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Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.
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Francesca Zappia (Made You Up)
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Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.
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Philip K. Dick
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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.
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Francesca Zappia (Made You Up)
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Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
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Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
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It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not.
To never feel completely alone even when you are.
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Julia Walton (Words on Bathroom Walls)
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You’ve got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem.
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Jonathan Harnisch (Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography)
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The line between insanity and mysticism is thin; the line between reality and unreality is thin. Liminality as a spiritual concept is all about the porousness of boundaries.
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Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays)
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The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality
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Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
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Schizophrenia: A psychotic disorderncharacterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations. See also: Nightmare.
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Holly Schindler (A Blue So Dark)
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Now, Emily didn't make a sound. There was something more defining about the soundless reality that condemned the paradigm of passion.
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allie burke (Paper Souls)
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When a schizophrenic patient sees things that others don’t see, he at least knows that his mind is playing with him. But your hallucinations, which you call reality. are being validated and strengthened by everything and everyone around you.
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Shunya
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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.
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Jonathan Harnisch
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If a person can accept reality as it is, in that very acceptance, all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair—they all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia, then suddenly there is joy. Then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals; these are very natural phenomena.
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Osho (Emotional Wellness: Transforming Fear, Anger, and Jealousy into Creative Energy)
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No, Ben. What I’m asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben’s the driver, right?
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Jonathan Harnisch (Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography)
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But unlike people with psychotic conditions like schizophrenia, they are not going insane at all. They are, if anything, suddenly overly aware of reality and existence and of the ways in which their own experience is a distortion of a “normal” sense of a real self. Depersonalization,
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Daphne Simeon (Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self)
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What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
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Jonathan Harnisch (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia)
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Schizophrenia may affect how we perceive reality, but it cannot diminish the power of our imagination and the strength of our spirit.
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Dr. Rameez Shaikh
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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.
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Anne Deveson (Tell Me I'm Here: One Family's Experience of Schizophrenia)
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Schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are often spoken of by laypeople – I used to do it myself – as if they were definitions as precise as those for hepatitis or appendicitis. In reality, the names are no more than those given to a collection of symptoms observable at a certain moment in time.
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Patrick Cockburn (Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story)
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Psychosis is defined as a severe mental disorder characterized by some degree of personality disintegration. Psychotics live in a nightmarish world of their own. They suffer from hallucinations and delusions—hear voices, see visions, are possessed by bizarre beliefs. They have lost touch with reality. Unlike psychopaths—who appear to be normal, rational people even while leading grotesque secret lives—psychotics match the common conception of insanity. The main forms of psychosis are schizophrenia and paranoia. For the most part, serial killers aren’t psychotic.
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Harold Schechter (The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers)
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In the brain, the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine affects the process of salience acquisition and expression. During an acute psychotic state, schizophrenia is associated with an increase in dopamine synthesis, dopamine release, and resting-state synaptic dopamine concentrations.10 Kapur suggests that in psychosis, there is a malfunction in the regulation of dopamine, causing abnormal firing of the dopamine system, leading to the aberrant levels of the neurotransmitter and, thus, aberrant assignment of motivational salience to objects, people, and actions.11 Research supports this claim.12 The altered salience of sensory stimuli results in a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr. B’s reality and provide the experiences that his cognition must make sense of. When considering the contents of Mr. B’s conscious experience, his hallucinations, his efforts to make sense of his delusions are no longer so wacky, but are possible, though not probable, explanations of what he is experiencing. With this in mind, the behavior that results from his cognitive conclusion seems somewhat more rational. And despite suffering this altered brain function, Mr. B continues to be conscious and aware of his existence.
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Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
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Bleuler chose this new word because its Latin root—schizo—implied a harsh, drastic splitting of mental functions. This turned out to be a tragically poor choice. Almost ever since, a vast swath of popular culture—from Psycho to Sybil to The Three Faces of Eve—has confused schizophrenia with the idea of split personality. That couldn’t be further off the mark. Bleuler was trying to describe a split between a patient’s exterior and interior lives—a divide between perception and reality. Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.
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Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family)
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Vaclav Havel was talking about when he said . . . The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, yet it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structures, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique “self.”18
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
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When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.
Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to an abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
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George Orwell (In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950 (The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, Vol. 4))
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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.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Quotes about Media
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* The neutral and honest print and electronic media are free advisers, mirrors, information, and opinions of the nation for ruling and non-ruling political parties. Thus, such media deserve subsidies without distinctions to stay stable as the fourth pillar of democracy.
