One surprising psychosis treatment that works: Learning to live with the voices
wsj.com
wsj.com
It can get surprisingly radical for a therapy session, at one point even inciting the patient to commit suicide! [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/29/acute-psychosis...
[2] > “You should end it,” the avatar [therapist] said, casually. “What have you done that’s of any use to anyone?”
Once I got really busy in my late teens and early twenties it became just a chapter in a shitty past life but in times of stress or use of drugs like weed it comes back. Crazy how impressioned the practice became.
Lately the stress and boredom of being unemployed had morphed it into having old traumatic relationship experiences becoming that pseudo voice. Like my own mother abandoning and rebuking me. Quite luckily I found out that cimetidine helps a lot.
Anyone with vivid episodic recall will self-critize the awkwardness dredged up by memory
I googled it and there seems to be an entire community of people doing or attempting to do that ?
Surely a symptom of the industrio/tech induced epidemic of loneliness.
A very interesting question on the ethical side as well.
My knee-jerk reaction is that the promotion and propagation of such methods should not be allowed, as it can risk nudging vulnerable individuals the wrong way.
But if this is not allowed, why would meditation be ?
What makes it different ? Only the outcomes ?
I cannot help but to be overwhelmed by the human condition sometimes.
It was certainly treated as "underground" knowledge, less something like you would share and more something you would find on a chan
Both you and the rest of the world would be better off not worrying about/trying to stop other people from doing things that don't harm anyone else.
We are all parts of an interconnected whole.
Your freedom ends where the freedom of the next person's begins.
Which has of course clear precedent, the easy example to point out being Strafgesetzbuch section 86a.
Glad you're doing better. Crazy how the gut and mind are connected.
Have you considered talking to a Vajrayana teacher to help understand what's going on? Tergar has an ongoing teaching this year on Buddhist psychology [1]. Also, a teacher I practice with posts most of our sessions online for free as well [2].
[1] https://vajrayana.tergar.org/buddhist-psychology [2] https://www.youtube.com/@ThuptenPhuntsok
The only reason I mentioned a Vajrayana teacher rather than a western psychologist or even a teacher from other Buddhist schools is that these advanced visualization practices are something most Vajrayana teachers will have experience guiding students through. Which also means they'll be well versed in what to do when things go wrong.
Nope, it was withdrawal. I discovered I could change the lyrics of the song by thinking them. And fans or other noise sources made it worse. Once I knew it was in my head, it was harmless and easy to ignore, if just a little annoying.
I had issues breathing around Corona and that stuck for 3 years. 1.5 years into that and after running from doctor to doctor I was cleared from a fear that it could be lung cancer or some shit. Still don't know what it is, but that helped tremendously.
I was smelling a sweet smeel for a month until I discovered that my neighbour grows weed. I was going mad because that seriously never crossed my mind cause he was never the type to smoke. And thought I am imagining stuff. Once I knew that, it was just a minor nuisance.
So the fact that this treatment of accepting the voices helps is easy to believe for me.
Usually just sitting up and accurately identifying the source of the sound (ceiling fan, radiators, passing train, cat water bowl) makes it go away.
My brain is very bad at identifying what people are saying with background noise, but at least I get free night music.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/grandma-got-run-over-reindeer-130...
Truth is, there's almost always some music playing in my brain.
A better working treatment is good but understanding these numbers seems important. That's a large increase in a very short time.
To add another trope, do not be shocked if EMFs are also found to be contributing. I know, this is coming from a schizophrenic, so whatever.
Interestingly though, there have been some studies that show a possible link between schizophrenia and ionizing radiation. (for instance: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11087010/ )
What type of EMF exposure? You see, there really has not been studies of real world newer EMF frequencies and none on mmWave exposure that are not only based on the thermal effects.
Please see this from 2023:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9665755
However, the available studies have not investigated the health effects resulting from exposure from the 5G mobile phone and base station antennas from 700 MHz to 30 GHz on the cognitive performance, well-being subjective symptoms, human physiological parameters, and EEG of adults. There is a need for such research regarding this current emerging technology. Such studies are significant in determining whether 5G technology is indeed safe for humans.
So just keep that in mind before drawing conclusions.
But let say they were overpowered, but not at the extent you are claiming. Were these studies "over powered" on purpose? There is evidence that they were to dismiss any health effects in studies completed by companies that make thee devices and this is discussed by researchers.
I calculated it myself. It was in response to one of those anti-EMF folks posting these papers as proof that cell phones were very dangerous. It's been several years since I did this, I don't have the references or calculations handy.
