The appropriate question is: can such an approach, in a wildly fractured series of data sets, overlook 600 people?
Of course, maybe the genes leading to blindness and schizophrenia together also lead to some other defect that results in miscarriage or some other kind of early death.
Congenital blindness is likely diagnosed with near 100% certainty in early childhood. It's easy to spot. The same is very much NOT true of mental health problems. Schisophrenics are diagnosed, almost always, when their condition manifests in such a way to interfere with their life (or someone else's) to the extent that the doctors get called in. There are widely assumed to be LOTS of undiagnosed mental health cases in society, simply because the sufferers live in situations where their disorder can be managed (or suppressed!) in an ad hoc way.
Now, the question becomes: are blind people more likely to be living in a circumstance where their mental health troubles are more easily managed/ignored/suppressed without the involvement of doctors who would otherwise diagnose schizophrenia? That seems not at all unlikely to me.
And frankly: this kind of confounded measurement strikes me as MUCH MORE likely than a heretofore unrecognized link between vision and schizophrenia. Significant results require significant proof, and I don't think this is it.
Could you explain your thinking to me? I'd think that people with one serious condition would me much more likely to have a second serious condition diagnosed, purely because of increased attention from medical professionals. That's certainly been my experience.
So let's say someone is blind, and they come in. They will almost certainly be more likely to receive attention than someone who is not. But how their presenting disorganized thoughts, etc. are described is likely to be different given their history of blindness, especially if they had a lifetime history of associated cognitive deficits or issues.
It's also the case that overlapping presence of two pathologies is not necessarily same as them disjointly. So blindness etiological factors + psychosis etiological factors may not equal schizophrenia with blindness, but rather a more severe cognitive and/or physical disorder that receives an entirely different diagnosis. This latter scenario isn't necessarily a measurement issue, but it could be construed that way.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of people with mental illness can tell something is wrong with them because they can compare themselves to others. It's much harder for a blind person to do that because they don't get a lot of the information most people get passively by simply being near other humans.
I have (untreated) asthma, but nobody ever explained to me what having asthma means. I was well into my adulthood before I found out that it is not normal to have difficulty breathing hours and sometimes days after simple aerobic activities. And I didn't even have the issue that I couldn't see that other people didn't have this issue. I just thought that this was normal and they were better trained.
Does that apply to blindness at birth, though? I mean, you don't get continuing "treatment" or checkups for blindness, right? (At least, no more than a sighted person would go in for a yearly eye exam.) Obviously there are unique needs a blind person has to function in society, but it's not like something like cancer or a mental illness where you need to follow up and have continuing care and treatment for many years, possibly the rest of your life. For birth blindness, it's basically "yep, kid's blind; need to adapt to that", and that's it from the standpoint of medical care, no?
In the kind of first principles sense you are thinking of, sure, proof is proof. But in the real world the burden of proof for an epidemiological headline like this absolutely is much higher, in the practical sense of "should I believe this bullshit or is there a mistake somewhere?"
For example, let's say someone inherits (genetically or environmentally) etiologic factors for psychosis and blindness. It's possible that whatever these factors are, they are severe enough to have widespread enough effects that the person no longer receives a psychosis diagnosis, but instead some other diagnostic label that's more comprehensive in nature.
Schizophrenia is really just a label for a semi-heterogeneous set of pathologies that might be labeled something else. I'm not saying that these problems don't exist, just that how they are perceived and described might vary a bit from scenario to scenario (this is one of the main impetuses for DSM-III and later actually). So someone with one pathology might receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, someone else, bipolar disorder, and yet someone else developmental disorder NEC/NOS.
It's entirely possible that if there is a negative correlation, it's because one reflects some preventative factors for the other, or something like that, but it's also possible that whatever causes the conjoint presence of the etiologies is catastrophic, leading to death, like you suggest, or the need for some entirely different label.
There are many potential causes of being born blind, not all of them genetic.
So in this case, the category is being both born blind and developing schizophrenia. The odds of a single person being in this category are 2/1M, and the odds of a person not being in the category are 999998/1M. The expression for never observing a person in the category for a population of 300M is ((10^6-2)/(10^6))^(300x10^6). Wolfram Alpha says this is equal to 2.6x10^-261.
It is very unlikely that the two distributions for blindness and schizophrenia are independent!
