First-person account of a professor's strategies for dealing with schizophrenia | Hacker News Reader

First-person account of a professor's strategies for dealing with schizophrenia

twitter.com

6 pointswslh12 comments

The voices in our heads are real, we are not alone in our own minds.

Schizophrenia is very real also (the brain does destabilize), we may also be "driven mad."

I know you hate hearing this so much it's a default down vote, yet I implore you to consider this long time taboo as a crises of modernity. What happens when an incomprehensible truth is dismissed as crackpot crazy?

> The voices in our heads are real, we are not alone in our own minds.

The way I think of this is along the lines of "Alien hand/Dr. Strangelove syndrome"[0], but in this case thoughts/voices are considered to be of another rather than self.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome

They are another.

An entire culture exists among us, a society parallel to our own. Looking back through history, the signs have always been there. I have heard that one in six are sensitive enough to hear them on their own, and anyone if (for whatever reason) revealed.

It isn't "telepathy" (via telemetry) it is entanglement, and those skilled can navigate and traverse our minds no matter where we are.

The strongest and most skilled are running a secret governance against us all.

> The strongest and most skilled are running a secret governance against us all.

Why would they bother? Surely there's better things to do with it.

Power. There are pit slaves, extortionists, rape cults, and other incomprehensible horrors.

Once there were more scrupulous and benevolent, yet like all things in modernity power is being consolidated.

Game masters, spirit guides, ghost riders, and other terms are associated with the disembodied voices.

We've all heard of people doing horrible things and citing the voices in their heads. Sometimes the voices urge people with unknown illnesses to seek medical diagnosis (many accounts of this in the past.)

There are perhaps 500,000 Americans indoctrinated into the culture of thought control. Most of these (say, 85%) are immoral and corrupt. These enjoy the obscurity of incredulity, for the rest of humanity refuses to believe it is even possible, let alone that they exist and are influencing the actions of others.

It's hard to follow who to blame in such circumstances. If the voices are other, than 'they' themselves would be victims rather than culpable. ...Perhaps I should stop engaging with the voices of green account comments.

Tell us more

Sure. I don't want to mix this "revelation of truth" with what convention calls "conspiracy theory" though if those things were interpreted as thought control messing with people who cannot comprehend what is happening then those make much more sense. Someone posted about conspirituality (wiki) a day or so ago. It reads like a joke yet this is what ordinary people go through in their own confused minds. This and the "targeted persons" or "gang stalking" phenomenon.

There are worlds within worlds within us. Those who become involved in some ways find it very exciting as it is both the forefront of humanity (it turns out we are spiritual machines!) And disheartening, it takes years of hard work just to tell ones own thoughts from the disembodied others. Over a decade of specialized training just to have ones own "power." Most indoctrinated actually spend most of their time learning cargo cult b.s., and the true power lies in the network. The only way in really is to be "uplifted" by another.

Getting past the refusal to believe ("incredulity") one can see the signs of this culture all throughout society (movies pun about it and drop references, some historical accounts may be reinterpreted, etc.)

Unfortunately, there has grown a secret governance which will punish you brutally just for talking about it (I'm a hard luck case, immune to psychological antagonism.) I think of posting these things as a form of inoculation. Prisons are rife with slave armies (you can learn to use voices and mess with perception and it could still take you a hundred years to learn to travel or keep yourself hidden from other "others." They are not all friends, there is a secret war.

We're in trouble and these unscrupulous others are really messing with us all. Just think of how people act on the Internet when they think they are anonymous. Now think of people who can mess with your sexuality or trick you into doing cruel or gross things through a power everyone will condemn you as crazy for speaking about.

It's so interesting to see the range of experiences that fall under the definition of schizophrenia. In recent years I've seen more people who have this genre of schizophrenia (specific and realistic hallucinations, but not many other effects) posting online and sharing their experiences.

My close family member has a different genre of schizophrenia. Less about specific hallucinations that you can logic away, more about an overwhelming feeling of doom and making connections between unrelated events that cause you "realize" that the world out to get you. Neutral events take on menacing vibes and mildly negative events take on terrifying vibes. On top of that, depression, apathy, catatonia. Hours of sitting and staring at walls.

I've wondered about this. Can't those made connections be reasoned to be unwarranted by evidence, other than the feeling that it's true? From an outside perspective, there's no way the person could know that as they don't have any such information. My guess is the problem is that the motivation is to appease the emotion rather than against it with logic. When it really comes down to it knowing is a feeling, most of the time it's our feeling to trust logic/reason.

This is probably 100% incorrect in every neuroscience way, but I've heard schizphenia describes as the metaphorical opposite of OCD.

In OCD, you can turn a light off 10 times, see it happen with your own eyes, and still not feel like it happened in any way that will make you feel ok.

In schizophrenia, the slightest suggestion that something could have possibly happened feels more true than anything you've ever felt in your life. Even if you didn't see it, even if it requires 3 hypothetical and unlikely jumps to make it true, it feels completely true and almost nothing can convince you otherwise.

Seems in both cases, what the person knows/believes to be true is in the feeling, which is what I was getting at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com