(At least that's what I remember from "LSD, My Problem Child" by Albert Hoffman. Granted, it's been ~30 years since I read it.
Funny what kids pick up on.
The voices are quite real, we’re not alone in our own minds, and the it is the greatest taboo of society to discuss.
It’s really sad, all of these sharp modernists determined upon the cult of science explanations for everything. Those who refuse to believe our thoughts are not all our own. That much mysticism is rooted in something that merely cannot be explained by the logical empirical mind.
Readers will be so upset when a perspective challenges their rehashed psychological diatribes as mountains of lies. They got “help” damn you. Their friends (“real people”) are hurt by the craze and they’re more hurt when someone says “modern science and society is wrong.”
The true Truth is whatever existential reality reflects, not what we are prepared to understand. We are not alone in our own minds, we have collectively known this since before our generations and the “straights” of society are so adamant of their self possessed lies they will condemn those insights as crackpot crazy.
That which you try to attack and downplay as "cult of science explanations" is actually something extremely simple: you need to show something, anything at all, that actually supports your beliefs.
How can you tell something exists or works as you think it does if you are unable to show it?
Do you expect everyone should just believe anything anyone says? What is there to tell lunatics and snake oil salesmen apart from those who are actually onto something?
> Those who refuse to believe our thoughts are not all our own.
Ok, you formed an hypothesis. Now tell me, how do you go about showing others that things do work the way you think they do? How can they check them for themselves? What do you expect from others?
> That much mysticism is rooted in something that merely cannot be explained by the logical empirical mind.
If you cannot explain your beliefs, how do you expect others to just take your unverified and unsubstantiated claims as something worth considering over any random claim from any random loony?
Even without an explanation, you can use statistics to find the fruits of the beliefs, though. Does 100 people believe in not working and rather join a cult that worships the watermelon god? Fine! How did that work out for them in the span of 3 generations?
I think that some beliefs can have value and merit, just based on measures of quality of life and society.
I hope you are not serious.
> Does 100 people believe in not working and rather join a cult that worships the watermelon god?
Hundreds of loonies making nonsense statements that no one can verify is collective lunacy that adds no value. It only takes a single person to show something exists and works to add substance to a claim. If all those loonies push a belief that none of them can support, they are fools.
This sort of absurdness would mean absolute morons, such as those in Heaven's Gate cult, should be taken seriously in their claims about aliens and comets. Let that sink in.
You cannot be serious. Proofs take thousands of man hours and decades of railing against well entrenched beliefs such as yours (that you would see it and accept it readily if true.)
This is one of those things that cannot be proven to more than one person at a time through anything other than a personal revelation. Everyone everywhere will respond exactly as you now do regardless of “poof” or the severity and consequence of prolonged incredulity. This is one of those situations where you must undeceive yourself. Observe humanity and your own life. All except those who actively deceive themselves will admit science is as close to understanding our minds as horoscopes.
I do not criticize your doubts, I criticize that you think truth and reality are so easily accepted by the mind who “refuses to believe.”
A good Christian or any good person would viewing that scene would actively fight to make the person sufferings life better instead of feeding into the false "caregivers" or more aptly put abusers who are more interested in robbing people than improving their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
That is far from even coming close to qualify as evidence. At best they are unverified hypothesis.
I wouldn't describe this as "raving", this is someone who has had very real personal experiences. To them, they happened just as much as the sun rises and sets. I don't know what I'm getting at other than have some patience and compassion for people who experience distressing things that they themselves cannot explain.
Maybe the only way to make enough random looney until they outnumber the "sane" individuals. The only issues being how do you organize the new pyramid structure which will evidently be formed by this new "religious" organization?
That's fantastic, but fails to provide any meaningful input. I mean, the whole point is to have a process that allows you to understand and predict how the universe works. If you formulate s hypothesis that is impossible to verify, how can you tell if it matches reality or if it's pure nonsense? And more importantly, what's the value of a system of beliefs that explains nothing and does not match any observable aspect of reality? Is the only value you see in that the uncertain smugness of being "right", whatever that means, in spite of always being wrong?