* What does a journalist mean? In my view, a journalist does not have any improper, wrong, or favouring connections with any party, group, or religious school of thought. He just writes the facts and realities regardless of caste, creed, colour, and personal interests. He respects every person as a human with dignity and honor; he is not a tool of the masterminds. The journalistic principle is only “fairness with morality.” A real journalist is more than a holy person because that person, maybe anyone of any particular religion, but a journalist is for all humans; he, who has not such qualities, can be everything, but not a journalist.
* The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge.
* Within the majority, Pakistani electronic media figures suffer from kinds of schizophrenia and complexes. Such ones penetrate just the selected motives rather than the neutrality. In fact, they fail and decrease to qualify to be a journalist; indeed, they endorse it themselves.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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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.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Alexander is extremely forthright about the consequences of this fragmentation: "In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide." As Alexander clearly implies, human beings do not naturally comply with this highly compartmentalized modus operandi. Our connections, among ourselves and with the surrounding environment, do not follow this type of conceptual order and simplicity. We are ambiguous, complex, and idiosyncratic. "The reality of today's social structure is thick with overlap-the systems of friends and acquaintances form a semilattice, not a tree," state Alexander on the convergent nature of social groups. He is convinced that the reductionist conception of urban spaces, typical of a tree organization, blinds our judgment of the city and limits the problem-solving abilities of many planners and system analysts.
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Manuel Lima (Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information)
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I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any attempt to titrate them, damp them down, could tip the person from a pathologically heightened state to one of great dullness, a sort of mental death.
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Oliver Sacks (On the Move: A Life)
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Why matrix organizational structures became so popular I’m not really sure. There is certainly an element of flexibility and collaboration suggested by them, but in reality they are forums for confusion and conflict. They have certainly not contributed to the breakdown of silos; they’ve merely added an element of schizophrenia and cognitive dissonance for employees who are unlucky enough to report into two different silos.
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Patrick Lencioni (Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors (J-B Lencioni Series))
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Dr. Rushdoony saw cultural schizophrenia as a split between thought and feeling, a withdrawal from the reality of God and a flight into fantasies of world government achieved through an unattainable unity. Utopians are undeniably schizophrenic. They want a heaven on earth, which can only be achieved by coercion and enslavement. But perhaps what they really want, as depraved human beings, is coercion and enslavement, and use utopian idealism to deceive and entrap the gullible.
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Rousas John Rushdoony (Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education)
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In the quiet corners of existence, we grapple with our perceived insignificance, yet relentlessly chase dreams. But beware, for these very aspirations can blur our vision of reality. Instead of fixating on distant horizons, let us savor the present—our most precious currency. Amid fractured identities and fleeting emotions, find solace in imperfection, and weave meaning from the void.
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Jonathan Harnisch
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It can be quite challenging to constantly remind ourselves that the reality we experience is merely a construct of our own minds. Despite our efforts to ground ourselves in the present, we often find ourselves getting caught up in the illusion of this fabricated world. However, it is imperative that we do not lose sight of the fact that none of this is real. The material possessions, societal norms, and societal expectations that we often place great value on are merely man-made constructs. It is crucial to maintain a sense of detachment and perspective, and to remember that ultimately, true reality lies beyond the physical realm.
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Jonathan Harnisch (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia)
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Disordered thought detaches a person from reality, leading to altered perceptions and behavior, such as hallucinations and delusions. These psychotic symptoms can be terrifying, not just for people who experience them but also for people who witness them. They are also a major cause of the stigma attached to people with schizophrenia.
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Eric R. Kandel (The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves)
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Schizophrenia is a brain disease which entails a profound loss of connection to reality.
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Elyn R. Saks (The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness)
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The power of an illusion or delusion is that the mind races and the heart pounds in fear of the imagined, the unreal truth. During psychosis and extreme mental illness, the mind’s reality undergoes a breach; and the mind, the Great Fort, is itself broken.
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Sara Niles (The Long Suicide: Losing Ariel)
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Thus, radical psychologists ask us: does not the "reality" of schizophrenia or art remain "real" to those in schizophrenic or artistic states, however senseless these states appear to the non-schizophrenic or non-artistic? Anthropologists even ask: do not the emic realities of other cultures remain existentially real to those living in those cultures, however bizarre they may seem to the Geriatric White Male hierarchy that defines official "reality" in our culture?
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Robert Anton Wilson (Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World)
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If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.