They exposed rats to increasing levels of radiation power for relatively short durations, and only the highest had the adverse effects.
Of course, could be I calculated it wrong. But it was a fairly simple scaling thing ala watts per gram of tissue, and I did do it for at least a few papers.
And yes, I think these were overpowered on purpose. If there was no effect at these extreme levels, it wouldn't make much sense spending resources studying lower-level exposure.
My point is that EMF has shown affects on people, but we know almost nothing about the implications ("unknown clinical significance").
The only population I’ve encountered with a similar strangeness to them is folks who have worked their whole life in a high VOC environment. Paint shops, print shops, that kind of thing. We were shopping for some custom canvas work for a boat, and at every shop we got quotes from there was overpowering smell of polyvinyl chloride, and every shop owner had a very weird affect to them.
[1] https://www.albany.edu/news-center/news/2022-ualbany-led-stu...
If this were true, GPS wouldn't work. It's entirely possible to communicate below the noise floor. See https://www.pa3fwm.nl/technotes/tn09b.html for a mathematical analysis.
But, lets sy they are the same, we are not exposed to sunlight at night, but we are exposed to ELF-EMFS and RF-EMFs now 24x7. Imagine living with a 24 hour sun.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/147/12/4121/7811070
Such events leave emotional scars on anyone, but can trigger schizophrenia in those who have a family history of the disease.
https://www.theaftd.org/posts/front-page/cloudflare-co-found...
I assume that people around you are also more likely to notice issues, and convince you to seek medical help before it's too late.
I have a friend who trained themself to recognise the onset of their psychoses, and to only medicate when that happens. Antipsychotics can have pretty unpleasant side effects in many people. This strategy is not without risk.
From Impro by Keith Johnstone
Who would have thought that "confronting your demons" could work in such a literal way.
As popularized in film, John Nash did this in the 1960s.
If the technique wasn't used for 50 years after Nash, wasn't it like the tree that fell in the forest and nobody heard it falling?
Imagine finding out that someone observed antibiotic effects of Penicilinum in the 1880s, but patients still dying of banal infections until Fleming; in that case, I would give the "revolutionary" credit to Fleming.
Which a first actual large-scale deployment of something fulfills, but isolated experiments don't.
Was Falcon 9 revolutionary? For me, absolutely, because it was the first widely deployed rocket that made partial reuse economical, and thus enabled projects such as Starlink.
We can call the previous small-scale experiments bold or maybe groundbreaking, but there was no revolution achieved.
You’re moving the goalpost. First it was a revolutionary idea. Now a revolution is after an idea has been put into practice.[1] Which is it?
[1] Even “not everything was thought of yet” but it’s there “for people whose thinking is sufficiently out of the box”. Come on.
To me Schizo is nothing more than an intensely creative mind. Why see nothing when you can see somthing?
Note that hunter gatherer genetics are linked to schizo and the idea of aa demon is a particularly Christian view of insights that do not fit the norm. More so if the ideas were coming from "pagan" people.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/evolutionary-psychi...
They often speak evil things, are unseen to the general population, but torment the sufferer ... a basic candidate for the category of "demon", especially in pre-modern times.
Also, I don't think that demons are a particularly Christian phenomenon. They certainly predate Christianity and various "heathen" religions were full of them: Indo-European, Amerindian, African...
But the idea of schizophrenia as a very intense mind going on empty is interesting. Only I would say that it needs some specific pathway to go down the schizophrenic route. Plenty of people with intense fantasies are normally adjusted and don't fulfill the criteria for a mental disease.
If antipsychotics fix the problem, was it really demon-possession?
Well, probably not. But if demon possessions were a real thing there is no reason why only medieval remedies should be effective against them
Would it be any different than if aliens could beam signals to individual neurons to force you to do something? What about a skilled surgeon with an Arduino, or those seizure prevention circuits they can install?
That's not the same as being dismissive about the state of world, or legitimising/glorifying real and distressing medical insanity - it's just saying; be careful how you "cope". That said, just look around you. Aren't intrusive voices just reason tired of us telling it to shut up.
I’m conscious I am (maybe we are) fumbling towards statement or acknowledgment of the same thing.
PS I like what you wrote!
It is nice to see it in secular medicine as well, though.
as we can see from the comments here already, many people choose to believe these alternative treatments always work and there is never any need for antipsychotics.
it completely makes sense that some people who suffer from the horrible side effects of antipsychotics would have some wishful thinking of this kind.
what i don’t get is why random people with no skin in the game, are often so emotionally invested in the idea that antipsychotics don’t work or are unnecessary. but it’s very common.
