Understanding schizophrenia: What exactly is schizophrenia?

I've never suffered from depression before, so I hadn't been aware of how depressed I had gotten while taking amlodopine. After switching, I checked the known side effects and sure enough depression is one of them -- to the point where some countries have disallow its use!

It really surprised me how much this drug affected my life without my noticing anything out of the ordinary. What's even more interesting is that this summer I got very stressed about work (something that has never actually happened before) and ended up having a panic attack. So now I'm wondering about the new medication! It's crazy.

The big thing that I keep thinking about is, how much of my state of mind is "me" and how much is my medication (or any other things, like drinking coffee, or beer, or not exercising enough, or whatever). It's made me much more conscious about monitoring my mental state and taking some actions rather than just assuming everything is OK. But it's incredibly scary. I've had quite a few friends with mental illnesses and this helps me understand a tiny bit better what they are going through.

Oh, and +1,000,000 on the journal. It's the only way I can keep track of what's going on in my head.

I think of it as "ignorance broad enough to encompass one's ignorance" or "to not know _that_ one doesn't know"

Meaning that I didn’t try to convince people they were wrong in classifying what they saw through their paradigm, but rather took it up as my work to navigate from that point forward.

I also began to see “mental illness” as a context vs. some discrete thing inside ones brain. And that many of the symptoms an individual is experiencing are manifesting for the collective.

An example of this is imagine a father who grows up with a mother with intense and dangerous rage.

He will very often never learn to feel his own rage in a healthy way. He meets a woman and they have kids.

He spends so much time avoiding his own rage that it begins to show up in his wife and family. He tries to control it in them as well, making sure no one feels it.

Perhaps one kid ends up diagnosed with depression due to not having a safe context to feel emotion in the home.

The mother escapes into work.

The child, never having felt safe with the father ends up angry as an adult and violent toward the father.

The mother becomes rageful with the father as well for not having a relationship with the child.

If anyone of them would goto a traditional psychiatrist they’d most likely be prescribed medication — another attempt to suppress the emotions.

If one looks at the overall system and begins to help the father heal his trauma of the rageful mother, he can begin to grieve and heal himself.

His capacity for his own anger increases and he is better able to hold space for that of his family. He can understand now why he’s felt so much anger directed at him — he recreated the rage he was accustom to as a child but now in his home as an adult.

The other family members do their own work as well and collectively the family learns deeper self regulation and connection.

Soon their entire social circle and community is beginning to transform and wake up and learning to feel more fully.

Very often a family or social system will unknowingly “push” their unfelt feelings into a single individual and then try to medicate or eliminate that individual.

In some tribal cultures they say “the schizophrenic sits at the seat no one else is willing to sit at”.

The shamanic approach acknowledges that some folks with a greater sensitivity will begin to experience the pain of the underrepresented values of the tribe.

With proper mentorship and context, that person can become a wise leader, deeply intune to the unackowleged needs of the tribe.

This was the approach I took and have continued to take with the folks and families I’ve worked with.

I start off with a position that the persons experience is inherently valueable and contains useful information for me and the community.

From there I seek to connect with the reality they are in and to join them there while still maintaining my own sense of safety. I seek to see where my own behavior could be changed in support of this person.

I also encourage the folks who care about the person to examine their own lives and see what might be connected and to work on healing it.

A fantastic book on this topic that was really helpful was Rethinking Madness by Dr. Paris Williams (you can download the PDF for free).

There are also some incredible results happening with a process called Open Dialog in which the community gets together and speaks the truth of their experience and this has incredible results.

My experience and scaffolding it left behind allow me to support some incredible people and organizations around the world in their own growth and transformation.

I’ll even be at the UN this Wednesday for a meeting on global mental health.

It is really wild to think that just a few years ago I was being told I’d be on medication the rest of my life; my girl friend at the time (a Stanford Psychiatrist) told me her advisors had said “Stanford psychiatrists don’t date men with bipolar! They never get better, they are like alcoholics!” and that she’s be ruined professionally for associating with someone who thought they could heal without medication; I was suicidal and sleeping in a vacant house in San Jose...

Now I’m living in NYC; engaged to an amazing yogi; a full practice of clients; my relationship with my family is better than ever and we just bought an Island in Panama to build a healing village.

When we go within, anything is possible!

Think anxiety. Or like on the movie A Beautiful Mind (I know it's a movie but it happens IRL too). Or being under the influence of some psychedelics (you know you're under the influence but it still feels like reality).

For example, I found the following texts thought provoking:

http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2010/01/21/schizophren...

http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2013/01/03/schizophren...

In short, the top-down processing hierarchy is "the model", and the bottom-up processing hierarchy is "the evidence." The brain switches between using the evidence to train the model (when the evidence is salient and the model is weak), and using the model to predict and "fill in for" the evidence (when the model is salient and the evidence is noisy.)

It would make a lot of sense to me if psychosis were simply a result of chronically overdriven AMPA signalling, such that evidence is always being "fit to" the existing model, with the bottom-up hierarchy never being granted enough dominance to use the evidence to correct the model.