#psychosis negative symptoms

[psychotic-system-culture-is]

Psychotic System Culture is...

Having trouble do college assignment because brain turn ?? have scramble brain. Disjoint thoughts, word salad?

Psychosis inconvenient for education...

[thecouncil-aac]

Is any other psychosis friend have word scramble more when not brain good?

Or is autism?

Council not sure, is not anxiety select mute because is not only speech lose, is thought scramble mess

Maybe psychosis disjoint thought episode, but usual have no reason, not when sad

Maybe is coincidence?

[thecouncil-aac]

😔

Cognitive decline is fucking terrifying

And there's nothing we can really do about it

We're working on incorporating AAC into our life to compensate for the communication difficulties, but that doesn't help with our disjointed/disorganized thoughts and ability to think and reason and...

And we're scared to find out how far it'll go, especially because we don't know what's causing our psychosis...

Man, how come no one's doing anything about the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia... its all just: psychosis, psychosis, psychosis. I want to function thank you. Psychosis for me is not the worst part (probably because of my antipsychotics) but yeah I want the equivalent of adhd medication but for the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.

[schizopositivity]

Friendly reminder that antipsychotics don't cure schizophrenia. They don't even treat schizophrenia fully. They only treat the psychotic symptoms aka the positive symptoms. (And lots of people on antipsychotics don't have all their psychotic symptoms disappear, sometimes it only helps a little bit). Meanwhile our negative and cognitive symptoms cannot be treated fully (or at all depending on the person) with medication, and they greatly affect our lives and tend to get more severe as we age. So please don't assume that a schizophrenic person on antipsychotics is basically not mentally ill anymore cause there's a shit ton more we have to deal with on a daily basis, even if our psychosis is treated and no longer affecting us.

[psychotic-tbh]

Do any other social folks on the schizophrenia spectrum also feel like they don’t know how to “people” after an episode?

It’s so strange to look back on how social I was when my symptoms were less severe and how (almost) outgoing I was

Now I’m not even sure how to talk to close friends and am just awkward. I lost my conversation skills :(

[clinically-kitty]

Ppl who have issues with hygiene ily. Ppl who cant brush theyre teeth regularly. Ppl who dont shower for months. Ppl who wear the same clothes for days.

If all u can do is brush or shower once every few weeks or months ily. If all you can do is change into a different pair of pajama pants today ily. Or if you cant do any of it ily.

Ik ppl will be like “its not healthy to spread positivity now my teeth are rotting bc I didnt care” which I understand to some extent for some ppl but no amount of scaring me about how my teeth health will suffer is going to make me do it more, my brain quite literally can’t foresee the positive outcomes and will refuse to make it a daily habit no matter how much its barked at me over and over.

Sometimes its not something that can be helped. And its not bc I dont care or i like being disgusting or dont understand the risks I literally just cant.

[lapdogchase]

going thru my posts from early 2022 like damn ... disorganized thought patterns... difficulty remembering words and speaking coherently... flat affect... lack of motivation & decreased goal-directed activity... asociality... thought blocking... delusional beliefs... et cetera. like damn i know these symptoms.from the dsm5

[alixisherebutringagain]

I feel so much emotions sometimes, I wonder if people within the schizo-spec relate to it.

Like it's. Huge.

The biggest emotions, moving, crashing down on me, but they have no name. I can't know, for the love of God, what they are. They're just here and crushing me and overwhelming me. Making me paralysed and stuck and wrong.

And some other times, generally when I'm supposed to feel joy, pure joy, content, happiness, euphoria, whatever you wanna call it, I feel nothing and really want to be alone at home rather than surrounded by those people, even if i know them.

I'm realising that often, I fake happiness because I'm supposed to be happy, but really, i feel neutral or even annoyed.

For example, I was at my first ever pride. It was big, colourful, loud, people smiling and laughing and dancing and singing, my friends deeply enjoying themselves...

But honestly. I would have rather been home, doing my usual stuff.

I love my friends, I love my job, I love my coworkers, I even love people, but I like being alone better. I like being in my own little calm corner. Or not calm. But my corner.

Sorry for the rant. DAE within schizo-spec relate ?

[thepsychotic]

My thoughts are so scrambled and convoluted I’m trying to make sense of them but they’re so messy and chaotic, I hate this

[psychotic-system-culture-is]

Psychotic System Culture is...

