Schizophrenia And Me Quotes

My dad once told me life would get complicated when I grew up. I’m guessing this isn’t what he meant. My mom, on the other hand, agreed with him, and I’m guessing this kind of thing is exactly what she meant.

I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world. But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.

Before I tell you, I have to know three things," I said. "Okay." "One, are you sitting down?" "Yes." "Two, are you mentally stable?" "More than you'll ever be." Well, that was uncalled for. "And three, how do you spell schizophrenia?" "What does that have to do with anything?" "Nothing. I just wanted to see if you'd tell me.

I have schizophrenia. I am not schizophrenia. I am not my mental illness. My illness is a part of me.

Look, I owe you a kind of explanation. I know you probably think I’m a horrid bitch from the plant Schizophrenia, but I’m honestly not trying to mess with your head. I’m just messing with my own head and I seem to have dragged you along the ride. I think you’re nice to me and that scares the fuck out of me. Because when a guy’s a jerk or an asshole, it’s easier because you know exactly where you stand. Since trust isn’t an option, you don’t have to get all freaked out about maybe having to trust him. Right now I am thinking about ten things at the same time, and at least four of those things have to do with you. If you want to leave right now and drive home and forget my name and forget what I look like, I wouldn’t blame you in the least. But what I’m trying to say is that if you did that I would be sorry. And not just sorry in an I-apologize-I’m-so-sorry way, but sorry in a sad-that-something-that-could’ve-happened-didn’t way. That’s it. You can go now. Or we could stay for Where’s Fluffy when Toni’s set is over. I think they’re playing a surprise show here tonight.

The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.

It’s more than that now. I can’t tell the difference between what’s part of me and what’s not.

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.

ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion. While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

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.)

And, what's more, this 'precious' body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn't enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself Oh, and I certainly don't suffer from schizophrenia. I quite enjoy it. And so do I What's the big fucking deal? Lots of amazing people have committed suicide, and they turned out alright He cried when I left, which I find to be standard male behavior I do not have OCD OCD OCD "Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you" "We had people fainting during the last tour, but I'm aiming for people to actually drop dead at this one." Hey, look at me! Look at me! Look at me! And...look at me. Will he think I'm sexy enough? Will he find me wholesome enough? Am I fuckable?

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some- one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other.

This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks. “I know,” I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said. “I know,” I said. There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.

Love me, hate me, hurt me or kill me. I keep fighting.

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?

Your daughter has schizophrenia," I told the woman. "Oh, my God, anything but that," she replied. "Why couldn't she have leukemia or some other disease instead?" "But if she had leukemia she might die," I pointed out. "Schizophrenia is a much more treatable disease." The woman looked sadly at me, then down at the floor. She spoke softly. "I would still prefer that my daughter had leukemia.

This is the story of V and me. Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he’s my angel. Simultaneously, his family’s a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they’re respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don’t want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig. This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn’t stop.

Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of 'happy nuts,' There's a tightening around the head that hurts, there's a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they're so unhappy and especially because they can't explain it to anybody.

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.

grief is not like clinical depression, schizophrenia, or anxiety, which can be diagnosed and treated. The grieving need someone to say “I see you, I hear you, I understand you are hurting and you can tell me more.

I’d thought for so long that I would become a schizophrenic, and if I was a schizophrenic, that’s all I would ever be. But a person doesn’t become their diagnosis. Your mom isn’t breast cancer, you don’t become cancer. You live with cancer. So often, we think of a person living with mental illness as their mental illness, and that’s unfair. A person is never their diagnosis, not even my mom. Delilah showed me that. She lives—and has lived—a full life. She has a husband. They travel. She’s a photographer, an artist. She tells the funniest knock-knock jokes I’ve ever heard. She takes her meds every day, but still has hallucinations from time to time. She is not schizophrenic. She lives with schizophrenia.

Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap. You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.

At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare.

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.

Can you guys sing to me?