I get impulses. Science knows about and studies these. But I don't hear any voices.
Firstly yes, they’re probably there and not revealing themselves (which is most typical.) They will either reveal themselves for some purpose or not at all (I had caused a stir, and a “hooligan army” went ahead and “recruited” me.)
Well after full immersion I looked back through my life and saw I was not really alone. Little things, some hypnogogia here and there, odd games they play, and other nonsense suppressed or blown off. Most are never aware or comprehend any of it. Those that do, what would they say to you? Look at these responses. And I know what is going on. Most others are desperate.
The noisy networks are usually those of prisons. You will hear very similar accounts among many who have done small stints. Enough for a network to take an interest, not long enough to be coerced into eternal silence. I have never been to prison though you can guess what city I’m from if I say “the most controversial prison system in America up to a decade ago.”
Prisons full of slave (coerced) networks is no doubt how the humanity level horrors began. The streets (and all humanity) are saturated with these various networks. Plenty of accounts by others throughout time, you have ignored them. The prisons and the black ops military power cults are the worst. Don’t worry, those are busy in Ukraine and Gaza. What do you think these would do for fun?
Power extorts ordinary power infrastructures of humanity. No one is going to talk about it.
There is a “you don’t talk about it” element. I don’t care. You cannot make me care. I so don’t care I take pains to be a contrarian. I make people f-off. I do not capitulate. It doesn’t make me “special”, I’m of the few who talk about it, even if it does no good. Let it then be for an account. To remain silent in the face of a tyranny of evil is to be complicit. Complicity be damned. These want to play God among you, and they extort each other for this ends.
And I suppose I should risk a flaggable wall of text to say there are “families” who have protected and guided us throughout our generations. Like all of modernity these are falling apart and cannot compete with the devastating industrialized efficiency of prison networks.
So no answer to the question "who am I" is strictly speaking true or false, in an objective sense. But that doesn't mean all self-interpretations are equally good. Some self-interpretations can be very destructive. It doesn't take much imagination, or reading history books, to see how defining yourself to be multiple persons/personalities can be very destructive.
What happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads?
I've watched several people go from having a grip on reality, thinking they don't need treatment, to absolutely losing their minds. It's tragic and I hate to see it happen.
Point is moments of lucidity should be seized upon, I say this as someone who briefly experienced psychosis after extreme sleep deprivation. It was fucking terrifying and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) and DID can apparently co-occur.
From [0] (2016): > One study showed that in a sample of patients diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) 74.3% also met diagnostic criteria of a SSD, 49.5% met diagnostic criteria for schizoaffective disorder, and 18.7% met diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.
The study cited in [0] is dated from 1996, however(!), so it was done not long after the change from changing the name MPD to DID. Not sure how much weight to put on a study that old.
From [1] (2022): > Numerous studies have shown that up to 50% of patients with schizophrenia meet the diagnostic criteria for dissociative personality disorder.
The two linked studies cited in [1] are dated in 1998 and 2004. So also, still old, but not quite as much.
It seems well-known that the two conditions co-occur. I don't have access to the linked studies, however, and am not willing to pay the subscription or single-paper fees.
I do have DID but SSDs have been thoroughly ruled out for me (I was checked for both, as well as other potential conditions). My assessment seemed quite thorough.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5216848/ [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8885543/
Also, my partner likely has DID and is struggling with it somewhat. If you have advice or are willing to answer some questions, I'd appreciate talking about it. But I know it's a big ask, respectfully, so I understand if not.
Thanks. I appreciate it. Will do if I come across something.
> Also, my partner likely has DID and is struggling with it somewhat. If you have advice or are willing to answer some questions, I'd appreciate talking about it.
