wg2ww - schizophrenia 101

abbyjean:

when interacting with someone with schizophrenia, my most important tip is not to try to contradict or argue with them about the reality of their delusions or hallucinations. when i had a psychotic break due to my mania, i believed i could fly. and i say “believed,” but i really mean “knew with the certainty that you know you can type by pressing keys on the keyboard.” rational argument was useless and only made me feel uncomfortable and misunderstood. there was never going to be a point where i said “oh, i get it, i can’t actually fly.” (well, that point came, but only after some sedation and the psychosis passed.)

so when i meet with a client and they tell me that sometimes they may need to lie down on the floor to avoid the scanning beams of the tellurian aliens, i would never try to tell them that aliens don’t exist or that they’re not scanning him or any of that. to him, that is reality. and to respect him as a person, i have to respect his reality.

it’s sometimes tempting to giggle at these things. haha he thinks he’s being tracked by the FBI because he’s the reincarnation of napolean! but think about what it would feel like if you knew you were being tracked by the FBI, if you saw evidence of it everywhere, if that were your reality. that would be fucking terrifying, especially if everyone you talked to wouldn’t believe you and told you you were crazy. that is that person’s everyday experience and to laugh at that is to dismiss the very real pain the person is experiencing. and arguing that in some theoretical objective reality the person isn’t being tracked or monitored is totally irrelevant to the person’s experience, except to minimize their feelings.

Here is the thing about schizophrenia: people who have it aren’t stupid or irrational. Usually, their world view is internally consistent, logically sound. Everything they think makes complete sense—within the world they see themselves in.

What makes it schizophrenia is that it is not the same world that most of the rest of the world lives in.

It is impossible to understand and treat with respect people with schizophrenia without realizing that their fundamental difference is not craziness, wackiness, lack of intelligence or ability to use reason. The fundamental difference is the reality in which they live. It’s different from yours. And that’s all.

I argued with my family, for a long time. Then I realized that I wasn’t going to convince them of my truth any more than they were going to convince me of theirs. It’s really that simple.

Don’t think you’re better than them. Or that your reality is obviously the real one and theirs is obviously imaginary.

Realize that the problem is not that they are not in your reality — but simply that there are different realities here, which are in conflict, and need resolved. It’s not about whose is more right. It’s about coming to an acceptable resolution.

That’s a really, really radical idea. It’s hard for people to let go of that sense of superiority. It’s really hard to momentarily disconnect from your reality long enough to see that theirs makes just as much sense, from a different starting assumption.

You might think of it as religion: within each religion, the rules and rituals make plenty of sense, given their starting assumptions. It’s those starting assumptions, though, that are the problem: because those can’t be argued in the realm of reason. The starting assumptions about whether there is a supernatural, what is its nature — those simply don’t exist in the realm of logic and reason. They are beyond logic and reason.

So which religion (or any at all) makes most sense to you has less to do with all that follows from those assumptions than it has to do with those starting assumptions themselves. And those can’t be argued or proven. And one cannot be said to be better or more right than the other.

Each person has their own — and that must be accepted. When conflicts arise, we cannot attempt to resolve them by denying the other person’s beginning truth. Because that will lead nowhere constructive for either party.

That’s how I see our society right now: we are attempting to “solve” schizophrenia by denying people’s base truths. And that just isn’t going to work, not for anyone involved.