Schizophrenia from the inside

A schizophrenic walking down the street experiences the same things that others feel, except the experience is quite different and can quickly overwhelm them. What mechanics are causing that to happen?

To investigate, let’s imagine yourself walking along a road. Cars are passing but nobody else is walking except you. You are aware that people look at you from the passing cars and this is normal. All people, no matter what age, experience the phenomenon of others looking at them. People are attuned to others around them. And somehow, even if you can’t clearly see inside a passing car, you can still read across the situation and gauge the feelings emanating from the people inside.

Being able to glean information from people inside a passing car has amazing implications about the physics of the real world. However to keep the discussion focused, it is safe to say that each person can make immediate assessments from others looking at them. Other people’s eyes contain much information, even in relative darkness. Most people can gauge danger or friendship from the most casual glance. For the ordinary person, this experience is effortless and primary to all social exchange.

To the schizophrenic however, the phenomenon is quite different. The visual exchange that leads to ordinary feelings in most people can act as springboard to exaggerated beliefs.

The schizophrenic sees the visual exchange as a vast opening into a world that may or may not actually exist.
Who’s to say that hallucinations suffered by schizophrenics are not part of some yet undiscovered physics? After all, it is a very unusual property of light that allows us to see, let alone glean information from what we just saw? Is it not also a strange property of physics that tells us when somebody is looking at the back of our head?
Clearly people use very strange mechanisms to conduct the business of everyday life.

But physics aside, the question is what mental process occurs in the schizophrenic’s mind that might be different from others?

Let’s say for example the schizophrenic exchanges a glance with somebody in the passing car. To the occupant of the car, this is the normal beginning of social interaction. The information is quickly filtered and forgotten.

To the schizophrenic, the exchange might trigger a massive emotional response.
Social interactions are essentially emotions at work, but the mind of the schizophrenic is different. The schizophrenic is unable to quickly filter and forget the exchange. Questions pour through their mind seeking an answer for the exchange. How were they able to see eyes inside a passing car? Do they have supernatural powers of observation?  Why did that person look at them? Was a message being sent? Who sent it? What did it mean? Was this a divine occurrence?
In desperation a schizophrenic can reach any number of seemingly irrational conclusions.

Obviously a schizophrenic is aware of themselves, and they understand that information was exchanged with eye contact.
And too they might understand that information left their brain and entered another person’s brain. And this actually does occur because people exchange information by looking at one another. But the schizophrenic brain diverges from normal. The schizophrenic does not have access to normal social filters and therefore they can easily conclude that the information leaving their brain is subject to open public record and quite logically they conclude that other people are reading their thoughts.

The conclusion that others are reading their thoughts is not without some validity. After all, if the schizophrenic looks ‘weird,’ then his or her social interaction may actually become part of the open public record and subject of gossip. All of us know that the 'stranger' a person looks, then the more people try to look at them and get a reading. Nothing fascinates people more than the irregular.

This hypothesis could be tested by exposing a schizophrenic only to blind people and seeing if the symptoms diminished. On the other hand, since people communicate across an array of feelers, the schizophrenic may conclude that even blind people can read their minds.

Returning to the original scenario with a passing car, what occurred between two people was a single glance or exchange of eye contact. To those people not involved in a hyper-vigilance life, for example somebody experiencing threat from others, the glance meant nothing. Who cares that somebody looked at you? It doesn’t mean anything – yet it actually means everything doesn’t it?

The first glance is the start of all social interaction. It is critically important. The first glance is the doorway to future friends and acquaintances. It is the measure of shared understanding. It is totally necessary for interaction among people, unless a person works and shops entirely by mail, phone or the internet and doesn’t answer the door when deliveries arrive.

Down inside the inner workings of each person’s brain, the eye-contact from a single glance is used to make full assessments for life. It is the sounding board of everyday life. Yet it is effortless and takes place continually without mention. That’s why the ordinary person probably feels that a glance meant nothing despite the truth being different. The glance is the beginning of everything.

Seemingly contrary to ordinary people, the schizophrenic is quite aware that a glance carries huge significance. This was no minor thing that took place and they know it.

