Research Suggsts a New Way to Identify Who Has Schizophrenia

[LiberalArkie]

For our sense of the world to, well, make much sense, we rely on the assumption of a reasonably constant sensory experience.

The same stop sign is going to look the same tomorrow as it does today, which looks the same as it did yesterday. If this were not the case, we might very quickly start having some anxiety about which real is real anyway.

Most of us can take this for granted, but there's a growing body of research suggesting that for schizophrenics, the ability to reliably filter and interpret sensory information is compromised. The world as the brain perceives it can't quite be counted on and this ties into the general schizophrenic syndrome of "disordered thinking." Hallucinations are a natural consequence.

By now a large number of studies have linked deficits in auditory and visual sensory processing with schizophrenia, but there has still existed a significant overlap in these observed deficits between schizophrenic and healthy populations. In other words, sensory deficits don't make for great predictors of the disorder or its future emergence in pre-schizophrenic patients.

Snip

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/new-eeg-evidence-helps-explain-how-schizophrenia-distorts-reality

[mopinko]

1. reliable tests for mental illness are SSSOOOOO important.

my daughter has epilepsy, and her seizures are mostly hallucinatory. she was seeing things that werent there. people lurking in the shadows. for YEARS.
she got a dx of ptsd, because, guess what? when you are living w distorted reality, yes, you get pretty anxious.
she finally started having more recognizable seizures, and the truth finally came out. but in the meantime, she was basically experimented on w anti-psychotic medications, and many of her physical symptoms were dismissed as anxiety.

check box dx's are a pox. we really need to find the biochemical markers for mental illnesses.
and if shrinks and neurologists could talk once in a while, that would be good, too.

[LiberalArkie]

2. I wonder how many kids with "imaginary playmates" end up with schizophrenia ?

[mopinko]

3. please dont say that.

i had an imaginary zoo.

[LiberalArkie]

4. I don't think I ever had any but have mild schitz. I hear crap all the time. Have since I was a teen

but never any imaginary friends as such. The worst I think was about 10 years ago, every Sunday I would hear ladies singing in a pentecostal church service. The mind is a strange thing indeed. I know it isn't real, worked my way to that point. But some times I break out laughing with the crap my mind imagines. I wish I knew stenography. I could have been rich. There were some good sci-fi books there. I learned a lot of stuff during the parts where the episodes were life consuming though.