Schizophrenia
My sister double majored in Journalism and Psychology and has had Master's level classes in Psychology and considered pursuing a master's degree in it and changing careers. And I've had a couple of psychology classes.
She said to me once "We must not have genes for schizophrenia or we would surely have SOMEONE in the family with it."
They get hospitalized, get better, go home to their dysfunctional family and get worse again. So we KNOW "dysfunctional family" is a factor here. That's not speculation.
But if someone commits suicide, no one EVER really wants to hear you should wonder if the parents were a part of the problem in some way. Someone commits suicide, everyone wants to act like the relatives are victims you need to handle with kid gloves.
I'm not exactly accusing anyone of anything. That's not really the point.
I've spent a lot of years trying to write a parenting blog -- the latest iteration of this effort is called Raising Future Adults -- because people with difficult kids get given actively bad advice by high paid professionals that makes the problems worse and don't know how to find better answers. I don't know how to get traction and establish "credentials" and blah blah blah, but I KNOW we just don't really HAVE good resources for kids like mine, who are fairly often beaten by frustrated parents at wit's end.
So please check your assumptions at the door. If standard answers worked, you wouldn't want the opinion of a HOMELESS BLOGGER, now would you?
You would talk to respectable people with spiffy credentials. Right now, all that's getting you is plausible deniability with the courts that you did all you could and they can't throw you in jail over this debacle.
So if you actually want solutions, here you searching the Internet in hopes of finding a smidgen of hope in this Pandora's Box.
Hallucinations and Voices
I've had ACTUAL auditory hallucinations a couple of times or a few times. The first time, years before I got a better diagnosis than whiny bitch and hypochondriac, I kept taking decongestants trying to avoid an ER visit for my chronic sinus issues and ended up in the ER anyway.
But before going to the ER, I clearly had taken too many and I would close my eyes and hear stuff that couldn't possibly be real. Stuff "on the street " outside my window when I was on the third floor. Things happening in my bedroom that made absolutely no sense, like factory noises or something like that.
I would open my eyes, it would go away and it wasn't anything remotely logical.
Once while homeless, I heard footsteps outside the tent like old radio drama sound effects of someone going up stairs or something. It didn't actually fit with people walking through a small wooded area.
But I also hear voices that I believe are probably other people thinking too loud and I've made some effort to check that hypothesis. And my debacle of a life works less bad when I operate on the assumption that the voices I hear are other people communicating with me psychically and -- like anyone -- they have their own agenda and they may be lying etc.
It's problematic to ignore the voices entirely and also problematic to assume it's trustworthy information.
So one possibility is that some schizophrenics hear people's thoughts and no one is proposing that as a valid answer and researching how to prove it or coming up with best practices for handling it.
So first you should try to determine what "the voices" are for this specific person.
And don't assume it's the same answer in all people labeled schizophrenic.
I try to make choices that work for BOTH scenarios.
Let's assume this is real. What then?
Let's assume I'm crazy. What then?
So that's a robust navigation tool generally for life. If you have incomplete information and you don't know what it means, account for all possible reasonable interpretations in deciding how to proceed.
Decongestants caused auditory hallucinations in me. Start a health journal and see if you can find correlations. Does a single dose of decongestants lead to hearing things that make no sense?
There's a Jurassic Park 3 scene where some guy has taken raptor eggs and raptors have been chasing them and he tells Grant the bag isn't safe and they consider getting rid of them. Grant changes his mind and the guy says what if they catch us with them? And Grant says what if they catch us and we don't have them?
And that's kind of how I operate.
Like what's the WORST that could happen? Whatever I do, I need to avoid THAT in specific whether I'm nuts or not, regardless of what is true.
Metal poisoning. I would test for metal poisoning, check for lead pipes, etc. It can promote infection and violent behavior and neurological issues.
Damage to the visual cortex promotes violent imagery.
It's ONLY in the Intro. There's another post by the same name in the archive. It's different information.
Ask for brain scans. Look for any anomalies and ask them to check the visual cortex for any abnormalities.
I've spent decades trying to figure out how to write about my kids because parents of twice exceptional kids get told do x, they do x and it isn't effective and causes problems.
Yes, SOME parents are abusive.
That's not the entire scope of "parenting stuff is somehow part of the problem."
I knew a bipolar guy and he's brilliant and he's twice exceptional and I'm about 99 percent sure he's a hot mess because of parents trying to prevent him from hurting himself and other people as a child and not having good tools for that.
Someone on Metafilter said professionals told her to loom over her violent child -- in other words threaten him.
My kids talk about how pathetic teachers were who tried that garbage and my son is like mom actually USES her size advantage to control the situation without threatening me. LOSERS!
I did things like use my longer reach to make sure my little troublemaker couldn't reach stuff.
I was raised by a twice decorated veteran. I was TAUGHT don't bluff, don't threaten. If you pull a gun, be fully prepared to KILL the guy, in terms of capable of shooting it and mentally and emotionally prepared. Don't do this movie drama nonsense expecting people to back down because you are pointing a gun at them. You can be arming them, scaring them and pissing them off.
So I don't generally threaten or bluff. And I didn't believe in doing that as a parenting tactic.
In Kung Fu the TV series -- something I watched as a kid -- Quai Chang Caine tells someone "If you plant fear, fear will grow."
BRIGHT kids with some handicap make all the adults NUTS and most adults don't have any idea how to handle that well.
Anyway, I told the chick on Metafilter she had been given bad advice. What happens when your violent little boy gets bigger than you -- and boys typically end up taller than mom -- and what you have taught him for fifteen years is threats and violence work if you are bigger?
So I'm not advocating for a witch hunt here. But in therapy, a problem teen is viewed as the presenting problem and the therapist looks at family dynamics to try to figure out why the kid does the garbage they do.
So maybe there's some combination of brain stuff and people mishandling it with the best of intentions in a very high percentage of cases and then actual abuse in a small number of cases that just goes very sideways because of abnormal brain stuff.
And in my fantasies, someday we shall have options like Project SRO for all kinds of people with personal challenges.
Last, SOME of the drugs for schizophrenia appear to have hormonal type side effects. My HRT site:
Last but not least:
The term for that is orthostatic hypotension.
Also, I'm absolutely certain that people who are persistently suicidal for years have an unidentified medical cause.
You should develop a means to try to check if suicidal schizophrenics are victims of sexual assault and start trying to FIND an infection or something.
My understanding is that neurodivergent and not cis het tend to correspond. So if you are a medical professional, try to DIPLOMATICALLY and delicately figure out if your suicidal patients are some flavor of queer and the parents are homophobes.
See Murder by Suicide.
If they test high for LGBTQ traits or something like that, I would immediately assume that whomever is harshest on them is a closeted homosexual. The worst homophobes seem to be homosexuals trying to desperately disavow all association.
I had some test in my twenties and my uptight White therapist told me I tested high for bisexual traits and then rushed to assure me it said NOTHING about my sexuality and was MERELY a mark of creativity, which I found hilarious because I was well aware I had bisexual traits from hooking up with both boys and girls in adolescence. Told this amusing story to hubby and he reacted super negatively with "You ARE NOT! You're STRAIGHT! You're MARRIED."
Yeah. Note to self:
Marriage probably cannot be saved. Also, don't tell hubby anymore cutesy anecdotes of that ilk.
(If it needs to be said: I'm long divorced.)
There is a DEARTH of resources for male victims of sex crimes, though I write a little about it:
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