To see this, observe that the number of heads follows a binomial distribution with n = 311 million and p = 2⋅10⁻⁶. This can be well approximated¹ by a normal distribution with mean μ = np = 622 and standard deviation σ = Sqrt[np(1 - p)] = 25.
99.7% of the time², when you sample from this distribution, the sampled value will be within 3 standard deviations of the mean, i.e., between μ - 3σ = 547 and μ + 3σ = 697. Results further from the mean are more unlikely. For example, seeing a value more than 7 standard deviations from the mean (i.e., less than 447 or more than 797) is about a 1 in 2 trillion event³. Since 0 is about 25 standard deviations from the mean, the probability of seeing 0 heads is on the order of 10⁻¹³⁸.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2021801/conditions-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule
[3] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/table-of-normal-tail-probabil...
Tangent: there is no such thing. You can weight a die, you cannot weight a coin.
Intuitively this should make sense because even if you made one side of the coin from lead and the other from balsa wood, all you are doing is changing the center of gravity of the coin. The coin spins about its center of gravity, not the geometric center of the coin, so this makes no difference.
You absolutely can manufacture unfair coins either using a two surfaced approach (like a weak magnetic field acting on a magnetized coin) but even a one surfaced approach is possible if you make use of carvings on the surface of the coin to get a favorable result from air resistence - lastly you can even achieve it through density, if one side of a coin is significantly more dense then the other then it will tend to land face down - you can play with this a bit by trying to flip a weighted cylinder and observing the landing pattern - I might suggest taking a coin roll (like you get in a bank) and gluing some coins into one end of it - then try and flip it in the air so it lands coin-side up.
It is, however, very hard to bias a coin significantly without skewing the dimensions or having clear alterations visible on the coin.
https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-pro...
Aka, you need to pick a threshold for bias that’s interesting before designing the experiment. A casino might care a great deal about say 0.5% bias which would take a lot of trials to detect.
Interesting results, I thought they'd be more skewed.
Not sure what your point is here. Yes, that is the meaning that is being discussed. You understood it yourself. Grandparent understood it as well. What value do you feel bringing up this point brings to the debate?
> like a weak magnetic field acting on a magnetized coin
Probably not. The field will act through the other face of the coin as well. The coin is pulled towards the magnetic surface, but it doesn't alter the revolution of the coin. If the field is sufficiently weak to not pass through the coin then it wouldn't have any impact on the other side either.
The exception would possibly be mu metal or something else that prevents the magentic field from acting on one face entirely, in combination with a strong magnetic field, and I'm still going to lean towards "probably wouldn't work". It would still intermittently pull the entire coin towards the surface, it's not clear that it would counter the rotation of the coin itself.
> even a one surfaced approach is possible if you make use of carvings on the surface of the coin to get a favorable result from air resistence
No, because air resistance is acting on both sides of the coin at once. The air resistance is a constant A+B, not A,B,A,B.
> lastly you can even achieve it through density
No, this is the entire point of the article. The coin doesn't revolve around its geometric center, it revolves around its center of gravity. By changing the density of one side (balsa wood and lead, as I said) you change the center of gravity but the coin itself has the same rate of revolution.
Considering you were the grandparent, I guess that should be somewhat reassuring.
FWIW, I interpreted your use as rigid in the same manner as the GP (of this post).
As far as I’m concerned a electronic bistable generator that is biased through manipulation is effectively a “weighted coin”.. those exist.. and are counter to your claim unless you restrict “weighted coin” to the completely literal.
God no, GP here means the contextual grandparent of the topic, as it always does. GP means the person I responded to. Why in the world would I respond to myself just because "GP"?
If you haven't read the rules, you need to be giving the most gracious reading of the comment chain here. Pretty obvious what the implication was. Try reading again.
> As far as I’m concerned a electronic bistable generator that is biased through manipulation is effectively a “weighted coin”
Oh cool you're trying to impose a change of topic from the ability to literally bias a coin when a normal person flips it randomly, into telling me to defeat... all attempts of people manipulating all RNGs ever?
Super weird angle for a discussion about flipping coins. Not really interesting.
In fact, most methods of coin toss will be influenced by an unbalanced coin in some way. The paper only demonstrates that if you flip a coin with a certain precisely specified method (and catch it midair) - can you be reasonably assured a weighted coin will be unbiased.
See their own referenced book Jaynes, 1996 pp 1003-1007, which I think gives a much clearer explanation of the possibilities.