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

Death I understand. There are plenty of people willing to die to achieve ridiculous results. But I really don't think any drug could justify the possibility of anal leakage. If anything ever drips out of my ass as a result of the treatment I'm receiving, the cure is clearly not worth it. Please kill me.

I feel completely broken due to the cruel and dark side of life. Life has been incredibly harsh, leaving me utterly shattered. I have been deeply affected and devastated by this cruel and unforgiving reality.

On the surface a borderline personality can be very difficult to identify, despite the underlying volcanic turbulence. Unlike many people afflicted with other mental disorders—such as schizophrenia, bipolar (manic-depressive) disease, alcoholism, or eating disorders—the borderline can usually function extremely well in work and social situations without appearing overtly pathological. Indeed, some of the hallmarks of borderline behavior are the sudden, unpredictable eruptions of anger, extreme suspiciousness, or suicidal depression from someone who has appeared so “normal.” The

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I’d said, didn’t shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I’ve always known what I did. I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind—schizophrenia.

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.

The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies.

Just because it seems like schizophrenia doesn't mean that it is,' Dr. Najjar told me. 'We have to keep humble and keep our eyes open.

Yet he would always know what was happening, no matter how crazy he appeared. He would register fear and humiliation – his or others' – and love and anger. He remembered it all.

I think when I question how life is treating me, I should be asking how I am treating life.

He has dark brown pupils, and mine are grey. Dead gray, that’s what he tells me.

As long as schizophrenia is treated like some evil and frightening nemesis, not as just an illness, we shall continue to spurn those who are afflicted, and to abandon their families.

For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff "crazy" would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it.

What’s he doing?” Raine asked. “He’s not talking to me.” “Grab him by the nuts and twist.” I glared at her over my laptop. To us, our characters were real, living, breathing people that sometimes didn’t cooperate. There was a famous quote that being a write was an acceptable form of schizophrenia. It was absolutely true. The voices never stopped, except when they were being jerks.

Mosher said, 'Treat people as normal, like them, be warm and friendly, and they will have much more chance of getting better than if you treat them as sick and keep as far away from them as possible'.

People with schizophrenia will often use metaphor and symbols to describe their inner states, but because they have lost their sense of boundary, they are unable to distinguish their inner from their outer worlds, and metahpor becomes reality.

With schizophrenia, we know that we are dealing with a range of disorders of varying severity which arise from a mosaic of one or more factors – genetic, biochemical, neurological – interacting in complex ways with the person's environment and personality.

Place me in a high-stress environment with no ability to control my surroundings or my schedule, and I will rapidly begin to decompensate. Being able to work for myself, while still challenging, allows for greater flexibility in my schedule, and exerts less pressure on my mind.

Eventually, I had no choice but to look at loss and pain, at all the pieces of my family's story that I didn't think I could ever understand. It was this process, recognizing the pieces, struggling to put them in order, that almost destroyed me. It's also what allowed me to live again.

I had never heard Mother admit that Dad was mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father

Yet we know enough about schizophrenia now to understand that it is a physical malfunctioning of the brain, in which genetics, chemistry and environment interact in fathomless permutations. We know that schizophrenia is an illness; it is nobody's fault; it could happen to any one of us, or to those we love.

The test results all came back negative. People congratulated me on this news, but I sought comfort in those who understood that negative test results meant no answers—meant Dr. J’s diminished interest in my case and thus in my suffering—meant that I had no avenue of treatment to pursue and no kind of cure in my sight line.

I walk down the aisle, keeping my head down. Sit across from a very old woman in a windbreaker who at first looks to me a little like my dead grandmother, at least in the face. I’m comforted. There is my grandmother sort of. Wearing the clothes of a slightly insane person. Tattoo on her throat of a spider in a web. Reading a ripped-up medical poster about schizophrenia aloud. SCHIZOPHRENIA: Do You Have the Symptoms?? She reads each symptom on the list, going, “Oh I have that, oh I have that.” Making sounds of delighted surprise. Like it’s a recipe she’s reading and she’s tickled to discover that— “—​she already has all the ingredients in her fridge. No need to go shopping.