Insert any subject there. This is a really interesting topic. I can understand having an idea on a subject, but why cling so tightly to the flimsy ones or refuse to accept them as wrong when given evidence?
I’ll still be taking antipsychotics for the rest of my life, but at least the side effects are manageable enough I can live with it.
For a while though I practiced a kind of visualization I called "shapeshifting" which has recently turned into a project to be possessed by a fox spirit because I found out that everywhere there are foxes people have been getting possessed by fox spirits so why can't I do it? (No need to explain it in terms of science, reconcile it with western approaches to religion, none of that...)
I had it come in and take over my standing reflex (the first thing it does) we said a few words and then I was left with the message that I was not in good enough shape and I could get hurt doing this (not like a serious injury but sprains and strains, yes, to express itself it will ask more of my body than I do.
I'm going to have to talk about my goals with a trainer next week, I don't think I'm going to come completely clean that a fox sent me.
This is one of the wilder comments that I've read on this site.
Can you talk more about Ouija boards and the dowsing rods? When you say that they work really well for you, does that mean that you're able to use the Ouija board to correctly answer questions that people ask, even if you don't know the answer ahead of time? As for the dowsing rods, does that mean that you're able to find water/minerals/lost items?
I have a family member who I'm now suspecting might be schizophrenic. They will interrogate an ersatz Oujia board and have genuine conversations with...something that appears, to them, as a separate entity from themselves.
The advantage of communicating through a Oujia board (or spirit manifestation) seems to be you control when and where the other...consciousness?...manifests. Versus untamed schizophrenia where the hallucinations are occuring constantly and unprompted.
It boggles my mind that circa 1880 you could claim to channel the spirits of the dead and get away with it. This gave way to the likes of Edgar Cayce (if I couldn't predict the future better then him with I'm thinking rationally...) and Jane Roberts.
Oh man this sentence killed me, literally lol'ed.
If rates of psychosis are going up, why? It seems very worrying when rates of depression, suicide, psychosis, and other mental illnesses are increasing with what seems like no understanding of why or what to do to prevent the increase.
(Oh, and of course, am not saying this is the only strategy for dealing with psychosis, but it is just that it was also the first thing that came to mind when I read this article:)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_...
I do not hear voices (frequently), but have delusions. This is what I do, I do not trust anything I see. I found that I think people are looking at me when they are not so now I just accept it and do not read anything into it. The medication to treat us are ancient and horrible and this is the only healthy way out for us. I had to learn this on my own though since medicare does not care enough about anyone's health.
Mental illness is a metabolic disease, mine is caused by a problem with purine metabolism. (carbohydrates will turn into purines) Each person will be different. I have Schizoaffective disorder like she does. I would say we are remarkably similar in many ways.
I've also come to believe a mix of metabolic therapy and targeted supplementation (particularly B vitamins, chiefly B3), yields much better results than medications. And it seems the medical profession is slowly waking up to it too.
It's zero trust networking for your brain, and you're asking "but how do you decide which ip addresses are safe?". That's the neat part, you don't.
Nothing is real. Not for me or for you. That is my greatest insight of my illness.
You all have very narrow band schizophrenia, mine is just more, uhm, loose.
So if I feel like some shadow agency is tracking me I just say; "So what.", If I think what I picked up from the supermarket I just say; "So what if I die." I really had to stop caring about dying or suffering.
The only time I know when I am alone in my perceptions is when I ask someone. For example, I was sitting in a restaurant and I these four Mexican workers were turned around staring at me. I asked my friend if they were and she said no. Now I do not know if I am able to pick up on something, maybe I could somehow tell they were talking about me adn my brain made me aware by making it look like they were looking at me. But again, so what is my answer.
The day before that I felt my dead great uncle was telling me to go to Dillon, MT to make amends for him getting arrested there in 1954. So it was a tough week for me.
I've seen that too. It's as if the brain's "saliency threshold" is set too low - suddenly, there are no coincidences; everything is relevant and connected and has personal significance. There's no clear dividing lines between logic and intuition and madness; many of the people we perceive as smartest or most creative are somewhere in the middle.
All people have neurotic moments (That someone is looking at them, or believe in some mild conspiracy or whatever). The people who say they aren’t are lying or good at hiding it.
Someone close to me and typically pretty rational has one where she thought bugs were in her bed after repeatedly bug bombing the house. Half the State of New Jersey think we are in the midst of a drone invasion. Thank god we invented the scientific method and other tools for reasoning that can compensate for our flawed perceptions.
