the authors, the men required psychiatric treatment because their symptoms threatened not only their own sanity, but the social order of white America. Bromberg and Simon argued that black men who “espoused African or Islamic” ideologies, adopted “Islamic names” that were changed in such a way so as to deny “the previous Anglicization of their names” in fact demonstrated a “delusional anti-whiteness” that manifest as “paranoid projections of the Negroes to the Caucasian group.”10

The mental illness that is called paranoid schizophrenia, or paranoia for short, is essentially an exaggerated form of ego. It usually consists of a fictitious story the mind has invented to make sense of a persistent underlying feeling of fear. The main element of the story is the belief that certain people (sometimes large numbers or almost everyone) are plotting against me, or are conspiring to control or kill me. The story often has an inner consistency and logic so that it sometimes fools others into believing it too. Sometimes

One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.

For nearly a hundred years, psychiatry has been striving to apply medical model thinking to psychiatric disorders. In this model, the symptoms besieging patients are sorted into specific disease entities and the causes then identified and removed. For doctors of internal medicine, this works. In the case of diabetes mellitus, for example, the symptoms of urinary frequency, fatigue, and confusion often lead to suspicion of the underlying cause, which is confirmed by blood sugar monitoring and then treated by insulin replacement. But psychiatric symptoms are much harder to sort into diagnoses. People with depression sometimes become paranoid. People with schizophrenia sometimes become depressed. Some people who hear voices have no other symptoms whatsoever, and others who hear voices also fall victim to terrible mood swings. Thus far, the hope that psychiatry would be able to identify homogeneous disease states, uncover the biological underpinnings, and remedy them has been largely a barren one. Kappler's symptoms, however, evolved when the hope for psychiatry's becoming a true medical specialty was bright to the point of being blinding. Over the years he would collect over a dozen diagnoses and cavalierly take a myriad of medicines, but no one would be able to bring him close to confronting the past he had disowned, to stand a chance of making peace with it and, ultimately, overcoming it. (46)

It was possible for the President to come down with paranoid schizophrenia, Black thought. Not likely, for American politics ruthlessly screened out the unstable personalities, but a possibility.

Since Malachi was a child, he had dealt with his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia, and now he hated that his sister felt obligated to stay in New York and see about their mom. Many people didn’t understand why Malachi

Sarah Skoterro, in Albuquerque, a veteran of thirty years as a drug counselor, remembered the meth years ago was a party drug. Then, she said, “around 2009, 2010, there was a real shift—a new kind of product. I would do assessments with people struggling for five years with meth who would say ‘This kind of meth is a very different thing.’ ” Skoterro watched people with families, houses, and good-paying jobs quickly lose everything. “They’re out of their house, lost their relationship, their job, they’re walking around at three in the morning, at a bus stop, blisters on their feet. They are a completely different person.” As I talked with people across the country, it occurred to me that P2P meth that created delusional, paranoid, erratic people living on the street must have some effect on police shootings. Police shootings were all over the news by then and a focus of national attention. Albuquerque police, it turns out, had studied meth’s connection to officer-involved fatal shootings, in which blood samples of the deceased could be taken. For years, the city’s meth supply was locally made, in houses, in small quantities. When P2P meth began to arrive in 2009, those meth houses faded. Since 2011, Mexican crystal meth has owned the market with quantities that drove the price from $14,000 per pound down to $2,200 at its lowest. City emergency rooms and the police Crisis Intervention Team, which handles mental illness calls, have been inundated ever since with people with symptoms of schizophrenia, often meth-induced, said Lt. Matt Dietzel, a CIT supervisor. “Meth is so much more common now,” Dietzel told me. “We’re seeing the worst outcomes more often.” In

I have swum 2,000 metres freestyle one thousand times in a symbollic expression to try to overcome the strong current of employer discrimination in New Zealand. I am still in the same spot on the river (I actually swam the distance in an Olympic sized pool)'. I have paranoid Schizophrenia.

