Dr. Erik Messamore and Bethany Yeiser discuss Topics in Schizophrenia in this six-part series. Find us online! curesz.org Facebook: / cureszorg Twitter: / cureszorg Instagram: / cureszfoundation RU-vid: / @cureszfoundation7671
I think we see changes in people's thinking, behavior and relationships with other disorders as well. People observe changes in thought, feeling and behavior that interfere with achieving life aims, problems functioning day to day such as slowed, delayed thoughts or racing thoughts and distractibility with extreme mood disturbance. One individual mind and spirit through which we operate in the world is conceived as being housed in the human skull, literally a closed box with portals for sensory inputs- the eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, nostrils for smell, tongue for taste, and the surface of the skin. The sensory inputs are for interpretation and correlation by the mind accessing emotions to form the impression of salience forming memories. Schizophrenia I think can interfere with the integration and correlation of experience into a meaningful match of the mind with the life lived. Schizophrenia opens doors to other interpretations and lived meaning but in the illness the inputs to the heart are clouded and thoughts perturbed by the doors open to an interior wall. There is no passage. But the mind is adaptable, so complex, responsive, teachable, daresay trainable that, for schizophrenia as in other mental and medical conditions, trying medications, therapies and individual practice can entrain other adaptive configurations of mind to fulfill the destiny of consciousness to experience thoughts, activate behaviors and tolerate, at least, or even to thrive in relationships.
Oh, I don't know, squatting around your private university campus and avoiding spending money on those ridiculous California rents hardly seems delusional to me. In my book, spending 2/3 of your income on a tiny room with 5 other roommates seems far more crazy. And if there's an unoccupied dorm that you can sneak into and live in for free, that just sounds like intelligent use of real estate that the university isn't paying any property taxes on -- the only thing to worry about is not getting caught! As far as dumpster diving for food, ridiculous amounts of perfectly edible food get thrown away, only to rot and contribute to pollution. What this girl was doing --squatting around her college, dumpster diving, and rejecting capitalist norms of success -- hardly sounds that crazy to me. And why was the trauma associated with witnessing extreme poverty and steep social inequality never addressed? To me, this sounds a lot more like a case of PTSD than schizophrenia.
