I highly doubt there'll ever be research in this area, but I'm very curious about whether it'll ever be possible to induce schizophrenia for a time, similar to how psychedelics or dissociatives can induce altered mind states.
So you're probably right, but on both points sadly. To this day he still sends me complex CAD drawings of nothing.
[s]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...
OP did address that. But
Lots of folks attribute things like schizophrenia to hallucinogen use, when in reality, people make questionable decisions in their late teens and early twenties; this is the time that these disorders tend to manifest. So a lot of coincidence leads to a casual relationship in popular culture.
“I took five people, and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks, and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high.”
From Be Here Now - Ram Dass/Richard Alpert
Interestingly he was the guy involved in giving psilocybin to priests back at Harvard in the 1960's.
Recent source: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/ram-dass
On the other hand, one single dose of a psychiatric medication can ruin peoples lives. They get brain shocks, sexual dysfunction or anhedonia for life. One dose of marijuana can effect similar outcomes.
I know immunosuppresants are whole separate part of medicine, but its a playing with fire risk/reward where its too early to establish reasonable probabilities. But at least we can begin the cause-effect discovery process.
(I've been trying to impact the stability of my brain for years. I just want a way to destroy rational thought but that isn't lethally addictive (benzos), or irreversibly neurotoxic (deliriants), or literal poison (alcohol). Harm reduction is such a drag, I just want to safely explore unsafety!!)
It is not possible, by definition; here’s a portion of the DSM 5 definition of schizophrenia:
“ The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or another medical condition”
Hard to find a publicly accessible DSM link, but here is an excerpt
https://floridabhcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pages...
Kind of like how we were "lucky" to get a guy with a railroad spike through his brain to learn about how brain damage affects personality and impulsiveness..
I use schizophrenia to refer to the experience, not to the diagnosis. I'm not sure what to call the experience of schizophrenia other than schizophrenia, given it's not synonymous with psychosis. (Though, granted, I would also want to try psychosis someday; even if it's a terrible experience and I never want to do it again, I want to truly know what it's like. Hopefully without permanent brain damage though. That stipulation heavily limits my options.)
Interestingly, he uses immunosuppresants as part of his anti-aging medicine/supplement regime.
https://medium.com/@x3em/from-depression-to-superhuman-bryan...
I was drunk for almost two days once and at the end I couldn't comprehend conversation!
Always respect your sleep, it's the only thing keeping you from cooking your brain at 30. Anecdotal but my mate's mom got Alzheimers when shes like 55, an overworked overstressed, never sleeping woman.
(Also, I have DID so I experience other personalities all the time!)
It brings 5d chess into my psychology or something
Which sucks, because I really feel like dissociatives would be nice. I've taken memantine orally and it was nice, although it took really long to wear off, and also after a while it made me throw up all over my expensive tech, which was very not fun. Ketamine though I haven't found an adequate way to take.
I self-medicate a variant of what's now available in the USA as 'Auvelity' but is just a ratio'd mixture of dextromethorphan and bupropion. The bupropion is there to slow down the metabolism of the DXM via its CYP2D6 pathway, but bupropion gives me anxiety/insomnia so I use something called berberine phytosome which isn't as effective but still works on CYP2D6 at a lower level, but no side effects.
All the other anti-depressant classes never worked for me but still gave me extremely shitty side effects.
There's a lot of anecdotal reports on DXM/Auvelity for both prescribed (variable outcomes, but for some people its the first thing that's ever worked), and recreationally its been around for ages sometimes referred to as the poor mans ketamine...
Not DID here, but schizo-affective. I've read things like meditation can actually have negative affects on dissociative disorders. Dissociating in order to re-integrate to a better place seems a somewhat reasonable strategy but I think mental-health/medication effects and understanding of how differently the same medications can affect different people is only just beginning to be realised by psychiatry now.
At least now there's even genetic testing for Auvelity - if you're already a poor CYP2D6 metaboliser due to a shortened version of a gene on a specific chromosome, they won't prescribe it to you. On the other hand you could be an ultra-metaboliser.