Sure. Not sure if you're wanting advice/help for yourself, your partner, or both, but email me at [email protected] if you'd like to talk. I know more about my own particular kind of DID than others, but am willing to talk about what I know of the generalities, too, as well as a bit about my experiences (including getting a diagnosis) if that helps you or your partner.
It was an eye-opener when I finally realized the faint FM radio sounds I kept hearing in the middle of the night were actually manic hallucinations.
In the few hours I experienced hallucinations after not sleeping for ~7 days, I also heard a radio playing faintly in the background. "Faintly" doesn't do it justice because it was very much undeniably audibly there, even if I knew it wasn't.
I also heard footsteps, felt their vibrations, heard and felt stuff on shelves shake in response to the stepping. It was stunning how in concert and real it was. It was like it was more real than reality itself.
I was aware it wasn't real which made it fucking terrifying, but it was both beautiful and absolutely fascinating at the same time. I was both in awe and horrified that it could be permanent.
Brains are crazy stuff and I can see just how easily someone can become delusional based on what is very much factual in their own experience of reality. There literally is no boundary between reality and true hallucinations, which is a terrifying prospect and
Things like stress, drugs, childbirth, significant life changes, etc can trigger psychosis and latent schizophrenia at any age, it's just statistically more likely to happen during adolescence and the period right after.
Another way to look at this is that adolescence is when someone experiences new stresses, significant life changes, drug experimentation, etc, which can be triggers for schizophrenia especially during age-correlated prodromal phases.
The really tough part for me is she was out of work, so I paid her to be a beta reader for my book. She's a brilliant person and very detail-oriented. She went way over and beyond what I asked for. She spent months and took three passes on the book making different kinds of notes. Then her problems seemed to come on right at the end of that. I worry that all the increased mental activity, and then suddenly not having anything to focus on again, might have been the trigger.
If I could go back in time, I would do things differently, but at the same time I can't blame myself for not understanding what was happening and doing what was, at the time, the healthiest thing for myself.
Sorry to hear about your friend.
I blamed it on the drugs I got prescripted for sleeping (I had bad allergy and was scratching myself to the point of bleeding during sleep so I got some "pacifying" drugs).
I still have vivid memories of experiencing what (in hindsight) I realise were hypnopompic hallucinations, around the age of 6 or 7. I wasn’t taking any regular medications, that I can remember. But, I grew out of it, as kids usually do.
I’ll say personally my experiences with psychedelics brought back memories of childhood - how I engaged with the world, how my mind would go off down different paths, the intensity of focus - so, you’re probably not far off here.
It's strongly correlated to genetics, and most people are totally asymptomatic, no idea they have it until one day they do.
The story of sudden-onset schizophrenia inducing a psychosis making the patient unwilling to consider treatment is depressingly common.
Depending on whose stats you go with, you can also argue that most people with schizophrenia never know they have it due to anosognosia.
Because, if so, then alcohol's ubiquity in society would imply that it is probably responsible (in the sense that substances are responsible) for most such conversions.
Schizos may take alcohol or cigarettes to calm down, a form of self medication. On the long term these may worsen, in the immediate they help. Why do you think they smoke a lot?!? To treat. If you smoke or drink, what do you do after a tough day - smoke or drink, to relax, feels great. Schizos may have a tough day , but not from external stimuli, but from internal stimuli
I would imagine other drugs which produce severe (and stressful) withdrawal could also trigger this. The stress alone cannot be good.
For those who were not aware, alcohol is a substance that Europeans and Asians have evolved with over about 8 millennia and the American tribes evolved with tobacco for about 12 millennia. Considering other factors like how up until very recently evolutionary pressures had far greater and more acute effects on the gene pool, it should really not surprise anyone that certain effects of tobacco and alcohol may be far less apparent than something like LSD, MDMA, cocaine, heroine, and even marijuana that has had far less evolutionary pressure/impact on humanity. Simply put, at best, it seems humans or our subgroups/subspecies have not sufficiently evolved to adapt to the uses of those newer substances over time, if that is even possible (i.e., at what level is self-poisoning by several different means simply too overwhelming and not adapted to, but rather becomes an evolutionary terminus?).