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger ...

The party was good, and Jonathan made immense efforts to belong. I don't think I had realised till them how difficult such occasions were for him. You could see him straining to find the right phrase and, when he found it, he would blurt it out as if he were an actor who was not yet familiar with his lines. People with schizophrenia have to make herculean efforts to stay our side of the line.

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channels might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

This situation conflicted with the purpose for which Hal had been designed—the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. As a result, Hal developed what would be called, in human terms, a psychosis—specifically, schizophrenia. Dr. C. informs me that, in technical terminology, Hal became trapped in a Hofstadter—Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself.

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

Mrs. Plotnick had learned from observing many patients over the years that the majority of patients felt well for the first month after they stopped taking their medication: The medication’s unpleasant side effects ceased, and their psychotic symptoms didn’t reappear, because there was a considerable amount of medication left in their systems. As a result, many patients thought they hadn’t needed the medication in the first place. During the second month off medication, many patients began to decompensate. By the third month, many were psychotic.

How could I love a man as uptight as Nathan Edwards and still have a raging crush on someone as wicked as Ronnie Radke? Maybe I am an undiagnosed schizophrenic. That’s what happened to Jamie Foxx’s character in The Soloist. One day, he’s a gifted musical student at Julliard, and the next day he’s toting his cello through the streets of Los Angeles, disoriented and muttering to himself. “What are you thinking, Vivian?” I drop my hand and look at my best friend. “Nothing.” “Vivian?” I grimace. “Do you think I have schizophrenia?” Fanny tosses her pillow at me. “Shut up!

Abhed, my father had called heredity-"indivisible." There is an old trope in popular culture of the "crazy genius," a mind split between madness and brilliance, oscillating between the two states at the throw of a single switch. But Rajesh had no switch. There was no split or oscillation, no pendulum. The magic and the mania were perfectly contiguous-bordering kingdoms with no passports. They were part of the same whole, indivisible. "We of the craft are all crazy," Lord Byron, the high priest of crazies, wrote. "Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched." Versions of this story have been tool, over and over, with bipolar disease, with some variants of schizophrenia, and with rare cases of autism; all are "more or less touched." It is tempting to romanticize psychotic illness, so let me emphasize that the men and women with these mental disorders experience paralyzing cognitive, social, and psychological disturbances that send gashes of devastation through their lives. But also indubitably, some patients with these syndromes possess exceptional and unusual abilities. The effervescence of bipolar disease has long been linked to extraordinary creativity; at times, the heightened creative impulse is manifest during the throes of mania.

I am not alone. Existing in this melancholic world causes numerous individuals to feel remorseful and even harbor resentment. Contemplating the world fills me with melancholy. I sense a profound disconnection from the world. Feeling completely drained by my internal and external despair and indifference. I find myself filled with regret and eagerly await the conclusion. I believe my overwhelming anxiety has transformed into anhedonia and depression. Feelings of emptiness and not fitting in are common to all people. Feeling like an outsider hinders connection with others. Once quite the extrovert. I have always experienced a deep sense of disconnection, but at this stage of my life, numerous things have gone awry, making it almost unbearable.

Finally, some of the genes identified in certain variants of schizophrenia or bipolar disease actually augment certain abilities. If the most pathological variant of a mental illness can be sifted out or discriminated from the high-functioning variants by genes or gene combinations alone, then we can hope for such a test. But it is much more likely that such a test will have inherent limits: most of the genes that cause disease in one circumstance might be the very genes that cause hyperfunctional creativity in another. As Edvard Munch put it, "[My troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [treatment] would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings." These very "sufferings," we might remind ourselves, were responsible for one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century-of a man so immersed in a psychotic era that he could only scream a psychotic response to it.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there? If god hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Isaiah.