Seeing a post about negative symptoms of psychosis and having a few too many things make more sense

((Also, fuck our psychiatrist for saying we weren't experiencing "actual" psychosis. We have positive and negative symptoms, increasingly frequent and worsening episodes, and it's not us mistaking anxiety/ptsd/cdd symptoms. Like, sorry we can double book-keep, didn't realize there was only one way to have psychosis /sarcasm.))

[sighing-and-all]

i thjnk im going to explode

[shimp-heaven]

:3c

[evil-jennifer-hamilton-wb]

Finally some positive representation

[ti2guhr]

getting kaiser mental health targeted ads is fucking bold when they're 90% of the reason i don't trust the mental health field At All anymore lmfao

[cripplecharacters]

Writing a Schizophrenic Character: Everything But Hallucinations

Plain text: Writing a Schizophrenic character: Everything But Hallucinations

Hey! Mod Bert here. 

So: you’ve decided to write a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (there are other disorders on the schizophrenia spectrum but I will be focusing on these for today)

You’ve done it, you have their hallucinations and maybe even delusions picked out. Maybe they are one of many who experience auditory hallucinations or maybe they also have visual hallucinations or a combination. Maybe they have olfactory hallucinations as well. They may have persecutory delusions or delusions of reference or something like Cotard’s delusion or clinical lycanthropy. Awesome, you’ve done it!

What, I hear you say? What do you mean that’s only 2 of the 5 components needed to be diagnosed with schizophrenia? What do you mean, you don’t need to hallucinate at all to be schizophrenic?

What Goes Into a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

Plain Text: What goes into a diagnosis of schizophrenia

Not a lot of people realize there’s more to schizophrenia and schizoaffective than just hallucinations or delusions. There are 5 diagnostic criterias that are needed for schizophrenia, and only 2 of the 5 are needed for a month, with larger symptoms happening for six months or more. Let’s get into it.

Delusions

Hallucinations

Disorganized speech or thinking*

Disorganized or unusual motor behavior (catatonia)*

Negative symptoms (avolition, anhedonia, flat affect)*

I’m going to focus on disorganized speech/thinking, catatonia, and negative symptoms.

Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Plain Text: Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Schizophrenia and related disorders are often called “thought disorders” for a reason. Speech and thinking can be extremely affected, and for people like me this can be one of the first and most striking examples of an episode coming. Some people will always have disorganized symptoms that will flare during episodes. A myth is that schizophrenia can be indistinguishable with medicine: most people will have some level of symptoms even during moments of peace or “remission”. More on remission later. 

So, disorganized speech. Some examples are: word salad (schizoaphasia), thought blocking, poverty of speech (alogia), pressurized speech, clanging, and echolalia.

Word salad: a combination of words that do not make sense together. Often called schizoaphasia for its similarity to jargon in Wernicke’s aphasia, this is instead a disconnection with the brain and not due to damage to the language part of the brain.

(Example: the salad would be yellow in the fat cow).

Thought blocking: A severe loss of thought, often paired with connecting two trains of thought that are not connected

(Example: I went to the………Do you like grapes?)

Poverty of speech: A lack of organic responses to speech or organically speaking, it can be severe enough that a person only responds to questions or in one word responses. Can also happen in severe depression.

(Example: Person A: Did you do anything fun today?

Person B: Yes.

Person A: Oh, what did you do?

Person B: Store

Person A: How was it?

Person B: Fun)

Pressurized speech: A sort of frenzied way of speaking associated with psychosis or mania.

Clanging: Connecting phrases together because of what they sound like instead of meaning

(Example: I went bent tent rent).

Echolalia: Repeating word’s and phrases. Commonly also associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

(Example: Person A: I went to the store.

Person B: To the store.)

These are not the only examples but they are some ones I thought I'd highlight, either because they’re well known or I have experience with them, or because they’re famously thought of with other disorders as well and I wanted to point out how things overlap.

Personal experience: I had severe alogia for the duration of my last and worst episode. People thought I was mad at them because of the clipped way I spoke and the lack of really speaking. It got me in a lot of trouble. I didn’t realize what I was saying was different or weird (I have the least insight when it comes to my speaking patterns affected by my schizoaffective, meaning I can’t hear any difference and all of this is from repeated conversations with my mom, who was my caretaker for a bit and knows the most about my speech and what it means). The best solution was talking with people and being honest and educating myself and others. I don’t know about others, but I couldn’t have used AAC at that time.

