Live Q&A Ep.2 w/ nednednerB
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ย. 2024
- Alongside answering a few questions, I describe some of my history as an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia.
If you wish to ask a question anonymously, you can use my contact form on my website, which does NOT require you to enter your email address. You can do so if you wish to receive a reply. nednednerb.com...
I discuss some of the warning signs and experiences of coming to know I was schizophrenic, and I discuss some of my psychotic episodes and times of hospitalization.
Great chance for getting off the cuff spontaneity and finding out more about your uncanny host nednednerB!
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thank you a lot for the videos and content ned, they help me and give insight in my schizo affective.been following you for years, also i wish u a happy newyear
Happy new year to you, too! Thanks for tuning in and for the feedback. Glad to contribute to your insight. That's the biggest reason I do this, all in all.
The hardest part isn’t being right. It’s knowing you are. We study all day everyday.
Thank you for explaining this to others...
Glad it was helpful!
Love you Ned, thank you...
You are welcome.
Do you think that the difficulty people seem to have with accepting that there's something wrong with them or agreeing with their diagnosis is a product of just how the illness presents, or do you think if society had a different conception or a better understanding of the illness that people, as they're developing it, might have an easier time adjusting to and accepting that there's a problem, and might be able to reach a place of insight like you have at a much earlier point in the course of their illness/life? Could also just be that a person would need to be medicated to get to the place of insight, and get distance from how much psychosis can suck a person in and make their belief system wonky and have such fixed delusions, and...I suppose maybe if it were less 'taboo' for lack of a better word, or maybe less shameful or not talked about for people to take psych meds, then they'd be able to stick with the meds long enough to get that insight sooner. I have bipolar and psychotic featurers that do not coincide with mood episodes at times (I think I've had the schizoaffective label at some point tentatively slapped on me, but bipolar with psychotic features matches with my functional level or something better.), and I remember having hallucinations when I was young, and even then I sort of had a sense of 'okay, that's not a thing that can be real. my brain had to have made that voice/thing/whatever up'. I do have psychotic symptoms that sort of trick me sometimes. Like I'll hallucinate the sound of my boss talking bad about me through the wall into the next room at work...except my boss isn't even there. So, I can talk myself out of that, even though the paranoid bad feeling I get from hearing that stuff is still affecting me at the time. I am just curious why I've never lost insight despite however severe my psychosis gets, and it's gotten quite severe in a couple of cases (not for long though). My only guess is that being someone who did a degree in analytic philosophy and a very sort of rational, reason-based thinker, combined with my early curiosity and years of research on mental health helped me skip losing insight. That and meds, I suppose. I did have a tendency to go off them in the early years of my bipolar diagnosis. Guess it's all a combination of things.
I'm rambling. Great video nednednerb!
Some fine rambling, Davida!
Thanks for your insightful questions and comments. I also did a degree with a major in philosophy! My studies were more general than analytic topics; however, investigating truth tables and centering the principles of charity and of scientific rationality certainly aided me to confirm rather than deny "I had schizophrenia". Likewise with you, I noticed in my own experience "symptoms" at a young age, and to this day I also have the uncanny apperception of my bosses or acquaintances talking about me in the room outside me. Mostly I can also discount it: it does just keep happening though, medicated or not.
Regarding your questions, I already had a plan to make a video discussing "hope" and I will also make it about "insight" and "accepting a problem exists", because that is a likely good step toward accepting treatment and encouraging healthy behaviour. Yes, absolutely, I think stigma around mental illness makes people feel having a mental health experience is taboo, same having a family member with mental health experience is treated as taboo, and same knowing a new person to you has a mental health experience is regarded as taboo. So there are problems which get effectively suppressed and hidden from discussion and view, and therefore symptoms gain more autonomy and internal consistency. It takes an >increase of social connection to break down delusional fixation, >not less.
I realize this may seem a novel and far reaching way to conceive of a role for "social psychiatry." Indeed, I don't think my success would be possible if I didn't see this: medication alone is not enough to truly govern behaviour or change the mind, even while it certainly can subdue hallucinations and some of the intensity of symptoms.
Actually, a small number of people are basically equipped to listen to and talk with a psychotic person. Indeed, it can be scary. Yes, I think if stigma were reduced and knowledge were increased, more people could handle and therefore assist when they (inevitably) encounter a person with strange mental health experiences.
Together, I think that medication, nutrition, exercise, meaningful occupation, and social connection should simultaneously be addressed, while outside the individual, social knowledge must grow in place of stigma. Then there would be a lot more insight at an earlier age for everyone involved. The "genetic" and "sociological" causes of psychological distress may never totally disappear, but to say knowledge in communities cannot actually advance is a self- and group-limiting non-psychotic delusion. I mean by that: we can grow together, indeed we must be able to, and as a view I judge it to be restrictive, pessimistic, and dangerously unrealistic. There could be no cultural or technological advance if "change of worldview" and "level of knowledge" were simply fixed. We're not robots (some of us), we will get psychotic features (some of us), and we can learn to help out a friend or a family member (I'm saying pretty much all of us).