It would be rather interesting to me to see research on something like drug induced mental health related issues that compares teetotaling type groups like the Amish and Mormons/LDS to the general public and individual drug user cohorts. If anyone is aware of something along that line, I would appreciate a pointer in that direction beyond what I can search/AI.
I am someone that does not do any illegal drugs, and minimal legal drugs like caffeine and alcohol, but I see the effects of them all on people around me and am even supporting a friend that is trying to pull away from marijuana use. My observation over many years and many different experiences around the world with different groups is rather clear that there is definitely some kind of interaction between drug use and various mental disorders; mental disorders which we also similarly mitigate like how caffeine is mitigated or even negated as a drug at all.
We should really be asking ourselves why the western world in particular is so fixated on self-harming with drugs; be it caffeine or meth. And no, please spare us all your justifications for how caffeine is fine or micro-dosing has been amazing, because they are simply varying levels of rationalization, I do it too, I’m just not in it as deeply. And no, just because you were able to become rich with and on the back of drugs does not mean you did it without harm, you likely just scandalized a lot of harm to, e.g., get rich selling some service to some coke head investor who will only fuel the abuse of data mining and social media addiction.
I see all the drug users around me make excuses for why their drug is fine (“it’s just caffeine”) and they are in control. It’s never true though, even when I use caffeine at times or tell myself I can be socially acceptable by also having a beer/glass of wine and it has an enormous effects on me because my body and mind are not used to dealing with the drug in a regular basis; it is really just coping and rationalization. In simply just willing to admit it to myself.
Frankly, I sometimes think that especially the western world is rather terrified with facing the reality of how damaged we are due to and from drug use, so we effectively just suppress even investigating it sufficiently even as it is burning right through our whole civilization in too many ways to list right now.
Caffeine, alcohol, marijuana. LSD, heroine, cocaine, crack, MDMA, meth, and all the other things I’m not even aware of; are all substances that effectively cause the brain to intentionally short circuit and run corrupted scripts in their minds, sometimes overlocking and wearing out things, other times scrambling data. We then though convince ourselves that the poison/toxin taken, was really a beneficial substance and the mind going haywire for a certain time was a good thing.
I do a lot of DIY psychopharmacology, mostly modafinil and amitriptyline, in a successful effort to reduce ME/CFS/hEDS related brain fog. I’ve given modafinil to normal people and they tend not to notice any effects where for me it’s a super strong drug that’ll keep me wired unless I take other drugs to calm down.
I think quite a large subset of human behavior is seeking self medication for genetic anxiety disorders and I think in knowing the mechanisms people can avoid stumbling around in the dark and go directly towards things that work.
My use is also light and fully legal, but personally I’m not sure that this is something that’s so binary. It seems more likely to sit on a spectrum, as most things do, and is largely dependent on the individual due to wide differences in brain and body function. It’s the same reason why the prescription drug that works wonders for one person and do nothing or worse, be detrimental for somebody else. We’re not all identical units of a particular model rolling off an assembly line somewhere, after all.
So I guess I would say that yes, we should be more conscientious of how substances (even those that are common) interact with our minds, but I have a hard time labeling them all as harmful. It’s just too broad of a brush.
I think you make some interesting points, and it's a very well thought-out post, but this is the definition of "poisoning the well". You're attempting to preemptively discredit the most obvious flaw in your argument.
There is a massive amount of evidence for the impact on both society, economy and neurology for each of the drugs listed in your last paragraph – and it's these impacts that often change personal and societal perception of risk and reward. Caffeine, at average doses, induces an effect that is comparable to a small cortisol spike – it is mildly addictive, but nowhere near that of an opioid, for example.
Drugs like meth and heroine (and one wonders why you left off fentanyl) are highly addictive and destructive, cause enormous loss of life an an inconceivable scale, and can permanently damage neurological pathways. From what I've read, the impact of hallucinogenics is less well understood... but probably not great.