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Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays)
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Bri says it this way: “I think that when we’re talking about … schizophrenia, we really want to be clear about what is rational, two plus two equals four; what is irrational, two plus two equals spaghetti sauce; and what is nonrational…. A lot of people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia that I have spoken with, that I have worked with … are not irrational at all.” The divine is nonrational and indicates the limits of symbolic understanding; insanity is irrational and indicates a structural failure of reality.
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Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays)
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Never tickle your vanity with a vanity press...always go indie and never pay to get published.
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Donald Harry Roberts (Into The Madness)
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During the depersonalisation or derealisation experiences, reality testing remains intact. C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. D. The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or other medical condition (e.g., seizures). E. The disturbance is not better explained by another mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, panic disorder, major depressive disorder, acute stress disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, or another dissociative disorder.
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Carolyn Spring (I don't feel real: A brief guide to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder)
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In the center of the totalitarian fears and fantasies stands the man-eating god and idol. He is unconquerable. He uses man’s great gift of adjustment to bring him to slavery. Every man’s inner core of feelings and thoughts has to belong to the leader. Is the citizen of Totalitaria consciously aware of this? Probably not. Modern psychology has taught us how strongly the mental mechanism of denial of reality works. The eye bypasses external occurrences when the mind does not want them to happen. Secondary justifications and fantasies are formed to support and explain these denials. In Totalitaria we find the same despising of reality facts as we do in schizophrenia.
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Joost A.M. Meerloo (The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing)
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Several studies report impairment in reasoning accuracy as a consequence of lesions in the left hemisphere,237 but others report impairments in reasoning following right hemisphere damage that are in reality more of a handicap. That’s because they involve not just hypothetical logical problems, but inferring complex and ambivalent or implicit meaning, inferring what is going on in another person’s mind and knowing how to understand the situation as a whole. As I have repeatedly emphasised, the old dichotomy – left hemisphere rational, right hemisphere emotional – is profoundly mistaken, on both counts; not to mention the fact that reason and emotion are never entirely separable. Knowing the limits to reason is essential to understanding. If not coupled with contextual, implicit and intuitive understanding (in none of which the left hemisphere excels), it can magnify error. As Sass and Pienkos point out: ‘The most deluded patients with schizophrenia tend to be those whose thinking is more logical.’238 This is in line with Eugène Minkowski’s insight that the problem in psychosis is not loss of reason, but its hypertrophy: ‘The mad person is much less frequently “irrational” than is believed: perhaps, indeed, he is never irrational at all.
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Iain McGilchrist (The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World)
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Under conditions of extreme stress or loneliness the propensity to escape into an imaginary world and imaginary friends can lead to an internal fantasy becoming a ‘reality’ for the person with Asperger’s syndrome. The person may be considered as developing delusions and being out of touch with reality (Adamo 2004). This could result in a referral for a diagnostic assessment for schizophrenia, as described in the biography of Ben by his mother, Barbara LaSalle (2003).
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Tony Attwood (The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome)
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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.
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Edward Dutton (The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers)
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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
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Douglas E. Richards (Split Second (Split Second, #1))
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What would Susan be like? All I knew of her was what I had seen when she’d been out walking, a reluctant-looking little girl who made strange gestures and movements. And I knew she’d gone to a “special” school. But what kind of school exactly? Mrs. Felder had hinted that I might not want the job once I met Susan.
I had looked up “autistic” in the dictionary. I couldn’t find the word, but I had found “autism.” The definition said something about childhood schizophrenia, acting out, and withdrawal. That was no help. Then I looked up “schizophrenia,” but I was more confused than ever. The definition mentioned “withdrawing from reality.”
For heaven’s sake, I am always withdrawing from reality, every time I daydream. And my stepsister, Karen, believes in ghosts and witches, but there’s nothing wrong with her. I would have to wait and see what Mrs. Felder said.
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Ann M. Martin (Kristy and the Secret of Susan (The Baby-Sitters Club, #32))
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Schizophrenia means difficulty in comprehending Reality
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Vineet Raj Kapoor
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Schizophrenia is a long-term mental disorder, involving a breakdown between thought, emotion, and behavior. It leads to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation
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Ditter Kellen (The Girl Named Mud)
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Creating stories is like breathing for me. With one foot or at least a toe always grounded in my imagination, I am never fully in reality. Even when I am asleep, my stories unfold like a movie in my head. This is a good form of schizophrenia.
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Y.L. Cantrell (The Love Makers)