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Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any sources for that? Because last I've read neuropsychiatry literature on the topic, schizophrenia is a brain-wide neuronal dysfunction, with psychosis being a downstream consequence of erroneous information processing - as in "2+2=5" type of erroneous.

I get that some people really want to believe that everything affecting the mind must be psychogenic, but with schizophrenia you're seriously stretching it. Schizophrenia isn't just a psychiatric disorder, it's a heavy duty brain dysfunction.

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I'm pretty confident there's good evidence supporting a connection between "early childhood adversity" and the development of schizophrenia, but I'm inclined to agree: once the system has gone off the rails, it's probably too late for environmental intervention to rein things back in. And that's assuming there's any reliable way to initiate and maintain those environmental changes.

Realigning the internal systems involved in schizophrenia seems at least as important as improving external systems that might provoke it.

Preventative is always more important than fixing after the fact where like you said it may be very difficult to do so.

Basically what I was indicating though, and which I get from for example, RD Laing and Gregory Bateson, is that the best “cure”, societally-willing, is to provide a safe community environment where the schizophrenia is allowed to “run its course”. I know capitalist societies always want a commoditized solution like a pill, and certainly those can be useful, but we shouldn’t forget that a more personal, human solution is always better.

Western medicine can also learn a lot from eastern medicine in this regard. Luckily there’s a lot of research being done on what the pros and cons of each system are. Definitely recommend the book The Web that Has No Weaver for example.

Childhood adversity well might be product of parents and the environment not knowing how to deal with early manifestations of psychiatric disturbances, honestly.

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