Catatonia

Plain text: Catatonia

Fun fact: catatonia means unusual motor behaviors! Any unusual motor behaviors mean catatonia. This includes what we think of when we think of catatonia in schizophrenia (inability to move) as well as the opposite (being unable to stop moving) as well as strange movements and ways of holding and moving the body! Catatonia in the DSM-5 includes 3 or more of these 12 behaviors:

-Agitation unrelated to external stimuli

-Catalepsy

-Echolalia

-Echopraxia

-Grimacing

-Mannerism

-Mutism

-Negativism

-Posturing

-Stereotypy

-Stupor

-waxy flexibility

I have some experiences with catatonia-like symptoms but since they were never identified as such I’ll skip those for now. I will say that catatonia is a symptom that can happen in many disorders besides schizophrenia as well.

Negative Symptoms! Yay!

Plain text: negative symptoms! Yay!

So a positive symptom (Hallucinations or delusions) are symptoms that add something to reality or a person. Negative symptoms are symptoms that take away. There are 5 A’s:

-Alogia (Again, poverty of speech, our favorite)

-Avolition (Lack of energy and motivation)

-Affect (Blunted affect, or a flat way of speaking)

-Anhedonia (Lack of pleasure in things that used to bring you pleasure, often thought of with depression)

-Asociality (Lack of interest in social events and relationships)

There are also often cognitive changes including thinking and memory, information recall, understanding, and acquisition, and so forth. 

Schizophrenia and schizoaffective often (but not always) happen with what’s called a prodromal period. This period can be months to years (mine was a little less than a year) and mainly consists of negative symptoms. Slowly, positive symptoms are added. There are thought to be stages to schizophrenia including prodrome, active phases, and remission.

I’ll talk about that a little for a second because I’m currently in remission and no one knows what that means. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective depressive type in January 2021. As of February 2024, I no longer qualified to be rediagnosed because my symptoms were strongly under control and no longer severe enough to qualify for a diagnosis. They also didn’t distress me or impact my daily life severely. Day to day now I still have mild symptoms and take my antipsychotics (trying to go off them have made it clear that I still have some symptoms I choose to keep medicating) but I haven’t had a delusion in 2 years and been hospitalized in 3. There’s always a possibility of another episode but I work with my team to keep myself one step ahead if that happens.

What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Plain Text: What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Alright the writing advice part. What do I want from a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective (which is schizophrenia plus either depression or bipolar). 

-Characters with caregivers.

-Characters using coping strategies (recording hallucinations to tell if theyre hallucinations, taking medication, having service animals that greet people so they know if they’re a hallucination, using aids for the cognitive symptoms like sticky notes and organizational tools)

-Characters who know other characters with their disorder, either online or in support group or through running in similar circles

-Characters having autonomy

-Characters who aren’t the killer or horror victim. I know it’s cool to have the schizophrenic protagonist in horror, and I love horror, but I don’t want to read about the horror being symptoms the whole time

-Characters who are in magical scenarios, who are in fantasy and sci-fi. The schizophrenic princess and the schizoaffective robot technician aboard the spaceship.

-Medication and hospitalization treated casually. Sometimes we need higher care. That’s morally neutral

-Characters with negative symptoms and speech symptoms.

-Characters with catatonia! 

-Characters with other disorders as well

-characters with side effects from medicine treated casually

-Characters with cognitive symptoms

Thank you for reading this incredibly long thing! Happy writing!

[alixisherebutringagain]

I've been throw into a pit of endless boredom and lack of motivation. I am empty, I am a desert, I am grey. There's no wind. There's no temperature. There's nothing but sand and sand, grey sand, unforgiving sand.

I used to feel like that during my depression, though the boredom was way less strong.

I'm realising it might be negative symptoms. After all, almost all my positive ones are gone. Am I falling ? Does that make sense ?

Is there anything I can do against this emptiness ?

I can't even go to work. I can't build up the motivation, the strength. I know I dislike this feeling but that's all.

Everything is tern and grey.