All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence.

ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.

Miss Frumkin rummaged through her bag looking for a spoon. She seemed to be aware that there was no spoon in the bag, but she insisted on rummaging anyway. Finding no spoon, she took out her toothbrush and began to eat the yogurt with the toothbrush. Miss O’Reilly laughed at her. Miss Frumkin didn’t seem to mind. “They laughed at Bell and they laughed at Edison,” she said, throwing the toothbrush into the wastebasket. She finished eating the yogurt with her fingers.

She spent the night there, engaging in behavior of a particularly primitive kind, and had to be showered the next morning.

As he spoke, Miss Frumkin looked at her chart, which was directly in front of Dr. Sun, facing him. Reading upside down is one of Miss Frumkin’s talents. It has enabled her, over the years, to read many things not intended for her eyes.

she was counting the brushstrokes when she brushed her teeth — on the rare days that she did brush her teeth.

I had insight and yet I did not; one part of me knew and understood, the rest seethe like a captured animal that yearns to get back to its own environment, it's own familiar places.

What’s it like to have schizophrenia?” “I don’t know. What’s it like to be a skinny fifteen-year-old with freckles?” Olivia made a face. “This is just who I’ve always been,” Zee said. “My behavior confuses most people, but it’s all normal to me.

David, a young man in his mid- twenties, looked at me warily. I had asked him how he knew that something crucial in him had changed. He was silent for a while, and then said, “When the sun burst.” For David this was a defining moment. He knew he had seen the sun burst. It was impossible that they had not seen this; it could only be that they were lying to him. Why would they do that? It must be because they were in cahoots with the forces that burst the sun. So he had to shut himself up, remain still. He did this for ten years, until his next schizophrenic “episode.” What does David teach us? Let’s pursue one line of thought. Life is normal until the apocalypse. Even if the signs of catastrophe seem mild—a feeling of being out of place, but it passes, the impression of hearing voices, the sense that something has entered the body—the schizophrenic will never forget those first experiences. Some process seems to be altering the self without any conscious choice involved in the mutation. After these shocks, everything changes. The world is not the same; people are no longer safe. But the rest of humanity seems oblivious. In schizophrenia, unlike other psychotic distresses, there are usually a number of these apocalyptic moments in which the person’s world view is changed.

Guide Note: Remembering is generally a two-stage process involving dialogue between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. The subconscious opens proceedings by throwing up the relevant memory, an act which releases a spurt of self-congratulatory endorphins. Well done, matey, says the conscious. That memory is really useful right now, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. You and me, pal, says the subconscious, delighted to have its contribution acknowledged for once, we’re in this together. Then the conscious reviews the memory in its in-tray and sends a message down to the sphincter telling it to prepare for the worst. Why did you remind me of this? the conscious rails against the subconscious. This is awful. Terrible. I didn’t want to remember this. Why the Zark do you think I shoved it to the back of my brain? That’s the last time I help you out, the subconscious mutters and retreats to the darker sections of itself where nasty thoughts are housed. I don’t need you, it tells itself. I can make myself another personality out of these things you’ve discarded. And so the seeds of schizophrenia are sown with kernels of childhood bullying, neglect, low self-esteem, and prejudice

Let’s define health foods as foods grown with as few chemicals as possible, processed with as few chemicals as possible, and packaged as “ecologically” as possible. There was a notion that eating health foods, called “inner ecology” (inner to one’s body), would somehow help the “outer ecology” (outer to one’s body) of the biosphere. Some Bailey’s Irish Cream on Your Granola? We prepared to marry the health food store to the liquor store. This concept, obviously, was founded in schizophrenia. But it occurred to me that people who really thought about what they ingested, whether they were wine connoisseurs or health food nuts, were basically on the same radar beam. Both groups were fragmented from the masses who willingly consumed Folgers coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc. Both groups were the kind of people who, I was hoping, represented a breakup of mainstream consumption in America.