If your argument is "we like to say caffeine and alcohol are fine, when they're really no different than opioids and meth", well there _is_ a staggeringly enormous difference in the potency and impact of caffeine vs the other drugs you've listed. I do agree with you that alcohol is far more harmful than society cares to admit, however, and that's both well-studied and often ignored.
The point is caffeine etc. corrupt the mind and cause a person's mental faculties to run in a way they were not initially designed to.
The point is not that these drugs are all extremely harmful, only that they are all harmful. Caffeine and other things get a pass because the "hard drugs" are so uniquely and visibly harmful that they overshadow all other forms of harm.
One could even say that this has tricked us into thinking that lesser drugs like caffeine or canabinoids are "effectively harmless" because they're not causing us to OD or steal things to get another hit or causing visibly psychotic states. But that is not true. We've simply accepted that the harm they due is not worth thinking about (this is subjective, not objective).
Not everyone is the same, there is a lot of variety, what you say could indeed be true for most people but can also not be true for a small minority of people.
What is the Autosomal dominant disordered gene polymorphism you have that causes your mental illness? I am assuming you are just guessing here?
> I have to take psychopharmacological drugs just to get close to normal.
I hope you can consider that you are taking drugs to manage being in an environment/diet that you are not genetically adapted to.
I used to think like you, but then I saw my genetics, now after 35 years, I am on no meds and have essentially cured my schizoaffective disorder.
I tried the no-drugs and being super healthy approach for the vast majority of my life, I look like a pro-athlete, the only reason I started the meds was due to figuring out the statistical possibility of having X things wrong with me was next to impossible without a common cause, and the ME/CFS with brain fog was destroying my life.
I also tried to quit caffeine but that only resulted in very negative effects that persisted for more than 4 months after going cold turkey, that's 4 months being largely housebound and not able to work for that one experiment. I've been at this so long that if you can think of something I've probably tried it - including the healthiest of healthy lifestyles.
Just comparing within my own family most are anti-drugs and anti-medications and their health is an absolute mess. I wish living a healthy lifestyle would be sufficient, I wouldn't have to walk a tightrope of balancing meds, but I don't get that option.
Some people have conditions that make the way their brains work different than what is considered normal. Western technological culture imposes differences in social interaction and pressures on thinking and required performance that are far different than existed in societies even mere hundreds of years before.
Drugs can be a way to compensate for these pressures and find a way to exist in the world with as much equanimity as possible. And I say all this as a person who avoids all caffeine and illegal drugs, and uses alcohol very infrequently. I'm lucky I can do this and thrive in today's Western culture. Not everyone is as fortunate.
I think blindly accepting the statement ‘drugs can cause schizophrenia’ is harmful because we don’t actually know if the drugs trigger it or if the disorder makes them seek out drugs.
Keep in mind also the typical onset for schizophrenia is teenage years or early 20s in men, and is often later, up to early 30s in women. These are years you might experiment with drugs.
You a joking. Nobody talks about it to not to harm 'suffering minorities' business. However there are researches that show harm from marijuana is significant and likely permanent. It's no better than tobacco. But you'll never see it on CNN for political reasons...
Two downvotes so far. Any explanation? Can't please everybody, especially Kamala voters.
But my advice: if you value your cognitive abilities, blood vessels health, and I'm sure it's snowballing, stay away from any form of marijuana.
> But when the protective hormone is withdrawn during menopause, some who avoided earlier psychosis get a later onset. Having a first experience after age 40 is uncommon, but it may include up to 15 percent of the women with schizophrenia—twice the percentage of men who have schizophrenia onset after age 40.
No it doesn’t. It sounds like they’re really concerned about a loved one who went off the deep end.
He was smoking a lot of weed leading up to and during the psychosis.
Ended up in psychiatric ward for a month, which was followed by a couple of years of depression/introspection/therapy, but is now doing great with lithium.