100% normal people do not get involuntarily committed to a psych ward. (Well, sometimes they do, but that is another story) The disorder comes when it disrupts your daily life. The thing you mentioned do not do that. Mine did.
This was my first thought - hearing voices are only one of many symptoms of psychosis. Disordered thinking is a big one.
It's hard to convince someone who isn't thinking logically that they have a disease and the voices aren't real. Their grip on reality is already tenuous.
I wonder how many people make things worse for themselves by worrying that they’re going crazy, which ends up feeding the cycle.
As opposed to “What can I do with this/How can I work around it?”
Giving people agency and making them know that they don’t need to own every random voice that comes into their head is nice. Even for non-psychotic folks.
So there is a limit to this therapy.
I say "Sorry" to a lot of people and they I try to find the trigger.
I do not think internal family systems is designed for biological triggered mood disorders, but I see where you are going here. I do not see the person that comes out in my everyday pschye.
Think of what happens to me akin to giving someone methamphetamines and trying to get them out of the high by talking about internal family systems. It just will not work.
Can I draw from this that when the psychosis gets deep enough you can sort of recognize that you’re in the state (since you’re telling people sorry) but simply cannot control it?
Is it controlled by medication? Does the medication ever fail you and return you to the state of psychosis?
No, it is too deep and I am fully in it. The sorry happens when I come out fo it and read the texts I sent out. :)
I did not have psychosis all the time. Mostly bipolar symptoms. Yes, meds stopped psychosis but made my life even worse. Klonopin will take me out of psychosis in about 30 minutes. See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5354128/
And thank you.
I can only tolerate antipsychotics because my medication mix counters a lot of the side effects.
I have an entire page of notes for my psychiatrist, listing my medication’s and their side effects, and how they interact.
I’m probably one of the few people who never wants to stop taking medication. They helped me focus my creativity. I never could’ve become an author without them.
See this for someone else doing medical keto who has been able to stop all medications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pIs30jDxeo
I’ve written up my two psychotic breaks on my blog: https://kayode.co/blog/4106/living-with-psychosis/
You don’t get to say you’re sorry until it’s over. I got to watch myself in third person fuck up most of my relationships while I spent the whole time screaming in my head to stop.
Of course, I thought this was a normal reaction stress. I only got diagnosed a few years ago. I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal till I offhandedly mentioned it to my psychiatrist and she couldn’t prescribe antipsychotics fast enough.
For me, medication is only part of the solution. I spend a lot of time and energy, keeping track of my mood and preventing myself from spiraling into an episode. Even the medication doesn’t always work and I have to take more of it. Can’t be manic if you’re sleeping. :)
But I’ve made the best of it. :)
I live today and believe tomorrow can always be better.
I know some people wish they can change the past. I used to wish that too, but now I find that to be extremely shortsighted.
Why would I waste my one miracle on changing an event I’ve already learn to live with? I want to be a werewolf. :D
Same with me. What helped me was years of Theravadan Buddhist Mediation. I do not recommend it, but it helped me create a mind that was separate from my delusional mind. I would easly have wild trips when I was meditating, whcih I think was from the excess serotonin released or my over sensitivity to the seritonin via the HTR5A g protein coupled receptor.
> my psychiatrist and she couldn’t prescribe antipsychotics fast enough.
That is all psychiatrists do.
I suggest you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pIs30jDxeo
But she's still taking care of herself and not a danger to herself or others, so there's nothing we can right now. My big hope is that someday she'll get perspective on this like you have now.
Hasnt occurred since. Unfortunately, even after having experienced and successfully (in my subjective experience) navigating this, i was able to help others do the same (at least to what i would calk that).
The problem is she never reconciled any of those episodes that it was her being overly paranoid. She just wrote those people out of her life and moved on. Which is what she's trying to do now to literally everyone in her life, and it's never occurring to her that the problem might be her. She thinks she's in a giant Truman Show and all her friends and family are punking her.
There are people online claiming to be harassed by groups of people hired by governments or shadow organizations. This ranges from being followed in the street or having people looking at you menacingly at the supermarket, to being subject to psychic warfare using electromagnetic weapons.
I have yet to find a case that convinces me it's not pathological paranoia.
But where it gets interesting is that these people also claim the "harassment" happens on the very forums where they discuss this topic: some posters allegedly make subtle references to info they shouldn't know about, especially because on these imageboards anonymity happens at the thread level.
