Would you like to know how your Life could be if you were Schizophrenic? *VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE*

reply to post by UberL33t


Thank you very much OP for posting this very interesting video. I think that it may help me to better understand my younger brother who was just recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. S&F!!!

That is interesting. I can see how hard it would be to function with all the voices telling you to do different things. Some voices telling you to do one thing and others telling you to do something else. Then voices tell you that you are worthless and everything that is happening in the world is somehow involved with you or is your own fault.
I feel sorry for people with this. I'd be in despair. Thankfully there are medications to silence the voices. But I can see how a family would need to be really patient and try to understand. They'd need to make sure the person always took their meds.

reply to post by enlighteneddante


You're very welcome.

This is sickening. I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia although I reject the label. I do not take meds and look after myself with diet and sleep. If this is what's being taught to students as being the standard schizophrenic experinece it's wrong. I've met people who were convinced THINKING was a symptom.

An earlier post in this thread suggested taking lsd to experience the symptoms - i'd suggest the same. Then if you really really want to empathise with your patients - take some of the medication prescribed to them.

reply to post by christina-66


You should convey your view to that Company, seriously. I'm not quite sure what sort of response you would receive, but it would be interesting to see it posted here if you did in fact inform them of your take on their product.

reply to post by UberL33t


Well uber you may be on to something. One time I had this apartment and I was standing at the front door. I was already feeling nervous for some reason as I was about to start exercising. Suddenly in the kitchen I heard this sound like a plastic bag rustling. I got these crazy chills and became angry, I mean like I wanted to kill someone and I walked straight into the dark.
Now at the time I assumed I was feeling that way because I was angry that this plastic bag falling off the counter scared me while I was already having some kind of episode. It was a fight or flight response where I went into fight instead. So there you go, and yeah it sounds interesting the connections between rabies and schizophrenia It was literally a pure aggression I felt, pure anger and hate, and I didn't care what may happen to me. Hope that answers your question.

reply to post by snowen20


Makes as much sense as anything else. I wonder if any comparison research has ever been done between the two?

Another thing I was wondering, is some posters were comparing this to a drug induced hallucination, specifically '___'. That got me pondering, being that no two schizophrenic conditions are alike, of those who are diagnosed, could there in fact be those that have a more euphoric version and those that have a more sinister version depending on what area of the brain is affected?

Just thinking out loud.

reply to post by UberL33t


I had an enlightening experience. No voices... I had several hallucinations that I always realised were emanating from my mind. Stress triggered my experience. I am strongly opposed to the genetic/bio-medical model as an explanation. The social model holds the answers. The increase in diagnoses is as much a sign of the times as anything else....and the marketing powers of big pharma. Once on the drugs - it's nigh on impossible to come off them. These drugs are toxic and can be lethal - for a non-fatal condition. They suppress the original personality and mind/body functions to such an extent people don't recognise themselves.

10 years of no meds and no relapse while I had a prognosis that claimed my breakdowns would become more severe and more frequent. The vid in the op seems to take all the text book symptoms and put them in one. Over thirty years of volunteering and sometimes working in this field I have never met a person diagnosed with schizophrenia who suffered the text book symptoms....ever.

Ps. I also strongly object to the medicalising of criminal behaviour. How often has it been heard after an atrocity has been commited 'It was the voices what made me do it'?....and they get away with it.

I have a friend who's mom is schizophrenic. A while back he was sharing some stories about her from his childhood, and mentioned she believed his toys were talking to her. Sometimes he'd come home only to find that she had packed up all his Lego blocks in a bag and hid them out of sight. She did the same with his sister's dolls. I always found schizophrenia very interesting. After watching that video I can rule myself out as being potentially affected by it. I have some paranoia, but it's on a pretty healthy level, nothing even close to what's shown.

I challenge anyone on this thread to sit for five minutes with a quiet mind....totally quiet. No thoughts - no memories - no imagery. Try it. If you succeed you'll be doing better than the best yoga gurus .

That was an advert for drugs no more no less. Terrible.

reply to post by christina-66


You should never do this, your asking for trouble.

There is still such a stigma associated with mental illness in our society, as if illness of the brain were separate from other physical illnesses. Western medicine has some responsibility for this misconception. Society looks differently on someone with a myopathy than they do someone with clinical depression, but both are chronic, debilitating diseases.

Originally posted by christina-66
I challenge anyone on this thread to sit for five minutes with a quiet mind....totally quiet. No thoughts - no memories - no imagery. Try it. If you succeed you'll be doing better than the best yoga gurus .

That was an advert for drugs no more no less. Terrible.

There are many types of schizophrenia. I know of people in real life that seems to have a type very similar to this video. A person with this type of schizophrenia actually hears voices as real as someone speaking to them and not only do they hear voices, but they often believe what they say as well even though it makes no logical sense to a person without this type of condition.

There are so many different conditions under the schizophrenia label and many of them dont even include voices or hallucinations like in this video. I am no pro medication guy, but in some cases it is sadly the only option.

reply to post by juleol



I understand that there are a number of symptoms that come under the label. That's the message of the vid I posted above. i.e. That the symptoms are so diverse the schizophrenic label should be dropped in it's entirety.
Whereas it's reckoned 1% of the general pop. are suffering from schizophrenia what percentage of that number actually hear voices? It's the most commonly recognised symptom of this so called disease. A real disease is not diagnosed on the basis of observation, subjective opinion and a tick list.

'Psychiatry is to medicine what astrology is to astronomy.'

I also recognise that if a person is going through a full blown psychosis that medication would likely be required to bring them down. However I believe that medication should always be prescribed in the short term and that in the long term an investigation of the triggers that caused the breakdown should be undertaken and management strategies taught to the person to give them the tools to prevent the psychosis becoming full blown without resorting to medication.

People have to understand that given enough life stressors ANYONE is capable of experiencing psychosis.

Wow, wish I would of seen this thread sooner!
Trippy vid!
I have ptsd so I can kind of relate to it, though for me it is hyper-vigilance. It is like the world is crystal clear,only it is so clear I catch the movement or shape/sound/smell of every single object within 10 feet of me. Sensory overload.

reply to post by snowen20


I can relate completely to what you have just described. I found the video interesting but slightly disturbing because I could say I feel and experience much the same things. I am very paranoid and suspicious of most things and I do hear voices, some telling me one thing and others telling me the opposite. I just figured it was normal for people to hear them in some form, but really this video was disturbing to me. There is much more to say but I don't want to, at least now, but what you said really sums it up for me too.