With a camera, a microphone, and sufficient cash, you, too, can craft your own version of the world and emblazon it with a premium of fear over facts. (Be warned though: Paranoid schizophrenia makes for compelling film, but it's no way of life.)

It is actually relatively common for someone to be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder after having visited the doctor for an eating issue. The eating issue cannot be resolved by the conventional approaches which most doctors use. Only when these approaches are all exhausted will the doctor look for alternatives and may well discover that the eating disorder is a symptom of a multiple personality disorder and not a disorder in its own right. •

A delusion is anything that one person believes is real, even if you present them with evidence to show that it cannot possibly be.

Just as in every walk of life it is essential to plan small goals and celebrate the success of each of these.

If unrealistic targets are set then the goals or expected lifestyle will never appear and this will be very detrimental to the attitude and recovery of someone with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia affects many people, both the people with the disorder and those who love and support them. Research is continuing and as advances in medical knowledge continue there is an increasingly likelihood that the disorder can be successfully treated

If Nash attracted Hollywood’s attention, it wasn’t only on account of his mathematical exploits. It was also because of the tragic story of his life. At the age of thirty he succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia. In and out of psychiatric clinics and hospitals for more than ten years, he seemed fated to live out his days as a pitiable phantom haunting the halls of Princeton, his mind an incoherent ruin. But then, after three decades of purgatory, Nash miraculously came back from the far shores of madness. Today, more than eighty years old, he is as normal as you or I. Except that there is an aura about him that neither you nor I have, an aura due to phenomenal accomplishments, strokes of pure genius—and a way of dissecting and scrutinizing problems that makes Nash a model for all modern analysts, myself most humbly among them.

Paul R. Linde in his 1994 book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. “Major mental illness cuts across all cultures,” Linde writes. “Amazingly enough, or maybe not, acutely psychotic people in Zimbabwe appear very similar to those in San Francisco. . . . They suffer from disorganized thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. The content of the symptoms, however, is very much different . . . Zimbabweans do not report hearing auditory hallucinations of Jesus Christ, rather they report hearing those of their ancestor spirits. They are not paranoid about the FBI, rather they are paranoid about witches and sorcerers.”1

My father was also Bi-polar, but he also had symptoms of Paranoid Schizophrenia.

One of the most common misconceptions regarding schizophrenia is that people who have this disorder have a split personality or even multiple personalities.

have to admit, he’s building a very strong case. But I have to remember that I am talking to a man with paranoid schizophrenia.

There are worse effects than “coke bugs” for the cocaine abuser. Symptoms very similar to those of paranoid schizophrenia – almost identical with them, in fact – often appear. William S. Burroughs, for example, tells of a friend who got the copper horrors (visions of policemen) while sniffing too much coke. Just like a madman in a joke, this fellow ran into the alley and hid his head in a garbage can, evidently convinced that this made him totally invisible. (Again, the logic of amphetamine is similar. DeRopp, in Drugs and the Mind, tells of a truck driver who took so much Benzedrine that he became convinced “Benny” was driving the truck and therefore crawled into the back to have a nap. “Benny” drove him into a ditch, but he survived to tell the tale.)

I have to admit, he’s building a very strong case. But I have to remember that I am talking to a man with paranoid schizophrenia. A man who has been hearing voices telling him to do terrible things, and he has decided it wasn’t necessary for him to take his medications. Of course he’s going to think something suspicious is going on. That’s part of his disease. But there’s some kind of rational explanation for everything. There’s got to be.

Paranoia, why do you keep watching me?

So, again, with Kekkonen, we see how difficult it is for the Finns to maintain democracy. They are too inclined to follow and trust their leaders, they are disinclined to stand out from the crowd and risk social opprobrium, or, rather, there are too few per capita people who are prepared to behave in such a way or support those who are prepared to. Moreover, it could be argued that Kekkonen successfully took advantage of a kind of paranoia among the Finns. As we have discussed, they are relatively high in schizophrenia, meaning that the average Finn is further along the schizotypy spectrum than is the average person in many European countries. This would mean that a higher proportion of Finns, with their very high empathy, would read too much into the external signs of the mind of the Soviet Union and thus become paranoid, prepared to assume that an indication of displeasure was in fact an indication of fury, possibly leading to invasion. ‘Only President Kekkonen can deal with this crisis’ they might reason, ‘so I must support him.’ But, in reality, there isn’t really a crisis at all.