And now after the eye-contact exchange, the schizophrenic is awash with extraordinary feelings that they must act on. Everybody responds to their feelings, it is imperative and you do it without choice. You cannot close your eyes so that your feelings disappear. Your feelings are always inside you and always working.

Instead of being overwhelmed by feelings, most people learn practical social skills that let them pass through the barrage of everyday feelings without delay.
When a person doesn’t pass through those feelings, and acts inappropriately for the situation, he or she is considered immature or acting poorly.

Over time, the exchange of glances among people will inform a person who acts poorly. These glances will force them to change behaviors or at least disguise their behaviors. By changing behaviors, the person is learning how to respond to their emotions based on what feedback they receive from the larger group. In this sense, people create an agreed reality by influencing which emotions are appropriate to display. During the course of learning we differentiate appropriate times to yell or cry. We learn to set aside feelings in order to meet expectations and goals within society.

The schizophrenic is not easily able to control their response to emotions. Whether this is the actual disease, or a symptom of the disease is not defined. The fact that the disease lessens its grip in older people suggests that it is not a disorder of cognition. No matter the root cause, the schizophrenic is unable to formulate proper emotional responses, and that leads them to wrongly assess the social interaction. This doesn’t mean that the schizophrenic is unable to reason, it just means that their system of judgment is impaired and they are likely to reach the wrong conclusion.

This implies that schizophrenics can benefit from cognitive training, but it doesn’t guarantee that the progression of the disease won’t erase gains.

Most schizophrenics direct their attention inwardly. They know they are different.

At this point the story diverges somewhat. That’s because the disease is different for each person. Some of the afflicted are stable functioning adults. Some get worse over time. Some are drastically impaired by the disease and will never recover. For some, the disease process allows periods of stability followed by attacks that carve away a little more of the person’s mind each time an attack is triggered.

The commonality between all individuals struck with the disease is that they seek resolution to their condition. Some people withdraw and close off communication. They sit in darkened rooms and brood about imaginary situations that crossed their minds that day. Others stand under a freeway bridge and let the pounding traffic drown out the noise inside their mind. After all when you are under a freeway bridge, it’s expected that people will look at you and therefore you don’t have to make assessments of the situation. It’s a perfect solution when each mental confusion evaporates with the car as it disappears down the street.

All schizophrenics are aware that something is different about them. They have their antennae raised high to gauge how much and when another person has noticed. The moment is crushing when others recognize they are not performing at a known social level. They naturally feel they are forever weakened and diminished from that situation. It is something that seems impossible to recover from. This is one reason why schizophrenics shun social contact and develop strategies that shut other people out. This is also the mechanism whereby some afflicted people develop deep-seated hatred of situations and people.
But is that really irrational behavior? Or is it the exact thing you would do if it brought even a moment of relief?

The brain is both a marvelous and capricious companion that runs our lives ... without permission.
Some people have an organized and dependable brain, while others operate like layers of swiss cheese, and when the holes line up maybe they are able to recall a detail, but if the holes are not lined up, then a less reliable memory fills the space. So here is the problem ... something must fill the space. The brain cannot be turned off, even at night, unless certain medicines are prescribed. Nor can the brain be fine-tuned to a different 'channel.'
There are methods to improve cognition of a problem, so a person with OCD can train themselves to fight a trigger that caused repetitive hand washing etc, but it requires a functional brain which schizophrenics don't fully possess.

So is the schizophrenic brain really broken? Or is it operating on a scale we don't yet understand?

My mother was not a schizophrenic, yet she talked about her antenna. She got flash intuitions about things before they happened.
I too was somehow blessed with the same intuitions, and sometimes they are accurate, and other times, utter nonsense as far can be discerned. But, and here is the point, they are accurate enough that I listen to them and alter course because of them.
As I get older, and spend more time writing and less time interacting with people, most intuitions come while dreaming.

One night, my dream showed something bad happening to my car. The next day while driving, I was extra careful until I got home and absentmindedly lost the car keys. My wife found them three days late in the front yard, and I didn't recall going into the yard at all.