Note that the NFL for instance does not catch the coin, so there's at least a real world where a coin could be biased.
The important part of that paper is this:
"Examples of how others have flipped and tossed coins show the students how essential it is to carefully describe the experimental process." not just the one detail about angular momentum and CoG.
http://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf
PS: Of note they where detecting bias in the range of 1% that’s difficult to detect by hand.
It's not even clear that's a real bias or just random noise, or an anomaly of their testing setup.
Yes but you don't need such a coin. You can use a perfect coin and consider flipping it many times.
[0] Of course I didn't do any statistical analysis or a huge number of trials for this to really tell if I was able to do it but it felt pretty consistent.
(For best results, make the styrofoam thick relatively to the lead, and/or attach extra aerodynamic surfaces :).)
So how many blind people were evaluated for schizophrenia?
This might actually be a lower percentage than for normal-seeing persons. People are less experienced with the behavior of blind people, so it's harder for surrounding people (and probable even for the blind themselves) to recognize it and push people to go get diagnosed.
Note: the above figure comes from the normal approximation to the binomial, which loses accuracy towards the tails. The exact probability of seeing 0 heads is (1 - p)^n = (1 - 2⋅10⁻⁶)^(311⋅10⁶) ≈ 10⁻²⁷⁰ [1].
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+2+*+10%5E-6%29%...
You can divide the population up into into 600 groups with 500000 people in them, and each of those has a 36% chance of not ever hitting.
So seeing no cases is like flipping a 36% coin 600 times and hitting 600 times.
(1 - 2e-6)^(3e6) ≈ 0.002
So about 0.2%. Still highly unlikely but orders of magnitude more likely than what your normal distribution-detour gave.
Using the binomial directly is a good way to get the probability of 0 heads. Note, though, that the U.S. population is in the neighborhood of 300 million, not 3 million (as you seem to have used).
(1 - 2⋅10⁻⁶)^(3⋅10⁸) ≈ 10⁻²⁶¹
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+2+*+10%5E-6%29%...
Subject: elementary math error in journal article
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/ was linked to and discussed today from Hacker News (a popular discussion board for software engineers) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307445.
In the ensuing discussion a poster noticed that the journal article contains an elementary math error:
"if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.02% or 2 out of every 10,000."
0.72% * 0.03% is actually .0002% or 2 out of every 1,000,000.
Despite the article being several years old, I thought you might want to know.
-harryh
I was unaware that they do at least have the implied 620 figure for the entire US correct, so there is hope that this is just a localised typo.
I can't get over how stunningly-similar this is to the infamous Verizonmath!
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.0015...
Still it should definitely be corrected as the 2 out of 10,000 is a value that sticks in the mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_point
edit: My bad. Correct character, incorrect description. It is indeed "ten thousand".
Unicode U+2031 ‱ is actually the per ten thousand sign (check its character name).
Unicode U+2030 ‰ is the per thousand (or "per mille") sign.
But still.
Percentage calculations being off by 2 zeros I would say is one of the most common mistakes I saw in, e.g. statistics exams.
0.72 x 0.03, which is indeed 0.02
0.72% expressed as a decimal is 0.0072. 0.03% expressed as a decimal is 0.0003. 0.0072 x 0.0003 = 0.000002. Expressed back as a percentage, that's 0.0002%.
No. 0.0072 x 0.0003 = 0.00000216 ~= 0.000002 = 0.0002%
0.72% ⋅ 0.03%
= 0.72 ⋅ 10⁻² ⋅ 0.03 ⋅ 10⁻²
= 7.2 ⋅ 10⁻³ ⋅ 3 ⋅ 10⁻⁴
= 7.2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 10⁻³ ⋅ 10⁻⁴
= 21.6 ⋅ 10⁻⁷
= 2.16 ⋅ 10⁻⁶
≈ 2 in 1 millionThe most recent study the article sites (Morgan et. al, 2018) states that out of 468k people in the population "1870 children developed schizophrenia (0.4%) while 9120 developed a psychotic illness (1.9%). None of the 66 children with cortical blindness developed schizophrenia or psychotic illness."
If we don't assume there is a relationship between schizophrenia and cortical blindness, it's not surprising that none of the 66 people who had cortical blindness developed schizophrenia. Simple binomial approximation will yield a 77% (0.996^66) probability. Am I missing something?