It’s rather a shedding off of an inconvenience for those that have no (direct) problems of functioning (eg risk of developing addiction, psychosis, etc) at the heavy costs payed by those that are more vulnerable.
While that framing might change the aperture for people to support decriminalization efforts, "helping people who have addiction means social progress" is the greater good here.
Unfortunately, at least from a USian perspective, we only got so far as the decriminalizing part, and we did it while actually cutting a lot of the social services, health care access, and safety net that actually help people with addiction function in society.
I had a parent with schizophrenia. I can tell you what a privilege it is to have my cannabis use be the primary risk factor I have to worry about, and not the financial stress and eventual homelessness, untreated health issues, and lack of mental health support my father faced.
And what about those who have a "direct problem of functioning" (like anxiety, depression, ptsd, whatever) and get no real help from the medical profession, but do get help from the drugs?
If you've ever listened to some of people pushing or debating psychedelics, or natural remedies, or even "totally safe" vaccines, then it should be readily apparent.
Psychoactives and homeopathy have plenty of capacity to be harmful and aren’t necessarily anywhere near as well studied, but at least their effects are more bounded to the individual. (This does not however justify pushing them blindly.)
The same way that not acknowledging that some accepted-as-benign substances can bring about mental health crises, overweighting of personal risks can cause weight-bearing pillars of modern society to crumble.
Saying vaccines are well studied is like saying drugs are well studied, it's a category error. You can't study vaccines as a whole, and the quality of studies of specific cases vary wildly. As a consequence, common psychedelics are probably much better studied than some common vaccines. LSD in 2025 is the same substance as it was when it first became available, as far as I know, and there's lots of research into its effects. Compare that to the COVID vaccines which weren't even the same substance from trial to deployment, as the manufacturing process was changed completely. The trials were done on vaccine made using a very slow, non-scalable and expensive process that yielded a very pure result. The stuff people actually took was made using a totally different process designed for cheap mass manufacture. That second process had problems, leading to DNA contamination in some batches, which seems to explain why injury effect reports clustered by batch serial number.
All this was heavily suppressed for a long time (e.g. by rules forbidding study of vaccine vials), but has been coming out over the past year or so as the initial findings were confirmed. Research into psychedelics at least doesn't have that kind of problem, I think?
(Not to condemn psychedelics, I just think the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the "it's totally harmless" direction.)
Could you elaborate on The Game? What did she say about this?
It's really fascinating to read this, because Alex Berenson has been beating this drum for a while now and he claims the psychosis risk has been downplayed or even denied. It's easy to find evidence supporting his take because if you just search Google for [cannabis legalization psychosis] you get a big pile of papers like this one:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36696111
"Abstract: Psychosis is a hypothesized consequence of cannabis use. Legalization of cannabis could therefore be associated with an increase in rates of health care utilization for psychosis [...] states with legalization policies experienced no statistically significant increase in rates of psychosis-related diagnoses"
That's from 2023. So apparently it's not that well established? Or if it's well established, there's a lot of researchers denying it.
I realize modern preparations are stronger, but the amount is too low, the dosage difference between relaxed and out there is too small, and after doing some research, it sounds like this is a sign I'm either more prone to schizophrenia, it could trigger it, or increase my likelihood of getting it, so the slightly relaxing high isn't worth it.
Only later I found out that a deceased close relative of mine had schizophrenia. That killed any remaining interest I might have had towards the substance.
Might be depersonalization. I had suffered from it in my twenties; everything feels fake, although you know it is not.
For example when you get very aroused your pupils dilate. Your brain fixes this for you so you don't feel like more light is hitting your retina even though it does. When you are high on psychedelics you can experience this though as the world getting literally brighter and darker with your mood. Feels like you are shaping reality with your feelings? As soon as the drugs wear off the effect is gone but you still have the memory that it happened.