After having spent enough time on these platforms, this happened to me on a few occasions: posters alluding to my geographical location, or making mentions of things I wrote in other threads with high emotional involvement. I can't tell whether I'm over-interpreting, but one thing that is certain is that these posters were LLMs. I came to that conclusion using various tricks: context-length exhaustion, talking about topics that go beyond their reasoning ability (such as anagrams), and I noticed they fail to properly understand concepts from pictures or to read text behind a link.
Conclusion: the idea of gang-stalking is not an assessment of the situation, it's the tip of a spear meant to induce pathological paranoia.
Modeling the Impact of Combat and Influence Actions on Population Attitudes toward Forces
During the last decades, stabilization, COIN and CT operations around the world have brought to light an increased need for influence capabilities on local populations and key individuals. Today, western Forces often face non-state actors and other kind of irregular opponents, which have strong interactions with the “human environment'' and find there some support based on ethnic, political or religious affinities. Influence actions aim at altering the perception, attitudes and behaviors within the population and at hindering proinsurgent dynamics. In order to counter them and stabilize the crisis zone, one must win the so-called ‘‘heart and minds’’ of the local population. The understanding of the human terrain and its dynamics is the key for answering those new operational needs and obviously calls for a modeling and simulation effort. Our goal is to develop a simulation of the dynamics of the population in terms of attitude and behavior change and to use in training and decision aid applications.
Source: https://perso.limsi.fr/sabouret/ps/MP-SAS-105-BROUSMICHE.pdf
I had such an interaction in real life, an attempt of an agency to use me. This interaction was seen by a friend or else I would have dismissed it.
One cannot easily dismiss these claim since there is a history oif the CIA experimenting on Schizos.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/intent-harm-cia-schizop...
"He sat in a chair, had headphones placed upon him, and was subjected to statements, screams and noises designed to frighten. Electrodes were placed upon his body, his heart rate, body temperature and sweat level measured."
And this, a bill banning "mind control"? Psychotronic weapons? Mood management?
https://sgp.fas.org/congress/2001/hr2977.html
through the use of land-based, sea-based, or space-based systems using radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control of such persons or populations; or
Basically there are a lot of useful heuristics you can get from the concept that your thoughts are only partially under your control.
Ultimately we both failed at that and are learning how to work better together. We had to accept that our plurality is our reality. We talk together, each get different times when we can control the body, and negotiate on what choices we're going to make. We have different names, personalities, likes, dislikes, and desires. Though this is something we hide to most of the world, we have let the people closest to us know, and they have started to get to know each of us personally.
There's enormous value in accepting who you are and focusing on how to live positively with that instead of repeatedly trying to ram yourself into a box that's "normal" and expecting that to be healthy.
What happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41980986 - Oct 2024 (150 comments)
For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41434484 - Sept 2024 (285 comments)
People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29068561 - Nov 2021 (268 comments)
The last great mystery of the mind – inner voices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28994542 - Oct 2021 (4 comments)
A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904019 - Oct 2021 (28 comments)
A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547367 - June 2020 (75 comments)
Researchers listen to people who hear voices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363387 - July 2019 (19 comments)
Hallucinations Are Everywhere (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19480576 - March 2019 (53 comments)
A Life Hearing Voices: How I Manage Auditory Hallucinations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16167545 - Jan 2018 (34 comments)
People Who Hear Voices Could Be on to Something - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653184 - June 2017 (105 comments)
What's Up with Those Voices in Your Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802231 - Oct 2016 (55 comments)
Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11539263 - April 2016 (21 comments)
When I stopped hearing the voices in my head - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569110 - Nov 2015 (69 comments)
In Some Cultures People with Schizophrenia Like the Voices They Hear - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328026 - Oct 2015 (34 comments)
The voices in my head: Eleanor Longden's 'psychic civil war' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9143928 - March 2015 (7 comments)
> This study shows that both CBD and AMI improve neurocognitive functioning with comparable efficacy in young and acutely ill schizophrenia patients via an anandamide-independent mechanism.
cannabidiol amisulpride: https://www.google.com/search?q=cannabidiol+amisulpride
Many people believe in such things and are also successful. The difference is that successful people align themselves with those who hold the actual keys to Reality.
I've had it for over 25 years, nonstop, without fail, every waking moment. Learning to live with doesn't just work, it is the only option.
> This study shows that both CBD and AMI improve neurocognitive functioning with comparable efficacy in young and acutely ill schizophrenia patients via an anandamide-independent mechanism.
cannabis amisulpride: https://www.google.com/search?q=cannabidiol+amisulpride
Do headphones playing audio with words just loose around the neck, not even on, help stave off verbal psychosis?
language learning apps,
music from another room: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Music%20from%20...