I spent a lot of time in an incubator as a babe The save of my life the doctors made After months in the hospital I was taken home To eat with big boobies on my dome What I mean by that is that they were always on my mind Keep writing, boy, you’re getting it right this time Don’t give up now, keep writing, you’ll be happy in the end The truth is in the end you are your greatest friend You are an introvert and you live inside of your mind Express yourself to the world, you’ll find more friends in time As I grew, time passed and things were really great My mom she always kept me fed, kept food upon my plate I ended up real fat, I was a chubby baby I ate to satisfy my id, that’s psychology, ladies

We do not set limits when someone is sick, and we 'do' things for sick people instead of encouraging them also to take responsibility for themselves.

If we keep telling people they need help, they will stay helpless. It must also have been profoundly demoralising for him to have conversation always focused on fixing up his illness.

For several months, about all I did was talk to addicts, counselors, and cops around the country—over the phone because the pandemic restricted travel. Meth was overshadowed by the opioid epidemic. But the people I spoke to told me stories nearly identical to Eric’s. This new meth itself was quickly, intensely damaging people’s brains. The symptoms were always the same—violent paranoia, hallucinations, figures always lurking in the shadows, isolation, rotted and abscessed dental work, uncontrollable limbs, massive memory loss, jumbled speech, and, almost always, homelessness. It was creating a swath of people nationwide who, while on meth and for a good period afterward, were mentally ill and all but untreatable by usual methods of drug rehabilitation. Ephedrine-made meth wasn’t good for the brain, but it was nothing like this. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their thirties and forties were going mad. The new meth was also deadly in a way ephedrine meth was not. It was killing young people with congestive heart failure, a disease common to people over sixty-five.

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

The victory feels hollow—not because I don’t believe that Peter is sincere in granting me this concession, but because of the dreadful circumstances that sparked the battle. If Diana had a visible handicap such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy, or if she was missing an arm or a leg—even if she had a better-understood psychological condition such as schizophrenia or if she was bipolar, it’d be different. There are support groups for families dealing with these issues. People would understand. They’d offer help. But no one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath. To the mother of a girl who tried to kill her infant sister. A girl who let a toddler drown in a swimming pool. Or did Diana push the boy in?

He is schizophrenic, this is how he was diagnosed with the CIA, and his schizophrenia is his strength, he comes out of a personality, directly impersonating a new one, a completely different one, which he experiences as if he had in it for his whole life. This is every professional agent’s strong point, but it comes at such a high price that it in many cases often ends up in a whiff of insanity. Therefore, they must be monitored and psychologically evaluated on a periodic basis. The last thing the agency wants is a suicidal agent with a message exposing many secrets, or a biased towards their opponents, or a madman circling the streets babbling from here and there. It takes its responsibilities towards them, these people suffer a lot, and the more they train, the more they work, the more professional they become, and the crazier they are. But there was something different about him, which Alex did not miss. Not that schizophrenia that she knew; When sitting with him, talking to him, all the paper reports seem as if they were written about a different person, as if deep down another person about whom no one knows anything yet, and as if all these characters he played are one character as if everything grows from inside him. What she was most concerned about is whether he is honest in being an intelligence agent, or is it a role he plays, as are the dozens of roles he played and plays for the agency. Many doubts revolve around him, officers were unable to manage him, and deal with him. The agency changed the liaison officer with him every few months, he is somewhat out of control, but at the same time, it is unable to terminate his services. The closer the agency got to making that decision, the more he did something that made them stick to it more, creative, distinct, and innovative, that we cannot easily let go of. Until Alex arrived, the only liaison officer he had worked with for years. His condition stabilized, he was no longer that mysterious brawler, she understood him completely, she threw all the reports, papers, and opinions behind her back, and dealt with him directly, without barriers. He was not simply pretending, he was not acting, he was really him. Every character he played, every lie he lied, every mess he made, it was him, without acting. And he said to her, they are all composite characters. If you look at each character, you will find something that connects them to the other, that they are like cubes, I build them on top of each other, I do not play them. What you need is to look at the details, and you will find a fine thread connecting them. He trusted her, and so did she. She became his friend, perhaps the only one in this world until Katrina entered his life. She knows nothing of what happened to him lately, but she knows that man deep inside him at the bottom of the pyramid of the cubes, “he will not hurt me, I trusted him before, I trust him today, his chivalry will not accept treachery, not of this kind, he will not do it”.