Another time, a dream had somebody knocking at the front door. In the dream I stepped outside to talk to the man, when suddenly a second more-agittated man walked up and got mad about something. The jolt of fear wke me.
Next day, a strange man did ring my front door. And I peered out the window instead of opening the door. Then suddenly I saw a second man who was going around door to door with the first man. They were offering prayers and conversion probably, but I studied the second man from afar and thought he looked like a hair-trigger fellow.
No matter if my dream intuition was an accurate forecast or not, I acted as if it was, mostly because the intuitions have been very accurate in the past.

There are people who intuit something terrible has happened to a loved one? They simply know down-to-the-bone that something bad happened miles away, sometimes across different states. Hopefully their intuition was wrong that moment, but stories about that are not uncommon or considered more that peculiar. The public doesn't clamor for protection from the phenomenon, and generally the person doesn't require intervention for and abnormality.

One more story from my own experience.
A number of years ago I took nighttime art classes at the Glassell School in Houston. I wanted to be an 'fine' artist, until I failed all measure of talent,  eventually coming to rest a number of years later as a graphic illustrator on my own website.
Back then however I was painting pictures every night. One night I painted a large profile portrait of a man in his 30's. It was an image I pulled out of the air, I wasn't looking at a model or picture of someone. The man was a disturbing figure, not much different than my usual attempts.

Then a few nights later after art class, a ratty-looking van was pulled directly behind my work van, blocking me in. My trailer hitch was missing, and somebody was inside the other van, in the cargo space moving around in an uneasy manner with the lights on and doors pulled nearly closed.
I rushed back to the school and got the security guard who returned with my trailer hitch, telling me the fellow in the ratty van was a schizophrenic, and that he was accusing me of 'taking his picture.'
I said, I haven't taken his picture. I didn't even know who he was.
The guard told me the guy was a photography teacher at the Glassell, and they had 'called his mother.'

The following day, I picked up a staff book and looked for the teacher's picture.
His staff picture LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE the portrait I painted.

I was floored by the implication.
Here was a schizophrenic, who could feel me painting his likeness, albeit without me being aware I was actually painting someone real who I had never seen, or if I had seen at the school, it would have been a quasi-conscious notice of somebody walking by.
I burned the picture next day, maybe to give both of us relief. I felt bad for causing this, whatever it was. And I regret painting the picture, but mostly I regret not telling his mother and the school what happened.
Of course what use is it telling somebody's mother, or some entry-level secretary. We're all locked away from influencing anyone at the 'decision-making' level, which is probably why there is so much discontent in this country.

In the end, this interaction with a schizophrenic happened, it affected lives, and there was no official 'de-briefing' of the events or feelings.
Suppose however, this event proves that schizophrenics are connected to other people at a much broader level than the rest of us understand? Maybe they are the next step of evolution, and the genetic is akin to other diseases in the body's attemp to solve human evolution.
You know the old joke that a schizophrenic is walking down the street talking to another schizophrenic waking down the street a mile away. It might be true, and what we see as very strange behavior has a point truth that we can't understand because we don't live there ourselves.
I don't know, but reality is created by the people who judge what is possible and acceptable, the same people who just what a schizophrenic is.

For those who have powerful afflictions of the disease, they live in a hell of sorts where they are alone and fighting for every step. These people wake up each day terrified that they will become worse today than yesterday. This level of affliction becomes apparent to everyone because the schizophrenic becomes more and more disheveled in appearance. It becomes impossible to do everyday routines because the person is just trying to stand upright against the blizzard of auditory and visual hallucinations.

The remedies probably make no sense to those people around them, and the worse a person is afflicted the stranger the remedies may appear. But to the schizophrenic, the remedy becomes their grasp on reality and it is the only place they can stand against the withering affects of the disease.

Naturally they begin to destroy themselves inwardly. It’s difficult to say whether the disease manifests negative feelings about oneself, or if that becomes a self-imposed pattern.  because they ‘didn’t get it right’ and you are taught from birth to ‘get it right.’ Even gentle prodding by the most protective parent is telling the offspring to ‘get it right,’ and much celebration follows successful accomplishment. The schizophrenic doesn’t get it right and they know it. It’s a horrible feeling.