Paranoid schizophrenia from the eyes of the patient.

 I am sitting in my living room typing away again. A future sound production video on Hideo Kojima playing in the background.

I am hoping to spend the rest of the morning reading. Trying to finish up a couple of the books in my pile of things I been meaning to read.

Neurons are to thoughts what cells are to matter. This phrase has been haunting me since I first thought it months ago. Primarily because of the implication that thoughts can be measured as objective reality thought excluded from interpretation. Whatever that even means.

I have had a bit too many cups of coffee this morning. And am struggling with limitations of myself, so far as, confidence can be dangerous if you have paranoid schizophrenia. And I have confidence that I am delusional. What that means beyond the obvious… that I need more doubt in my life. It also means I have got to make peace with the fact that delusions don’t die with doubt, or they would not be delusions. Yet, if there is doubt… how can it be a delusion? 

I don’t understand exactly but still I need to not be too confident. Always reminding myself that I am one conviction away stumbling off the rails again.

I don’t care about my diagnosis anymore beyond it being a stumbling block for my ability to self actualize. The reality is that I have convictions with enough doubt to not be delusional and can rationalize these convictions so that I understand why they are there.

Which is to say I am highly medicated and been in therapy for over a decade. I am wanting to talk about my diagnosis because I have never addressed it beyond sensationalist rambling about my hallucinations. Which can be frustrating because having a subjective experience of external reality is fairly good definition of psychosis.

If you’re hallucinating and you doubt that what you saw was real. Then you are going to be sent home with those hallucinations till they erode your sense of reality until it becomes so subjective as to be alien to anyone you share this perspective with.  Then they will stop the active symptoms which they could have done… before your souls were torched by the flames of psychosis and you have to spend decades regaining a sense of identity that isn’t incongruent with the multiple modes of reality you have experienced. All the while knowing you could lose your medicine at any time. The stabilizing of a patient with paranoid schizophrenia has nothing to do with helping them  and everything to do with leaving in state where you can comfortably forget about them.

Whether a dam breaks from weak infrastructure (genetic predisposition for a diagnosis) or storm or flood makes the dam crumble (think an objective trauma)… what matters is the dam is broken. With paranoid schizophrenia  this is not always the case I spent year pacing repeating hallucinations back to myself substantially indistinguishisbel  from a form of cptsd except the trauma is subjective.   

The amount of effort to create a function framework to deal with subjective and reality we experience when our active symptoms are medicated away. The passive symptoms are at their core a trauma response to  being exposed to a hell the rest of the world was excluded from.

The metaphors I use for explaining halucination vs delusions is this a color blind person has a subjective experience that is objective to them but if they treated it as universally objective it would be a delusion. It takes an act of faith on their part to understand there is something they are missing. Paranoid schizophrenics deal with this in a much more extreme way… not able to communicate that what they are experiencing is the barrier being eroded (though in a very personal hell) between objective and subjective experience. And even when he active symptoms of the voices or in rare cases visual hallucinations are gone the memory of that experience. What you have heard or saw has become objective experience that can be recalled. Whether you are allowed to process it or not.

When you hear voices you try to rationlize it you try to explain why this is happening. In my case the voices I thought was the crew that are my life into the Truman show trying to reveal themselves to me so I could join objective reality. Then I thought it was the matrix all efforts to rationalize subjective experiences others could not engage with. And at last I believed it was God (still do to some extant) because the rational mind is in checkmate. If it denies the hallucination after sometimes spending years engaging with it. It becomes a personal betrayal of a God who intervened in your life on your behalf. And in my case sense the mind is still capable of rational thought… then your can say it was God talking to me through my mental illness. And while it may very well be… but… God is not a delusion. Faith is not a mental illness. Thinking God is real is normal. Thinking you are God is a delusion. Unless you’re Jesus. Also I know I am not the lord.

You have to understand though as delusional as I sound. I have seen things and heard things that objective reality cannot accommodate. From the dead calling out to me.  Too waking up and seeing the devil watching me sleep after week of not eating after my radio lead me to fast and that same radio told me “what Jesus did for us was sacred.”

I been typing this for a long time now and I may write more about this subject int the future but if one therapist or psychologist reads this the only thing I would like to say is this. You have to be willing to help someone on the terms that their subjective reality is objective to them as the one they will live in after the active symptoms are medicated away. They will carry those memories for the rest of their lives and likely they will seem more real and meaningful than the shared experience of processing them. The trauma is psychological as were the wounds that caused it.