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Comment by wellthen | Hacker News Reader

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 11 years ago.

The "double bookkeeping" mentioned in the article is a neat description of how I sometimes dealt with the hallucinations. Everything I experienced was real to me but I quickly realized that it was not "objectively real", for lack of a better term. I had the luck of having a GREAT support network, and I highly believe that its because of that I'm functioning today.

I'm currently symptom-free and have been for a few years (despite being a dumbass who cold-turkey'd my meds without my doctors knowledge). I want to try to help anyone who's feeling isolated due to "mental illness" (not a fan of that term either). Drop me an email: helpful at hax dot xyz

(apologies for rambling and/or strangely formatted text, writing this on phone whilst commuting)

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> (despite being a dumbass who cold-turkey'd my meds without my doctors knowledge)

Robert Whitaker says that the only people he's met who recover are the ones who stop taking their pills. Anatomy of An Epidemic is written around the premise that psychiatric medications take an episodic illness and make it chronic.

Avoiding polyunsaturated oil is a very important part of helping people with mental problems. These oils are "deodorized" during their production process, so that people don't realize they've already gone rancid.

random pages from Whitaker's organization:

Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications - https://www.madinamerica.com/mia-manual/drug-may-problem-sto...

What Happens When You Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications - https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/09/stop-taking-psychiatric...

I ended up stumbling on that idea of "double bookkeeping" as well, though in the context of acute drug induced hallucinations.

What made it hard for me is that both sets of ideas are correct about some aspects of my experience and wrong about some aspects. The hallucinations are mostly wrong where they deviate from "standard" reality, but they're not entirely so and seem to be capturing some patterns that my brain is picking up that I can't articulate through other mechanisms. Counter-intuitively, admitting that there were facets of the hallucinations that did make sense made it easier to deal with accepting that there were parts that didn't as well.

I view it as having two approximate models for reality which have different faults -- one model is knowingly incomplete (but scrupulously consistent); the other model is knowingly inconsistent (but has models for any experience, and serves for "experimental" ideas). The goal is to try and work both towards a shared (underlying, objective) truth trapped "between" them in some sense.

Well put, after a bit of reflection I mostly subscribe to the concept of several "approximate models" wherein "objective" truth lies somewhere inbetween.

My own hallucinations were auditory and in the instances where they weren't random noises they only said my name, often in "plausible voices" (i.e. voices of people I had talked to recently or were nearby) and as such I don't ascribe much meaning to them. I can however see how other psychotic symptoms I've had followed the "approximation"-pattern -- had an incident where for about a day I was convinced my left arm weren't actually my arm and was most likely grafted on by aliens. In hindsight, this probably manifested this way at least partially because of fear of being different due to my diagnosis.

I find the idea that "the map is not the territory" useful in considering delusional beliefs. It keeps belief and reality separate, where "belief" could include things you know to be hallucinations etc (though I've never had those). https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory

>but they're not entirely so and seem to be capturing some patterns that my brain is picking up that I can't articulate through other mechanisms.

Drugs made me more aware of how routinely our brains mildly hallucinate in ways that are designed to be imperceptible so as to 'smooth over' our perception of the world (i.e. our blind spots https://visionaryeyecare.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/eye-test-f... ).

It always seemed as if drug-induced hallucinations were less some kind of emergent or externally-imposed phenomenon and more of the drugs simply ratcheting up the misfire rate on normal systems of consciousness like face recognition, pattern recognition, piecing together incomplete information via extrapolation from memory, etc.

Learning to recognize this kind of 'misfire' and label it as distinct from objective reality was enormously helpful to me when it occurred to my emotions later, because of bipolar disorder.

The Charles Bonnet syndrome is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations

Thank you for this comment!

My problems are different from drug-induced hallucinations or schizophrenia, but I believe they are related. You (and OP) have put into words something I've been struggling with for much of my life: the feeling that I'm engaged in "double bookkeeping", and the experience that giving both 'realities' a degree of validity leads to a much better outcome than trying to deny-all one of them. Of course that leaves 'outcome' rather fuzzy, but somehow that's easier to accept and live with.

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