Flegr told me he himself had just completed a study on the same topic that exploited brain-imaging technology not available in Jírovec’s day. When we were seated again in his office, he handed me a copy of the newly published paper. Only forty-four people with schizophrenia participated in the trial, but small as it was, there was nothing ambiguous about the results. Based on MRI scans, twelve of them had missing gray matter in parts of their cerebral cortex—a puzzling but not uncommon feature of the disease—and they alone had the parasite. I shot him a raised-eyebrow look that said Yikes! and he replied, “Jiří had the same response.

He is an abnormal person and a schizophrenia patient, even a criminal and filthy-minded. I neither know his background nor he is my friend; however, I let him come since it is my nature not to humiliate and hurt; conversely, such ones caused me gravely damaged. I cannot believe if someone who claims to be the holder of a high IQ and also has a high status in society, which I always considered and thought of as one of the criminal groups. It is a surprise for me that a son of a bitch still misuses someone, telling me every time strange stories, and previously he talked about it ugly things. He also caused the worst image of Intelligence agencies, pretending as if he worked for them. I have never seen such shameless and morally dead people. I request that someone who exists as that who demonstrated for the last six years should come out to prove its reality; otherwise, disappear if it respects humanity and moral values.

A relentless storm rages within me, a maelstrom born out of this irritating affliction called Akathisia. This isn't just restlessness; it's akin to being trapped in a never-ending marathon with invisible shackles chaining every muscle, nerve, and inch of my being. I see the world around me as vibrant, lively, and pulsating with life, yet I'm confined to this lonely island of agony, isolated and misunderstood. Every moment is a battle against an invisible enemy that holds my peace hostage. I clench my fists, grit my teeth, and ride out the waves of torment. But the relentless onslaught of Akathisia never ceases. An unseen demon has sunk its claws into my soul, forcing me to endure this relentless turmoil. I look into the mirror and see a stranger staring back, a hollow shell writhing in pain, enslaved by an unseen tormentor. The cruel irony is that the world continues to spin, oblivious to the infernal landscape that has become my existence. From sunrise to sunset, the silent scream of Akathisia echoes within me, a chilling reminder of the hell on earth I am condemned to.

When someone is diagnosed with depression, you won’t hear them say, “I am depression.” This is equally unlikely with a patient diagnosed with anorexia or bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia. A rare few psychiatric conditions enjoy the pleasure of being both an adjective describing one’s mood or classification of behaviors and a noun—a label—to encompass all of who one is. Alcoholics. Addicts. And borderlines. Unfortunately for me, I identify with all of these conditions.

He’s better now, he tells me, because he was finally told that he himself knows better than anyone else what he needs. For him, that included harm-reduction techniques instead of involuntary rehabilitation, as well as estranging himself from his family.

It is disconcerting for anyone to be told that her brain is being damaged by an uncontrollable illness. It might have been especially disconcerting to me because my brain has been one of my more valuable assets since childhood.

He is an abnormal person and a schizophrenia patient, even a criminal and filthy-minded. I neither know his background nor he is my friend; however, I let him come since it is my nature not to humiliate and hurt; conversely, such ones caused me grave damage. I cannot believe someone who claims to be the holder of a high IQ and also has a high status in society, which I always considered and thought of as one of the criminal groups. It is a surprise for me that a son of a bitch still misuses someone, telling me every time strange stories, and previously he talked about it ugly things. He also caused the worst image of intelligence agencies, pretending as if he worked for them. I have never seen such shameless and morally dead people. I request that someone who exists as that who demonstrated for many years should come out to prove its reality; otherwise, disappear if it respects humanity and moral values.