Weirdly enough, the same way dreams can feel more like an episodic story or more like an immediate experience, that unfiltered dreamlike experience feels more real than the rest of the trip. Maybe because it literally is closer to reality because it was less bring-filtered, or maybe because the contrast between this and the hallucinations of wallpaper shifting before your eyes put the search for "real reality" into your head in the first place, now the concept of more or less reality is in your brain as an experiential concept. Now you have the memory of having struggled for real perception and achieving it.
Like in inception: you fell into a dream, you are trapped for longer than you anticipated and don't like it and want to wake up. Weeks later when you have a deja vu it triggers the uncomfortable feeling that your mind is playing tricks on you. Are you dreaming now?
Though this is not schizophrenic. From what I was told from someone who had schizophrenic episodes it makes you completely unable to tell apart illusions from reality.
Also I guess there are degrees to it.
She’s the most intelligent of the bunch for entertaining this possibility. The rest of you are fucking morons living day in day out without an iota of thought as to what you’re doing here.
It’s not schizophrenia or psychosis. It’s just denial and delusion by everyone around her.
If they then become obsessed with the idea being a fact and refuse to even consider updating their mental model when presented with evidence contradicting it then they have developed a fixed belief.
When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief.
When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem.
Or do you think a mind is a perfect thing that can never be ill?
> When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem.
But why does the issue of whether it is “common among their culture” matter? A person unable to function due to a non-bizarre fixed belief has just as big a problem as a person unable to function due to a bizarre fixed belief, if we assume the same degree of functional impairment in each case. The question of whether the belief is “bizarre” seems irrelevant, and possibly even encoding cultural prejudice
But some people’s functioning is impaired by beliefs common to their culture, whereas other people have very unusual beliefs but aren’t impaired by them to anywhere near the same degree
One person obsesses so much over “culture war” topics they lose their job… another person spends all their free time contemplating elaborate idiosyncratic theories of parallel universes, yet still manages to put a lid on it at work to a sufficient degree to keep their job. The first person has a non-bizarre obsession with serious functional impairment (they lose their job due to it), the second a bizarre obsession but the degree of functional impairment is significantly less. So the fact that we label one obsession “bizarre” and the other “non-bizarre” seems of little relevance
For example, I've met several people who reported the set of symptoms and behaviors you describe - but in their case, 'the game' involved the fact they came from a wealthy extended family whose entire existence revolved around hanging onto their pool of capital and ensuring some rogue family member didn't gain control of the capital, which funded all their connected lives (including this guy, who was able to travel the country and go to music shows solely because of his family-linked trust fund). The game they all played was keeping the family members that controlled the capital happy, rather than going out into the world and finding jobs, making their own money, and being self-sufficient.
There's just not enough information in your post to evaluate whether the example was escaping from a cult or being indoctrinated into another cult, who is sane and who is crazy, etc.
But we can't do anything because she still knows how to take care of herself and isn't a danger to herself or others. So it's just sad.
Schizophrenia is not defined strictly enough that it's possible for you to be right or wrong when you say your friend has it.
Here's a discussion of the change in diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV to DSM-V, which has the side effect of describing what the criteria formerly were and now are: https://psychcentral.com/schizophrenia/dsm-5-changes-schizop...
Has your friend seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(1997_film) ?
I don't know if she's seen The Game, but I do know that she's always had a deep insecurity about being the naive one in the room, being the one not in on the joke. It seems like this thing plays on your worst fears and brings them to life.
Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known. It seems to me that these drugs create a feeling of having accessed great knowledge, but the "knowledge" is just whatever nonsense your brain conjures up on the fly, like a dream world that makes sense while you're asleep but whose logic falls apart the moment you wake up.
Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.
Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.
To quote Shulgin,
> The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.
But I never felt like I was getting at some deeper meaning, and it wasn't something I wanted to keep doing throughout my life.
It is not just schizophrenia, any mental health condition is isolating, others cannot understand it. I have OCD,ADHD etc so I know it, that's why we prefer who have been or going through same thing than normal people.
We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.
We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.
Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.