Also I find the difference in prevalence rates of schizophrenia of 0.4% in the Morgan et al. paper vs 0.72% in McGrath et al. 2008 odd.
Morgan et al. 2018: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09209...!
It explains the difference in prevalence rates: "While median lifetime morbid risk for schizophrenia is estimated to be 0.72% (Saha et al., 2005), many of our young cohort had still not passed through the window for schizophrenia onset."
However, their claim for a relationship is indeed very weak: "In our data, this dropped to 0.2% for congenital or early peripheral blindness and was zero for congenital or early cortical blindness [0 cases out of 66]. Our data further suggest that the protection offered by cortical blindness may extend to a broader range of psychotic disorders and that risk of psychosis may effectively be reduced to zero."
It's ironic that they start the discussion stating "The results from this whole-population cohort, although possibly underpowered, lend confidence to findings from smaller case studies". Yes, it is underpowered, and I'm surprised it was published.
Whether or not hypothesis testing in registry data is justifiable was once the topic of a legendary fight in my graduate department during someone's defense.
I mean if we’re evaluating the claim that no blind people got schizophrenia then sure. But the claim is that blind people don’t get schizophrenia, which is different. The population for this claim is not “all the humans alive” but rather “all potential humans” (which is not possible to sample).
Is this really true? I would've imagined it to be hearing, though tbh I'm unsure how one would begin to approach measuring them in isolation.
The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and 75-150 million rods (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina). There's a bit of crazy data compression that goes in to this, but the amount of information to process from the eyes is several orders of magnitude greater than from the years.
> The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and 75-150 million rods (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina). There's a bit of crazy data compression that goes in to this, but the amount of information to process from the eyes is several orders of magnitude greater than from the years.
While you're technically correct, that's not the whole story.
There is a substantial amount of image processing that happens in the eye (I suppose it's possible that's true of the ear as well; we know much less about hearing than sight). I'm not familiar with all the research in the area, so I can't throw out numbers, but you can't just compare numbers of raw sensors meaningfully.
However, the statement was:
> There is more brain input from vision than any other input possible
I guess we could compare the nerves that lead from the sense organs. Again from wikipedia:
> Each human optic nerve contains between 770,000 and 1.7 million nerve fibers
> In humans, there are on average 30,000 nerve fibers within the cochlear nerve
so again, at least an order of magnitude more nerve connections from the sense organs to the brain. I think this backs up the original statement.
Interestingly the number of nerve connections from the cochlear are greater than the number of raw sensory inputs, but the eye is quite the opposite. I know the input to the brain is more of a differential coding between colours than raw data from the cells.
Why not? It's certainly not definitive, but assuming a correlation between number of sensors and dataflow is certainly a reasonable starting point. If you really want to suggest the number of raw sensors is meaningless with regard to data volume, that seems like a much bolder claim. Especially when, as here, it's a 4-5 order of magnitude difference.
Just from a signal processing perspective, sound is a 1D data type, though we do have stereo sound and can localize sounds, so that's some additional processing there I suppose. There's also frequencies involved. Image processing is typically more demanding than audio from what I understand with computational things, images being 2D, or 3D sources. This is a pretty interesting exploration relative sensory input load.
Mental breaks from reality are increasingly common as society increasingly condones and encourages escaping reality in many ways, including recreational drug use, television and video game addictions, and even physical mutilation.
Yet this isn't happening with those who were born with one less way to perceive reality. Perhaps it's because those born blind have a greater and stronger need to hold fast to reality, themselves not being able to benefit from it nearly as much as everyone around them and as much as nature would have it.
Schizophrenia rates have declined significantly over the past century, and have been stable over the past 20 years. If anything, the data better supports the opposite story - that as societies develop more sophisticated ways of altering conscious experience, people are less likely to be schizophrenic.
But more soberly, I'd say there's probably no link at all, and that both narratives just reflect a misunderstanding of the pathology of schizophrenia.
https://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/scz/sb-time.html https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-trends-in-GP-record...
Going further than misdiagnosis, how many congenitally blind people are even tested for schizophrenia? Maybe lack of visual hallucinations make it less likely someone would get to the point of a test at all?
(I am not a psychologist!)
Visual hallucinations are not a hard criterion for diagnosing schizophrenia. They do occur, but the symptoms are more about delusions, disorganised thinking and catatonic symptoms. IIRC hallucinations are more often auditory, like hearing voices.