I look forward to healing together and for society to grow!
nednednerB the Schizophrenic That’s funny that you, too, did a philosophy degree, and that you hallucinate your boss trash talking you at work too. I get that on meds as well. I have little breakthrough psychotic symptoms fairly often. Especially if I’m not good about getting enough sleep. Yesterday at work, for instance I was hearing quiet voices (couldn’t understand what they were saying, and only tripped me up on my lunch break when I kept thinking random strangers and homeless people were talking to me or calling out to me, but it was fine. Just slightly weird. But my normal level of weirdness. I didn’t actually think the random people were talking to me after I sort of looked around and registered there was no one actually trying to get my attention.), or I’ll hear music at times, or certain sounds related to whatever job I have (when I was a nurse’s aid at a nursing home I’d hear the ‘call bell’ dinging sound for days at a time often times, whether I was at work or not, and when I worked in an office that had a clock with a digital chime song I’d have days or hours when I’d hear the clock’s chime song on a weird looping repeat endlessly. Slightly annoying... Thankfully never very loud though as long as I take my antipsychotic properly).
I really like and appreciate and by and large agree with your answer/response to my question and ramblings. Medication is definitely important, and the stigma that exists about taking psych meds, for yourself, a friend, a family member or someone you know is really needless, and I’d like to think we can progress past that unfortunate societal sense of mental health problems as being taboo and something not to be talked about or ‘admitted to’ to anyone. I took an Abnormal Psychology course in college, which was a nice crash course in understanding at least the basics of what challenges people face having many of the more common mental illnesses. In canada is there any sort of mental health coverage in school at a non university level? I know I didn’t get any sort of psychology or mental health-related lessons in grade school or high school, and if I hadn’t had an interest in psychology I wouldn’t have had anything but my own curiosity and the internet (nearly everyone has the internet, but I’m not sure loads of people are particularly curious). I agree that societally we can grow together. We can teach young people about emotional intelligence and how to express and talk about how they feel and what they experience and how to listen empathetically and how to be non-judgmental toward someone’s struggles even if they’re not your own and may seem strange or foreign at first. You’re probably right that at the moment there’s only a small contingent of people who have the necessary toolkit or personality or communication skills to listen and communicate with someone in an acute psychotic state. I don’t think I’m perfect at it by any means, and in a lot of ways I think I run up against some at this point very outmoded situations and problems that are specific to folks who have been institutionalised for years or decades with almost no therapy, with extremely limited social support apart from interaction with me, my coworkers when they bother to actually talk to the residents at my work (sadly, that’s not often), and a 15-30 minute conversation with their psychiatrist every 1-3 months. I’ve sat in on these appointments and I’ve seen fully qualified psychiatrists utterly flummoxed and bewildered when faced with a resident who’s psychosis is presenting in a seemingly bizarre, challenging, highly-delusional, way, or speaks in odd terms or has a unique and difficult to crack way of communicating verbally. The psychiatrists tend to just look past their actual patient and ask accompanying staff (i.e. Me) what the patient’s needs are...so hm, staff may well be the only sort of communicational lifeline for those guys and we do not really have a setup that allows us to support/plan/implement much in the way of nutrition, or exercise (we do try, but it’s not a roaring success, let’s just say that), and meaningful occupation is....super lofty seeming for them in that setting with just one or two support staff and no training or integration with any sort of occupational community-based or social things to try and support the guys in utilising to actually find and pursue meaningful occupation, and social connection outside the group-home (even in the group home residents don’t tend to talk to one another. They really seem to just have staff.). I love working with people with psychosis (and other problems, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, bipolar, depression, etc), and I am able to sort of meet someone where they are and am someone who has the patience and acceptingness (is that a word?)/openness to take in whatever someone is willing to share of their world, and try to piece together how to understand their ‘language’ and their ‘world’ and be able to reach them there where they are, and speak to them in a way that’s hopefully meaningful to them, and not just me rejecting or refuting their belief system or writing off their ideas and concerns due to them ‘not making actual sense’, etc. It definitely is a skill to speak with someone in acute psychosis. And I do get screamed at and cursed and and at times threatened verbally. We don’t tolerate physical violence at all in my workplace (if someone assaults anyone, they’re immediately evicted. Which does happen, and has happened twice since I started there in mid 2019). Getting screamed at is obviously doesn’t feel great, and in particular, I find it challenging as a female to struggle with how individuals who have fixed delusions about women (e.g. all women are witches, or believing that I’m trying to seduce them into cheating on their wife (not a real wife, a delusion-sourced ‘wife’, or that women are spies...there are kind of a bunch I’m running up against with different guys. That’s a very new challenge for me and I have no idea how to navigate it other than to be kind, and polite, and steer away from triggering people with my ‘womanness’ (easier said than done...). But I can usually handle the yelling with no problems and am pretty good at de-escalating or just walking away or asking someone who’s screaming at me to come back when they calm down, and then moving to a different room. In that setting it’s generally not too hard to end a shouting match just by removing the person being shouted at from the person doing the shouting. Working as someone who tries to help get people with first-break psychosis, or homeless people struggling with psychosis into a formal treatment setting or something seems like it would be a lot harder in terms of trying to actually get someone who’s psychotic to ‘cooperate’. I’m not entirely sure what my point is. But yeah, it is a rare thing to be able to talk to someone who’s psychotic, especially if they’re emotionally distressed or having a particularly hard time. I hope I will get better at it with time. And I hope that as a society we will move toward ditching the whole ‘mental illness is taboo’ situation we’re a bit stuck in now, and that generations to come will live in a world where it’s okay to say you have a mental health challenge, and to talk about it, and have the language, understanding, and skills to really communicate meaningfully about it, and where people will be more likely to readily get on board with treatment and realise they’re sick, and accept that reality as one that happens, that’s not shameful, or anyone’s fault, and that it’s okay and beneficial in terms of quality of life, to get treatment and to stick with it.