Bobbie Fischer was considered the greatest chess player who ever lived, and he ended up losing complete touch with reality. John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who developed game theory, was debilitated by paranoid schizophrenia. There are

… the several sub-types of mental illness should be functioning on this world as classes somewhat like those of ancient India. These people here, the hebephrenics, would be equivalent to the untouchables[*]. The maniacs would be the warrior class, without fear; one of the highest. … … The paranoids – actually paranoiac schizophrenics – would function as the statesman class; they’d be in charge of developing political ideology and social programs – they’d have the overall world view. The simple schizophrenics (…) [would] correspond to the poet class, although some of them would be religious visionaries – as would be some of the Heebs. The Heebs, however, would be inclined to produce ascetic saints, whereas the schizophrenics would produce dogmatists. Those with polymorphic schizophrenia simplex would be the creative members of the society, producing the new ideas. (…) There could be some with over-valent ideas, psychotic disorders that were advanced forms of milder obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the so-called diencephalic disturbances. Those people would be the clerks and office holders of the society, the ritualistic functionaries, with no original ideas. Their conservatism would balance the radical quality of the polymorphic schizophrenics and give the society stability.

This narrative scroll is my story. It represents a peep show into a self-prescribed, ceremonial quest to stare myself down, mutilate myself, slice myself into minuscule pieces, exam and innervate my paralytic soul. Writing this manuscript documenting disenchantment with my selfhood’s unsatisfactory interactions with significant life defining experiences constitutes a calculated surgical disembodiment of my former egoistical self. The act of writing my life story serves as a spiritual dismemberment undertaken to reconfigure and reconstitute my essential being. Perhaps this anatomical deconstruction of a delusional self represents a talisman-like step in attempted self-healing. Alternatively, perhaps this megalomaniac manuscript, which amplifies my psychopathic condition characterized by narcissistic fantasies of power and greatness, and chorusing ring of self-doubt, is nothing more than the sound and fury of an idiot’s paranoid rant. Is my self-induced schizophrenia running rampant, writing page after page of pure drivel, descending me deeper into a private hell? Perchance writing this oscillating scroll is a well-intended personal attempt to escape my mortality, an effort to cheat death by entering into the web of eternity, immerse my voice into the collective consciousness of humankind by creating an immortality vessel. Conversely, mayhap the illogical rant that demarks this scroll proves that the devil does take the hindmost.

Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare. The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall. He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.

Al did not have to "act crazy" to get approved for disability; he let his voluminous records do the talking. Our sessions consisted of reminiscing about his childhood, processing the racism both overt and covert that he had experienced throughout his lifetime, and discussing the news of the day. I believed that he did truly suffer mentally; he had very little contact with people other than me, didn't trust people, and seemed to hear and see things that weren't there. I used to see a lot of patients like Al. There was also Marvin, who believed he had inherited an ability to see and talk to spirits; Teddy, who claimed to be tormented by the sound of babies crying; Eric, whose outbursts of intense anger caused him shame and guilt in the aftermath. All had mental health symptoms that plagued them and shaped their interactions with others. All were also Black men. The strands of their stories were so infused with suffering that it was difficult to separate their symptoms from their history. Was Al depressed because he often self-isolated, or did he self-isolate because the only people he knew around him had chronic substance abuse issues? Was Marvin paranoid because some neurotransmitters in his brain were out of balance, or because he had been beaten by police upon multiple occasions in the past? How much of Eric's anger was due to the fact that he had very few friends left because so many of them had been murdered? All had ended up with diagnoses of severe mental illness along the schizophrenia spectrum, yet there was clearly more at work in each case.