Think of it as a continuous spectrum from the idealized normal person (the center of a bell curve) to the person having significant problems living a normal, fulfilling life. The eccentric personality is somewhere in between.
This is all about definitions. The ICD-10 and similar categorizations essentially work by listing a number of symptons and a minimum count of symptoms a patient has to have to be diagnosed according to this definition. They don't make any assumptions about disorders existing per se.
I think it's far more acceptable for us to "mishear" something and think nothing of it. The seeing also have the backup sense, sight to verify much of what we hear.
"I heard the sound of an elephant stomping around in my living room."
This statement made by a seeing person could be made by nobody thinking much of it. I wouldn't immediately ask if they actually thought an elephant were in the living room at the time.
The same statement made by a (blind) schizophrenic person could have implied that the person actually believed there was an elephant in the living room, but the clinician might have missed the significance and not asked follow up questions.
A bit of a contrived example, but you get the gist.
To a seeing person it might
It’s not like screening people for spectrum or personality disorders.
Note, my sample size is far too small to draw universal conclusions about schizophrenic.
Since blind people need to rely on others a lot more than people with sight, I think it would be even harder for them to avoid medical authorities than for other schizophrenics. For what it's worth, the schizophrenics I knew personally were not averse to seeking help for their condition, but were very distressed by side effects from medication (understandably!)
There's a strong cultural component to how schizophrenia manifests. Violent, paranoid thoughts are more common in societies like the United States. The extent to which their experiences can fit into a positive cultural narrative partly dictates their quality of life. The U.S. is exceedingly hostile in that regard. You're likely better off in a society where hearing voices is considered a gift from the gods, or where perceiving odd but intriguing cause+effect relationships suggests you can sense magic.
Googling will show similar reporting in the literature over several decades. I don't think I've seen any contradictory research, though that's not surprising as this is just an interesting observation; there aren't any sophisticated, concrete explanatory models to critique--individualist vs collectivist dichotomy seems intuitive but not concrete on its own. Rather the focus seems to be on pragmatic therapy. It's noteworthy nonetheless, particularly as a reflection of American society, and of how culture informs pathology, a point usually made regarding more touchy-feely mental health issues and thus lacking punch.
You did however get the number of people who should have it in the US correct at roughly 620 cases if the two conditions are independent. Although that only includes the reported population numbers, as a better population estimate to account for people who won't answer the census is more like 340 million. This portion of the population that doesn't answer the census could easily be hiding all 670 potential cases because they also don't tend to trust doctors and would never be diagnosed.
I'm not saying that this is a guaranteed scenario, but schizophrenia does have a genetic component, so it is possible that we simply haven't seen the cases in the general population because their families have hidden the affected family members. The "closet" syndrome when it comes to mentally ill family members is well documented, and some groups have even been known to hide family members with physical disabilities such as blindness or deafness. We believe this is happening less today, but that's difficult to prove and may simply be our way of coping with the fact that we will never be able to help people trapped in that situation.
PS: That’s a direct quote from page 2 of the link. It’s got some other interesting information about this topic you’re interested.
Schizophrenia, like almost all diagnosed psychological disorders, is called a diagnosis, but is effectively a punishment. Psychiatrists feel sorry for blind patients and refuse to apply this punishment to them, for the same reason they wouldn't punish them for performing a little worse at basketball.
In what part of the world would you rather be sick and undiagnosed than have your illness acknowledged?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/08/iowa-g...
Typical treatments like Haldol, Thorazine, and Depakote have a blunting and depressive effect on the entire central nervous system. Treatments like shock therapy, cause severe memory loss and permanent brain damage.
These "treatments" are often paired with coercion, involuntary injections, confinement in psych wards, and court orders.
Many times LE will bring a civilian to a psych ward as a secondary or additional option to charging them with a crime. It's often seen as an additional tool in creating orderly communities, disciplining individuals that get out of line, and overall exerting control on society and free thought and action. Once a patient is admitted or diagnosed, they are strongly incentivized to align themselves and their behaviors to the values and expectations of the institutions and people that brought them there and control their release and treatment plans.
Even if schizophrenia had a biological signature it wouldn't be used in practice because they WANT the ambiguity and discretion to classify and medicate patients as they see fit.
The parent is sensationalizing a good bit, but I agree with his overal point: treatment of schizphrenics -- and other "untouchables" syndromes -- is very poor.