Why is it that when you talk to God, it’s called praying? Whenever God talks to me, they call it schizophrenia.

I suffer deep pain that erodes my being. Despair, the quiet inner bully, causes this anguish. Hopelessness crushes my spirit, burying joy and purpose. It is a persistent force like a dark chasm that devours light and creates a void. My physical disabilities rob me of autonomy. Once a vessel of possibility, my body is now a prison, a constant reminder of my limits. The simplest things become punishing undertakings, with each attempt failing and fueled by fury and shame. The suffering permeates my soul and covers every aspect of my being. My continual emotional tiredness saps my drive to fight futility. The universe conspires to keep me from meaningful interaction. My hopes are now dashed in every endeavor. The cycle of boredom and insignificance repeats daily without substance or reprieve. Every time I see promise, overwhelming roadblocks block it, causing irritation and despair. An overwhelming sense of deficiency replaces any sense of contribution or worth. My once-proud goods are now worthless. Thus, I fight an unavoidable darkness in a never-ending combat that leaves me wounded, broken, and hopeless. Once a canvas of possibilities, the future is a dreary, uninspired continuation of existing suffering. In this terrifying terrain, sadness rules cruelly over my lifeless existence. I am experiencing deep emotional and physical pain, and I feel hopeless and stuck. My disabilities limit my autonomy, and everyday tasks are a constant struggle. I feel emotionally drained, and my efforts seem futile. I encounter roadblocks at every turn and struggle to find purpose. Overall, I feel trapped in a cycle of suffering and despair with no end in sight.

I do take out my phone and punch in the word “haloperidol.” Several hits fill the screen. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic medication, used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, delirium, agitation, and acute psychosis. And that’s just one of at least a dozen pill bottles. God knows what else is in there. Part of me is burning with shame that I looked in the first place. And part of me is scared at what else I might find.

A never-ending nightmare on earth has plagued my life. Each day is a constant struggle against the forces of evil, filled with fear and torment. As a result, I have found solace in the simple act of sleeping - a temporary escape from the unimaginable horrors that await me in the waking world. Many may not fully understand the true extent of my suffering, for I am under the control of Akathisia - metaphorically, Satan himself. Yet, I refuse to allow this affliction to define me or dictate my actions. Despite the darkness that surrounds me, I persevere with unwavering determination, determined to overcome this insurmountable challenge and reclaim my life.

My mother had told me more than once about James Joyce bringing his daughter Lucia to see Carl Jung after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The writer protested that Lucia was simply doing what he did, playing with language, but Jung told Joyce that he was diving to the bottom of a river; his daughter was sinking.

If anything, please take solace in the fact that you are not burdened with my existence.

As long as I was strong, I was able to keep my Schizophrenia under control.

But you have gift!" "Gift? I was electrocuted and disfigured, and now I think my fucking television is talking to me. That's called schizophrenia.

On one level, accepting that I was one of several — possibly hundreds of — personalities turned my head inside out. It was like trying to catch your breath standing under a waterfall. There was too much information to take it all in at once. I needed time to process - but time was the thing I was always missing. On the other hand, it explained so much I felt a weight rise from my shoulders. It wasn't like the diagnosis for schizophrenia, which I'd always instinctively known was wrong. This feels right.

But I begin to humanise him – to try and understand him, to realise that a person’s life is a complicated process, and that nobody is all good or all bad.  To forgive.  And my reward is that my efforts at forgiveness make me feel a little better internally.  Forgiveness, in the end, is essential to recovery.  In my case, I have finally realised that if you hate the seed that begot you, it is difficult to love yourself.  Now, at last, I am beginning to heal.