Antipsychotics are hell. Full stop. Even for next-generation pharmaceuticals. Risperidone took away the delusions, and every other faucet of myself that made me human. Can it improve quality of life? Yes, it can. If the case is severe enough that the patient is endangering themselves or others (through violence or neglect), antipsychotics can sedate their impulses and delusions.
I would describe it as a short-term (if ceased within a reasonable timeframe) chemical lobotomy. No hyperbole.
I was lucky that I'm fairly educated, quick of mind, and primarily presented with negative symptoms (catatonic subset). Delusions and psychosis are transient, and I'm able to reflect on them, identify when they pop up, and not act on them.
For someone that is in a near-constant state of psychosis, antipsychotics are really al that can be done, but I personally would rather be dead, than a husk. If I were still on them, I probably wouldn't believe this because the drugs would take away some of my agency.
I'm now on a hefty dosage of a certain dopamine agonist, and it has improved my quality of life immensely. There are stil bugs, and psychosis and delusion are much more common now, but I have a good grasp on them and wouldn't want to to back to being a shel of a human.
It's dehumanizing and violates my dignity.
Haldol, Thorazine, and Depakote are older but still widely used, even for disorders like bipolar. Even atypical antipsychotics are still life-changing, personality altering, potentially diabetes-inducing heavy handed tools. You yourself admit the side effects are horrible. It's far from FUD. Be glad your family member is getting appropriate treatment.
This morning in my country an allegedly deranged 41-year old man stabbed a 16-year old girl to death. The media reports that he underwent psychiatric treatment in 2018. I will take the liberty of translating roughly one of his facebook posts to show you some "abnormal or undesirable" thought patterns, as you call them, and why appropriate treatment is necessary.
> Today when they tell me that they have checked the first floor check above us, the apartment is the last name P., first name I.D., if the commanders report that they did not pass the check, the team that went into the apartment and they pretend to do some kind of check or what do I know supervision, let alone protecting us officials, they have an announcement after the order has been issued exactly as long as they have to scram out of the apartment as our commanders give them. We are the dead guard, then there is no such thing as a stop, I stopped, who goes, the password, the response, the Praetorians. The dead guard shoots, slaughters and then only checks when it is resolved that the protected natural persons are safe near the action and only then reports to the proper authorities.
https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/osumnjiceni-za-ubojstvo-...
2) you can't drive. There's ways around it, but they involve extra courses and costs.
3) There's many things you can't do. From getting a security clearance to working in the police force, certain legal professions, certain medical professions ...
4) as a kid, let's not go into just HOW bad psychological treatment is.
5) medications against this are basically drugs. They're strong sedatives that don't help, except by sedating you in the moment.
6) those medications have side effects. Like all sedatives they can kill you, cause sleep problems, depression, hallucinations, "freezing" (weakness, up to total inability to move), tremors/shakes, eating problems. AND a common and interesting one: you don't consider the long-term consequences of your actions under the influence of these drugs, up to total unscrupulousness. Which brings us back to problem no. 1.
7) worse, if you go over the recommended dosage and duration the side effects generally become permanent. Eventually what happens is what people call "zombification". Summer Glau (or whoever ...) could come to your bedroom and offer absolute "anything goes" and you would not be able to lift a finger. Those recommended doses and duration are essentially nothing (enough for a mild high at best), and somewhere between hours and weeks depending on the exact drug.
8) EVERY psychiatrist and EVERY institution does not just go over those limits, they exceed them by years, factor of 10, "for lack of alternative". (meaning the alternative is having people watch those patients, much more expensive)
8) I guarantee the patient will be the one blamed for it, not the drugs, not the science itself (that clinical psychology has no answers for problems other than sedation), and not the nurses/docters that exceed the recommended dose by a factor 100.
Is this a thing? People write numbers like that?
edit: somehow they did get the expected number in the US right, but they seem to have flubbed the comparison to other conditions.
That changes the math significantly.
if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.02% or 2 out of every 10,000. Although this is a low prevalence rate, it is higher than the rates for childhood-onset schizophrenia (Remschmidt and Theisen, 2005), and many other well-known medical conditions (e.g., Hodgkin's lymphoma, Prader Willi syndrome, Rett's Syndome). Based on this estimated prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/
That does do rule out misdiagnosis etc, but it does seem to support a correlation.